Dancing in the light, the search for perfection and technical brilliance? Don’t

Dancing in the light, the search for perfection and technical brilliance? Don’t

Why is it that the greatest artists are flawed? Jonny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin to name just a few. The performances from these where far from perfect in fact they teetered on the edge of disaster for most of the time, concerts of Amy Winehouse for instance.

What is it that we are missing here? These people seem to thrive on being on the edge, is that the key that we seem to be missing here by approaching their ability intellectually? We have a concept which makes us strive for perfection, yet the reverse seems to hold a secret, and I think we know this deep down; otherwise we may not be so captivated by the failings of the masters.

Are these personal demons of the above artists the things that drove them and made them so captivating? Let us as a thought experiment imagine that they were and take our psychological shadows for a walk..

There is a Buddhist concept which I think comes from Tibetan Buddhism of feeding your demons by invoking them, getting to know them and then 'feeding them' sometimes literally. They need feeding anyway and if ignored will disrupt your life as well as feeding off you, so bring them in! I look at it like they are the builders and labourers that are doing work for you, make sure that you pay them and treat them with respect and do not ignore their requests for payment.

Our failings and inadequacies are important and they that can be used. Hendrix was not the best guitarist technically for his time, not by a long shot, but he touched more people than any other guitarist and his performances although flawed were entrancing.

Instead of looking for perfection and dancing in the light step into the shadows and dance with the shade. Invite the parts of you that you do not like, be it your character flaws- anger, jealousy, greed or your ability flaws- lack of patience, heavy handed,  inaccurate playing and let them join the feast. see what they bring to the party. Stop pretending to be someone else. Stop being the shop front that you show the world and bring the workers from the back room out. Do what Freddie Mercury did, lay it out for all to see but in your way and see what happens.

Your demons may have some cool tricks up their sleeves. Let’s face it they have had to put up with you all these years.

Tarot, archetypes, magic, cut up, music and poltergeists and theft.

Tarot, archetypes, magic, cut up, music and poltergeists and theft.

Forget creative card packs find an old tarot card deck and use them.

There are lots of creative thinking card packs available, often being advertised on Facebook as a Kickstarter campaign. You don’t need to buy these, the best thing to do is to use a pack of tarot cards or just ordinary playing cards, they are easy to read.

You can go into the archetypes if you wish, as the major Arcana are the archetypes, but all you really need to do is to read what you see in the pictures and tell a story as if you are speaking to children. You will be amazed at what will come about in your storytelling, include the colours that the characters are wearing, which direction they’re looking, what they are holding, what the landscape looks like, telling is all relevant because it’s the things that your unconscious is picking up.

Remember the film Jumanji which is based on board game that comes to life? The tarot is like that.

Just read what it says on the cards and make up the story.

Use tarot cards for storylines and new ideas, they are as good as any Kickstarter generated ideas pack  on the market . They have lasted for several hundred years, so following Nasim Taleb’s Lindy effect they are likely to last for several hundred more years.Which is much more than anything made by psychologists will last!

There is always a time and place to cut cards with the devil.

Remember there is always time to cut cards with the devil, all the bright things cast a shadow, turn the meanings of the cards to their dark side, for example with the card, ‘the lovers’ what are the bad experiences of life and love, what is it like to suffer the loss of another that you feel deeply for. And then for the more troublesome cards like ‘the tower’ and ‘death’,  look for new opportunities that come from adversity. When you look back, one often sees that great change and benefit often transpires from an unfortunate incident in ones life. Something that you would have avoided if you knew it was coming, but those things act as a catalyst for something better.

What you notice on the cards is what your unconscious is looking for, so the things that you see are meaningful and your descriptions are meaningful. Tarot cards come with an information booklet and there are lots of books, much of which is based on the interpretation of cards originally written by people such as Crowley, Mathers or Waitte  from the Edwardian period. These are typical of the colonialist thinking, trying to link everything back to Egypt or Ancient Greece. Don’t worry about all of that stuff, just read the pictures it works so much better!

Communicate with the darker side of your nature, your shadow side; it is where all of the interesting stuff is. Remember all things are born from darkness, the seed in the ground, the baby from the womb, and your most interesting thoughts come from the darkest recesses of your own mind. For those of you who are interested in acting, the best characters are the ones who are evil and dark, it is much harder to make a convincing character from somebody who is all goodness and light.

The Fool, the trickster, the musician

In the myth the trickster will move between the worlds passing knowledge to humans and taking payment for it, sometimes to annoy the gods and sometimes to test the humans.

