Art acts directly on our perception and our energy, and, by generating in us beneficial emotions, it produces healing and spiritual opening, which are two aspects of a same purification process.

Art is human creation, by opposition to nature which is non-human or divine creation. Contemplation of art and nature can both lead to healing and spirituality.

The reality in which we live contains all the natural as well as the human-created phenomena. It is divided in three spheres, or three worlds, that are three different levels of perception.

1. The world of form, or world of desire, is the material world we perceive with our senses.

2. The world of subtle or aesthetic forms, is the world of energy and light, which are subtle forms of matter.

3. The world of formlessness, or emptiness, is a purely spiritual world.

These last two worlds are what I call extra-sensory worlds, because they are not directly perceived by our five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, neither by the sixth sense of our conceptual mind. We nevertheless perceive them intuitively, by more subtle senses that we all possess, but those are often little developed and we don’t trust them. So we often don’t pay attention to these perceptions and refuse to take them seriously, except when these perceptions are particularly strong. Even if the three aspects of reality are inseparable and exist in all things, the last two are generally much more subtle than sensory and conceptual perceptions, and are masked by them.

Extra-sensory perceptions manifest the most strongly precisely in the contemplation of nature and art. Who has not felt deep emotions in front of a grandiose landscape, a rainbow or a work of art? One of the words I like to use to qualify this emotion is wonder, which is an mixture of admiration, surprise and enchantment. Small children are much more familiar with that emotion, but later it disappears at the adult age as our society does not encourage to manifest this kind of emotions.

It is interesting to notice that the three levels of reality awaken in us emotions of very different natures.

The first level generates various kind of emotions that we can classify in the three large categories of greed, aversion and ignorance, depending if the perceptions have a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral character. As long as we stay in this level of perception, we remain under the power of our mind, and all the emotions we experience, even the pleasant ones, are not particularly beneficial to us, because they are all of a conflicting nature. They don’t produce in us healing nor spiritual opening, but just consume our vital energy.

The emotions created by the two other levels of reality are of a completely opposite nature. They are like a magical potion, able to heal all our ills, to open us spiritually and to lead us to the realisation of our true nature.

The world of subtle or aesthetic forms produces emotions of joy, wonder, enthusiasm, which purify our heart and open it to unconditional love.

The world of formlessness generates emotions of peace, contentment, equanimity, which purify our soul and open it to divine wisdom, the clear vision of things as they are.

It is why the practice of extra-sensory perception is so important. It is simple and begins with the contemplation of an object that awakens in us a pleasant feeling, like a flower or an artwork we particularly like. We practice this contemplation until we succeed to spontaneously rejoice, wonder, in front of the display of beauty, grace and harmony. We then let our heart open and submerge in these emotions, until we feel them strongly in our body in the form of shivers, tears, heat or bliss. When we have very deeply experienced this feeling of joy and wonder, which belongs to the second sphere, we let it dissolve slowly, and we penetrate in a more tranquil feeling of peace, calm and coolness. We enter now in the third sphere of reality, and we let our soul open to the essence and oneness of all things.

This practice can be done at all time, and, with training, not only in presence of beautiful objects and artworks, but of any phenomenon, including those that our senses and our mind consider ugly or unpleasant. It is what we call "seeing the beauty in all things". And every time we succeed in this way to live in the two superior spheres of reality, in the pure extra-sensory perceptions, we are directly connected to the cosmic energy and to the divine, we are in harmony with the oneness of all creation, and we discover our real nature. It is the secret of true healing and spiritual realisation.

Even if we don’t think we are an artist, we can make of our life an art, and transform all aspects of our existence in a beautiful artwork with many facets. Each one of them will awaken in us pure perceptions that generate joy, wonder, love, peace and contentment. It is what I call Artotal. We become then the creators of our life and happiness, and have the power to transform our environment and the whole world at the image of the beauty of our subtle perceptions...