Only the inner artist himself knows if he fails or succeeds.
Because of the way life is:
Every would-be, inner artist who becomes involved in the consciousness-changing-business begins by studying the works of, “past masters.” Not unlike novice painters sitting with sketch pads before da Vinci and Botticelli, or music students pouring over manuscripts of Mozart and Mahler, but neophytes to the, “I-wanna-wake-up, be-enlightened, and know-for-myself-what-the-hell-is-really-going-on-around here” field face a much different situation.
The works of consciousness art cannot be seen, touched or heard. Although pertinent to the last is where it seems otherwise, and where most aspirants’ feet become forever stuck-in-the-verbal-&-mental-mud.
As is natural with men, those who hear-of, and adopt the goal of recreating the overall operations of their conscious thinking, seek first, a role model. The mind automatically searches for an example of the completed task, which it has undertaken, which in this case would appear to be exemplified in another human being who has achieved the goal, but the unrealized error in this is that being more awake has no easily observable or readily imitable qualities.
Those who don’t know, profess that it does, and primarily point to behavior, to acts of charity and kindness attributed to, “past awakened masters” while feigning oblivion to the fact that any sort of behavior is possible for any sort of person. The other criteria employed by the unknowing is that of the words spoken by their role models, and here they mightily proclaim themselves to be on indisputably firm footing, confidently declaring that the WORDS of an enlightened man would unquestionably be the truest proof of his extraordinary state. And again they pretend to ignore the simple, glaring fact that any man can say anything, even surreptitiously plagiarize the impressive sounding words of another, while having no idea of what it might really mean.
J