I use and teach the cutup technique for song writing, and for the uninitiated it looks like cheating but this was the technique used by the greatest songwriters in pop music, from Lennon to Bowie, from Bolan to Cobain.

I am interested in the idea of the trickster musicians like Bowie and Bolan, infact many of the great guitar players like Hendrix had techniques that you could look at as some form of trickery. Infact if you look at technology and what it can do, creating an illusion of sound and vision, is itself a form of trickery as it creates an illusion of complexity.

I have pondered that we get trapped by thinking, and that some form of deceit needs to happen to fool us out of our trap into another mode of thinking. Cut up is a good example of this; we often see cutup as a series of phrases taken out of context from magazines and newspapers, put together in a random form which then weirdly makes sense. However, William S Burroughs did more with the technique, using it to predict the future, curse people and businesses that had upset him.

In fact any form of non-linear irrational thinking can be termed as cut up. For instance Burroughs would record the sounds that he heard in the street, taking snippets of conversation and then putting them together, out of time. Also just flipping between TV channels or radio stations, and recording the dialogue will open reel tape player. Taking parts of pictures and putting them together, any of these techniques will be the basis of cutup. A good example of this is the cover of Sgt Pepper which extensively uses the technique, and Burroughs is actually one of the faces in the montage!

When I was explaining this technique once at a Blues Camp Summer School somebody actually made the remark that I had burst his bubble, that the illusion of all these wonderful songs that he had listened to over the years had actually been some form of fraud.

This is one of the elements of the trickster in myth and in reality. Here is a strange phenomenon, when something unusual happens there is often an element of fraud that seems to go with it. Even when it is not necessary, because the event is weird enough in itself. An interesting case in point was the Enfield poltergeist, the event was well documented but the woman involved who lived in the house told some untruths which made the whole event look made up . What is interesting about this is that years later she tried to explain why she had actually lied about certain elements of the story, as if the strangeness of what was happening affected her mind.

This is quite common, infact there is a book written about the trickster effect which states that truth in these situations becomes very malleable. ‘The Trickster and the Paranormal’ by George Hanson looks at these strange effects, and is well worth a read!

Cutup can be looked at as a fraud and not genius, but I think it best mirrors how the mind comes up with ideas in the first place, splicing and dicing ideas from memories to create new things. Could this be how things really are and that our mind creates and curates the world to eliminate the weirdness for most of the time? It is only when the weirdness breaks through the dam wall that we experience things as they really are.

My experience of cutup has been really interesting and creative. I suggest that you try it and see what results you get. When I work with this it does seem to put you in to a dream experience of thinking and maybe because of the way that the unconscious is unlocked, gives rise to some very strange results; like in a number of cases of showing the technique in a festival, I ended up creating a song that seemed to cover a subject covered in a previous talk that I had not attended!

Whether we look at the artists who have used this technique very successfully as being frauds, cheats and tricksters or not, they often lived lives that seem very unreal to us in our mundane world. I think that this is one of the areas of artistic consciousness that we can easily obtain by using this simple technique, that seems to create strange synchronicities and weirdness to our over developed left brain. 

‘Bring out the magic in your mind’

‘Bring out the magic in your mind’

My mother had a book by Al Koran called, ‘‘Bring out the magic in your mind’, this book came out in the mid-1960s. Koran was a mentalist a little bit like Darren Brown is today and this book, which I still have, is a very special book for me as it links me to my mother’s positive thinking ideas, reminding me of the experiments in E.S.P. that she would do when I was as young as six.

This book is full of examples of acting as if what you wanted had already arrived, or, was on its way, such as buying carpets for a particular type of car that you wanted or getting a door handle for a new house. This type of thinking is very much on the lines of the new thought movement.

Here’s an example from book from the chapter ‘magic of visualisation’

‘The first step is knowing what you want. Exactly what and when. Want a car? Do you want an old Austin or a brand-new Cadillac? Perhaps it’s a Jaguar that you want? Be specific; tell your subconscious in so many words, exactly the make and type of car you want, and when you want it. The new Jaguar isn’t going to do much good when you are on your death bed. Make it clear what you want and when.

You wouldn’t ask for a new Jaguar in five minutes, because your intellect would say, ‘There is no hope of getting such a car in five minutes!’ And you wouldn’t get it. Be reasonable. Give a sensible time. Now the thing is, you may be absolutely unable to see how to get the new Jaguar on what you are earning at the moment, but other factors come into play. You may get a sudden windfall. You may hit the jackpot in some exciting competition. If you do the pools, possibly it’s your turn for the big money. Don’t draw lines between the possible and the impossible. Leave it to your subconscious to get it for you in its own magical way, by command of your will.

