Since my earliest memory, I have always been an outsider.
When you are an outsider, you have a fringe and ambivalent-investment in society’s structures.
So you step in and out of its matrix like visiting a place and coming back.
Whereas people who are totally enrolled into society are absorbed/fully-engaged in its dream/matrix/structure.
Since I step in and out to varying degrees, I am more like a traveler/explorer.
The outsider point of view, also clearly delineates and illuminates the boundaries of society.
Because one cannot see the inside from the inside.
One has to be outside to understand the inside clearly.
The other illuminates the self, the self illuminates the other.
The contrast is what gives transcendent clarity regarding BOTH.
Concrete works of art come out when the abstract structure is locked/fixed/solidified and thereby out of awareness.
Else without a firm abstract base (so firm that I can treat it as a ground and forget about it), a person gets entirely absorbed into the abstract and steps out of the concrete dimension.
Just like how when one suffers a sudden huge loss, death of a loved one, one is instantly transported to the metaphysical thought process – what is life? what is death? what are we here for? etc.
The person would have never thought along those lines, if not for this event, that swept away his concrete orientation and stable abstract.
The abstract is the territory of the spiritual/metaphysical.
Abstract (returning to God) ———- (returning to common living) Concrete
In deep spiritual contemplation one lives and moves along towards more and more abstract territories, until the final abstraction (the ONE) is reached.
Journey to the Abstract 