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Spencer, Stanley - Symbolism 02 - Helter skelter 1937
Identifier
019379
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The Art and Vision of Stanley Spencer - Kenneth Pople
Stanley is a mystic. He inhabits a world other people do not know. Gilbert Spencer, 1959
............for Stanley each visionary painting was a halt on a pilgrimage through life, a viewpoint along the path. The young Stanley was aware that he was destined for his journey but he had no clear notion of what the pilgrimage would entail. He was an explorer, testing the way. By the close of his life, the panorama was beginning to clarify, but by then was becoming so complex that he died with it only partly recorded.
How does one encompass whatever it is which constitutes the identity of God - the universal mind if you wish - which in effect Stanley was striving to do?
Happiness (as opposed to momentary pleasure), wrote psychologist Professor Martin Seligman,
“comes from knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying them in the service of something you believe in larger than you are”.
There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is. Or, as the sculptor Henry Moore saw it :
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.
A description of the experience