And then later in the next paragraph he sort of hits the nail on the head concerning the technique, which looks very familiar from an NLP perspective.

Never for one moment should you limit yourself because you cannot see where such glorious things are coming from. Go and look at the cars, especially the Jaguars, if that is what you want, and feel the joy in your heart. Feeling counts, feeling is the secret. When it comes to control of the subconscious mind, feeling plays a very important part. Feeling that you can get that Jaguar car you want. You’re going to enjoy life when you get it, feel that excitement now; you obtain your desire by feeling as if already got what you want now.

See yourself behind the wheel; see yourself driving that wonderful automobile. See it draw up in front of your house. If you do this; if you see that picture, it is bound to materialise. It is law.

Screwy, that’s what he is screwy

No my friend. To create the magic of visualisation you must hold the picture clearly in your mind. Every detail of it, see it, feel it, get yourself a scrapbook and paste in pictures of the things you want, put that Jaguar on the first page. You think it’s all nonsense this visualisation? Right, hit the nail on the head with a hammer. It may be called nonsense but it may nonetheless be true…… Behave as though you believe.

Although this book was printed in 1964 it tells the same story as many books produced from that time up to today. Infact the details are almost identical to many bestselling books of recent years.

As I’ve mentioned before I think the most compelling thing about this is that it is free to do. The only caveat I would add to this is that action needs to be taken for these things to become possible, don’t expect to win the lottery if you haven’t bought a ticket. Don’t expect money to come if there isn’t an alleyway for it to manifest. Otherwise,  it will come in a way that you hadn’t expected with some ramifications.

And I can attest to that fact from my own personal experience.

So, it is a good idea to also enchant good possibilities and opportunities, and allow those routes to be open.

Neville Goddard

Another great exponent of new thought was Neville Goddard , who Mitch Horowitz has written extensively about in his excellent book the ‘Miracle Club’.

Neville Goddard believed that your imagination was God, therefore as you use your imagination you are creating reality. Neville Goddard was not a name that people seem to remember until being resurrected by Mitch’s book; however he had very profound effect on many people including Carlos Castaneda. There is a point of view that Neville’s Indian mystic mentor who may or may not been real, was an idea that Castaneda adopted with his ‘teacher’ Don Juan, who also may not have existed, but was a literary device to tell his story. 

Neville Goddard presented people with a challenge that if they used their imagination they would make things manifest. He used to say try it, prove me wrong!

But for us creative musicians, we need to be imaginative, we need to believe. We need to believe that we can be successful against all the odds, when the statistics point to other probabilities. We need to believe that what we say, or what we create, can be believed and loved by others.

Neville Goddard started from a family that was desperately short of money, and he used his ideas to create a successful life for himself against all the odds. Remember that human ideas become real, like law, money, human rights, commerce, and trade. At one time these things did not exist, but somebody had a bright idea and made them real. They all started in the human imagination, someone created them and then they became believable by others using that idea, and then they became a reality.

So let us create our world in the here and now, what works for you and the rest of the world? Aim to make the world a better place.

The new thought movement has been an important driver to the American culture. Books by writers such as Napoleon Vincent Peel, and Napoleon Hill have been an inspiration for many people including Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan.

In the UK this has not been so apparent, but we still believe in the Protestant work ethic.

So, if you do not believe in the above, the people who rule you do. It reminds me of something that I heard from an astrologer once, ‘millionaires don’t believe in astrology, but billionaires do’

Remember these ideas are free, so use them!

Have you ever been struck by lightning?

Have you ever been struck by lightning?

In many cultures if you have been struck by lightning, and you survived of course, it was a sign that you have been marked out as shaman, seer or healer. In the same cultures this wasn't something that you wanted to be gifted with, this was something you were marked out for, sometimes literally, by being scarred. For example, anything like an illness that nearly killed you, or an accident that left you with an injury like a limp, a touch of the ‘Harry Potters’ the scar on the forehead; something that leaves you marked often signals that you can walk in both worlds.

It is difficult for us in the West, the affluent West, the colonial West, to truly get our heads around this. I live near Brighton in the UK, and down here there are more shamans, magicians, psychics, healers, tarot readers, and what a friend of mine calls crystal repair mechanics,  than you can shake a wand at. A few have been marked, but for the many it’s a ‘career’ choice.

