Learn to bake.

‘Learn to bake bread; you cannot provide good education on a bad diet. Head, heart and hands is what education should be not the three R's. Transformation happens through the hands so every school should have a permaculture garden. Have dignity for the ones that are working with their hands they are really creating something. Start your own job; ask ‘where is your education vocation?’ Money should be the slave, you should be master.’ Satish Kumar.



Paul McKenna remarked a few years ago that school was not about education it was about conformity and I at the time agreed with this; over the years it has just become a lot worse.

The problem is the balance between learning new things but not losing sight that learning is really about opening the mind and this often requires us to think radically about what we take as a given.

Experts are not fonts of wisdom; they are only resources of knowledge, which is different. Knowledge has the problem of application and also runs the risk of being out of date. It is one thing to have the knowledge that a tomato is a fruit but having the wisdom not to put it in a fruit salad. Wisdom is the realm of the unconscious and therefore lies outside of the realm of measuring and controlling, it is by nature ethereal and formless however it often manifests itself through creating and that creating will need knowledge but the conclusion of the creating is wisdom of how, what, why and where.

By equipping people to create and use their abilities to then sell and build businesses we will give the public a way of developing themselves, building self-esteem which is something the education system often ruins for many. Self-belief is a very important tool for mental wellbeing and health in society something that is not being properly addressed.

What a great way for children to learn about themselves and the world and be able to go out and make something happen that is truly beneficial for society.

Vic

 
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Great mystics and sages.

“We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered.

Now what may foeman’s malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man’s deception? (Rig-Veda (8.48.3))”

Soma is important because it is a crucial source of inspiration for the people who wrote the Vedas, ancient texts that originated in India, making up the oldest scriptures of Hinduism (around 1st century B.C).

Is it that the great seers, mystics, poets and sages of the past transcended the ordinary conscious of the human mind by taking drugs, starving themselves or dancing into a cosmic rapport with great ideas beyond the thoughts of the time? We know that the great names of Greek philosophy  attended the Eleusinian mysteries which included a drink that we would now view as psychoactive.

Are we missing something here in that these are banned by the governments around the world and in the past the taking of these things were classed as witchcraft? Maybe the idea of taking plants, dancing or starving oneself would change one’s mind so much that you break the normal indoctrination that has been foisted on you by society was always a step too far for society that wanted to control thought?

The problem is that we do not think from the mind-set of the people who did these things, it was not a ‘bit of fun’ in fact it is far from a bit of fun, it is the saga and quest that was alluded to in the stories of the ancients, it is the recurring theme of the facing of the death of the ego the facing of your fears in an initiation. Such events as these were fraught with danger and not for the light hearted.

The extreme searching conducted by these people were undertaken by societies that faced danger in ways that we do not in today’s society but as soon as something happens to us we have no resources to deal with them. Ok allow me to simplify a little on these things but I do believe that our mind-set creates the landscape for all decisions that we make and living in a ‘Nanny State’ does not allow us to face up to the fact that life is not fair, just listen to the way that people want to blame everyone else but not take responsibility for themselves.

There is much evidence for these extreme states of mind contributing to spiritual and the origins of religious thought of all of the major religions with the use of starvation and extreme stress. Visionary episodes caused by contaminated food and the consumption of liquids including those of VERY strong beers such as heather beer that was known to have psychedelic fungus on the plant referred to as fogg and a theory that the ‘wine’ that the early Christians drank was mimosa which was used as a dye for fabrics in the middle east, and it is known that it was used by mystics both Islamic and Christian giving rise as it were to the stories of ‘flying carpets’ and maybe Soma was such a drink. If one looks at this early Christian and Muslim art it is incredibly visionary and although different from the Hindu art is also 'otherworldly'.

I will look at how music can create 'higher' states in the future but just open your mind to the possibility that some of the great developments in society, art and thought may have come from activities that are illegal, why is that?.  

Vic

 

OCD. Is it the Golden Goose?

I was talking to some artist friends of mine and I found it interesting that they all said they had OCD. Their attention to detail was very acute and it became obvious that their ‘condition’ was part of their skill. ‘Obsession is an important part of what makes me artistic,’ was one comment that was made in fact ‘I cannot see how you could produce work without it’, they went on to say.
Maybe the labelling of this condition as an illness maybe shooting the goose that lays the golden egg in that we may be losing the artists in our midst by trying to help those with states of mind that ‘normal’ people term as an impediment.
In the distant past the differences were often embraced as a gift but there is a theory that these differences were subject to a form of religious racism. In the west these Christian ‘values’ have been incorporated into our thinking including the idea that the experts have the answers and the public need to be saved. The experts have swapped their church robes for white coats but I would caution that the things that look right today may not be right in the future as our descendants look back to us. Ask yourself how confident the people in the past were with the teachings of the Church? Were they convinced they were right? They had God on their side; of course they believed they were right. Now we are confident, we are right and we have our god, science on our side.
The one thing that seems so evident is that science never seems to spot the unexpected consequence, the black swan, and how can it? However it can look sceptically at its actions and maybe see that often they are taking us down roads of no return.
How much longer will it be that anything that deviates from the norm will be considered something to be changed, this was tried in the most draconian terms with homosexuality but something like thinking differently is much harder to defend against because in many cases it can be a problem if the world is wired up differently to your world, that does not necessarily mean it is wrong, just different, and to be a great artist you need  to be different.
Vic
  


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Brainwashing warning from Aldous Huxley

‘There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for the entire society so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but rather will enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods, and this seems to be the final revolution.’-  Aldous Huxley
 
Interesting thoughts of Aldous Huxley and he may be correct in many ways; the trouble is if he is correct we will not know! When you watch programmes like The Voice and X Factor you are being swept into someone’s idea of how fame is created which for most musicians seems a total sham but for the general population and particularly children that is how it works.
The strength of brainwashing is that it is easy to rebut criticism by saying it is a conspiracy theory or it is subversive thinking but if you look back in history that was the defence of many governments which in hindsight we can see but civil populations at the time did not, mostly because they trusted their leaders.
I am not attempting to change the political system but I would say that this sort of thing is a mind-set and mind-sets do not restrict themselves to one place they become the zeitgeist for the time. Here is an example of this during the time of mass production lines. This idea of production lines was adopted by Stax Records and Studio One who had a resident band and the singers would come in and work on a song then leave in time for another to come in and so on, like a revolving door. It produced great records of course but it meant that the artists were working with the musicians set by the studio.
Look at the ideas that coming out from the government; low crime figures, better economic growth, Olympic Games, etc.  It is the selection of these ideas that Huxley would have found troubling, the fact that few people are killed by terrorists and many are killed directly by the car and indirectly by the pollution caused by the car; however the government uses terrorism as the tool for anything from immigration to putting CCTV cameras on every corner. I am personally more afraid of the driving by the middle classes in Sussex than by a man with a beard from Birmingham.
The pharmacology aspect is interesting to me, that drugs taken in order to keep you from being ill is the best business model of anything I have ever seen. If only we as teachers and musicians could keep being paid on a regularly basis just in case their ‘patient’  were required to play in the future we would all be minted.
Use music as a way of allowing you to think creatively, open your mind and be different from what is set out for you by society because you are greater than society says that you are.
 
Vic
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