Wat is tradition?

Contrary to conventional belief, a cultural tradition is not a simple formula or a body of instructions to be followed, or a collection of rules which makes creating works of art easier. Also it is not a suppressing weight of the past. Tradition is the continuity of the life force through the species, reflected in symbolic acts and works, in ever evolving variations, but never violating its original spirit of humanity fertilized by the Divine. Tradition is renewing itself with every new artist who plunges himself uninhibited into its depth and comes-up with something living and new. In surrendering to its life stream, and giving-up himself, forgetting who he was and what he thought about himself, he will find himself as someone he had not known before, because the energy and dynamics of tradition will burn and wash away everything that is not authentically himself. Paradoxically, by leaving himself behind and letting himself be carried by the stream, he will find his own, original voice; the Self will be cleansed of convention and the superfluous debris of the world. And by his attempt to imitate the great works of the classics, he will learn and in his failure to be like them, he will appear as the original Self he was from the beginning but had not fully known. Tradition is a trajectory of self-discovery.

Tradition is a baptism of fire and of crystalline water. This is the secret of the great works of the past, before the misconceptions of a materialist and nihilist age destroyed the connections.