Maybe in this culture it would be better to think of those with psychological and physical illnesses, things such as epilepsy, being bipolar and having schizophrenic episodes, to be our equivalent chosen people. In other words not a choice that one would easily make. We could also include those with near death experiences, and any experience that marks us out as being different, like being struck by lightning.

Gordon White of the Rune Soup podcast talks about becoming ‘invincible’ in his book Chaos Protocols, which is a term that he uses for a state which is a form of ‘enlightenment’,  similar to the red pill episode in the film The Matrix. Once this pill is taken you cannot return to the normal world. We in the West have been brought up to believe that we can be all that we want, the best we can be, we can have it all; this is the spell of the Anglo-American dream, you can be rich and successful and have a white picket fence. But at one time, here, and still existing in other cultures the belief is that we are born in to something by design. Maybe we are all born to walk the path of liberation, but not be something that we do not have in nature. If you are an apple seed, you will not turn into a pear tree.

Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna’s route was the taking of a ‘heroic dose’ of psychedelic mushrooms in complete darkness, with the  intention to rewire the brain.  For many cultures the  initiation process is exactly that,  rewiring the brain whether through psychedelics or by other practices that took you to the edge. Again it is so difficult for us in the West to understand that maybe our paradigms of the scientific explanation can be anything other than correct, and society has become risk averse and maybe too comfortable for what we could term as spiritual development, and for us as musicians being artistically boring. This I believe comes out of scientific thinking,  about probability and safety,  anything that is interesting is too dangerous for society. Look at societies response to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Punk, Rap and whatever emergent creative musical genre , other than shock horror to the collapse of social respectability.

Returning to the metaphor of the snooker game as I often do in my blog, science is brilliant at estimating and predicting what will happen when you first strike the cue ball and maybe it will able to predict what happens when that ball hits the first coloured one, but when all the other balls move it is far too difficult to predict. Holistic thinking however seems to be able to deal with complexity much better, having a generalised feel of what will happen and how those shots will work. In fact athletes use this type of imaginative thinking, feeling, and internal dialogue to achieve results, things that science will rubbish as being nonsense, superstition, and old wives tales, to be able to navigate the complex world of reality.

Science is good at observing the observable, modern medicine is excellent at being able to fix the thing that is obviously broken, such as dealing with a heart attack, or for removing the tumour. But the complexity that made those conditions arise within the body it cannot know, only surmised.

This I feel is where Eastern philosophies and older Western ways of thinking seem to be able to deal with complex issues, that would create an existential crisis in Western society

Have a look at your experiences in life and ask yourself are they similar to being struck by lightning?

Let us return to our lightning which is echoed through myths all the time, and thunderbolts. Thunderbolts and lightning are associated with Thor and gods of northern Europe, and to Zeus for the Hellenistic world. In the Celtic bardic tradition inspiration is poetically referred to as  fire in the head, maybe there's a link here between the idea of creativity and where it comes from, and maybe that place is the other world in which the witchdoctor, magician or Shaman visit.

So what has this to do with musical success? Well lots, first of all what are you born to do? What has happened to you that has directed or redirected your life? Are you authentic? Could listening to your own inner knowing make you more so?

Is your art, music, poetry, filled with something deeper than the Western throwaway culture?

If it is, it will last, evidenced by the Beatles, Neil Young, David Bowie, JS Bach, Holst, Picasso, Salvador Dali, JK Rowling and hopefully you.

Magic has been drained out of history by the historians. Gordon White

Magic has been drained out of history by the historians. Gordon White

There has been a fundamental omission in the telling of the past, not just our past history but also in the way that we understand music, and that is the role of magic. It is difficult for us to reconnect with the fundamental belief in magic that our predecessors had, it was infused in everything that they did and by extension music and art was a magical connection with the other world.

Without reinserting that fundamental belief in magic and the supernatural back into history it is impossible to fully understand why or how people thought. We also have to respect those people and not just come out of our colonial Western modern thinking and all its pomposity that we have the answers, because we obviously do not. So with a little bit of humility we can see that our ancestors’ belief and the use of magical ritual and spiritual practices gave rise to incredible innovations in art and technology. For us our focus is what that thinking did regarding music.

Music and art were used to invoke and evoke states of consciousness and they knew that. Their definitions of how these things happened would be different from ours, as we will explain them in psychological terminology. But anybody who is a student of Carl Jung will understand that psychology is really only a cipher for magical thinking. Evidenced by the red book.

I would say that today music is disconnected from this otherness, it has little or no inner energy, this is why root styles of music frequently come back into the popular music arena and re-energise music, disguised as rock and roll, punk or grunge and there is something innately visceral and otherworldly about those sorts of animal.

One thing that could be said about modern pop music is there is nothing really magical about it. It is so computerised and quantised that any essence of energy has been removed and replaced by something sterile. However if the computer becomes the servant and not the master the essence of the DJ producer can be bound into the songs, dance is a good example of this. I think the deciding point here is, were any risks taken? Producing a song by a Rihanna or a Katy Perry maybe more a case of not getting it wrong than getting it right because of the big budgets involved.

We find it very difficult to be able to think in a mediaeval style, because we have been told that many of the things they believed are rubbish, but obviously they did not think that. If however you ask yourself the question ‘why ritualistic behaviour and magic systems seem to have been unchanged over a period of 2000 years, why keep doing something that does not work? The logical answer to that is, it did. but is only us that have rid ourselves of the magical tools from the toolbox.

I am suggesting that by looking back at styles that may influence us musically and getting to the root of what it is that drives it we can reconnect with what the music is all about and derive something from it for ourselves, if only to reanimate the music that we play.

You do not have to believe in magic and the supernatural; only suspend your disbelief to unlock the unconscious. I would suggest listening to musical styles such as Blues or Flamenco or the English folk music tradition and see what sort of weirdness you can find in there; Mojo’s, Dances of the spider, impossible tasks asked of ex-lovers etc. Pull on that thread a little and see where it takes you.

Then maybe off to the crossroads to talk to Old Nick.

NLP Timelines- Mapping your journey

NLP Timelines- Mapping your journey

Before we start a journey, we need to know where we are going! What is our direction? Where are we starting from? At some point in the past our ancestors named the directions; North, South, East and West. Directionality eventually became unified and standardised. So as a thought experiment, there was a time before the directions were named and someone made a magical decision to invoke directionality, and later into two dimensions as a drawing, to have power over it; in other words a map was created.

The NLP timelines are process developed by Tad James in the 1980s, they used the concept that we store memories in a linear fashion. However, things get really interesting when we use techniques such as dowsing or shamanic journeying, on these timelines which is not part of NLP.

If making a map is a magical act where you are going is also magical, NLP timelines create an imaginary map in time. To discover the directionality of your time think of something that you did yesterday, where is it situated as a memory? Is it behind you to the left? Or is it directly behind you? Now think of something that you plan to do tonight and then something for tomorrow, then connect those thoughts. Where they are situated to the thoughts of the past? This becomes the timeline that you can walk.

While you walk your timeline , experience the feelings of success with every achieved landmark this really adds something to the experience and the potency of what you’re doing. Now I have classified this as an NLP technique, but it is a magical evocation of time, space and events.

When you are walking your timeline, visualise and put the emotional data into the experience. Do not think about how long it’s going to take, just focus on each step of the way, with no thought to why or how it can work. Again putting yourself into a state of in-between-ness, or non-attachment to a result is very effective. I have no scientific reason for this only my own experience and the experience of others. As well as including the things that will ‘happen’ on your journey, I  also like to charge these things up by doubling the feelings in my imagination. I find this works very well; the process for this is very simple. Think of something you can easily imagine like being happy, think of an event that made you happy, and focus on the feeling. Has it a physical sensation? Where is that sensation? Could you estimate the ‘amount’ say on a scale of 1 to 10, and then in your mind double the feeling. You could even just say to yourself I feel twice as happy, it really is that simple. (You may go beyond ten in your happiness scale, all well and good!).

Recap

So the process is to ‘walk’ the memories and place them on the timeline. Think of things in the past to give you an idea of where that lies, and then think of some things that you are going to be doing in the future this gives you the trajectory of the line.

Memory Mansions

The Greeks used something similar to a timeline as a memory system for remembering complex details in order. The idea was to imagine something like a mansion or a large building that you can walk around in your memory. Take a mental journey around the building; placing triggers to memory on objects and walls will help you to organise and remember your thoughts. So, think of a place that you know and as you enter the front door imagine a notice pinned by the door handle, this could be the category that you want to file the memories under. Now walk through the door into the hallway and the first object that you see will contain the next memory that is required in that category.

You could use this memory system on your timeline to deepen your experience, placing events that are also symbolic as well as just visual. So as an example, you are going to be taking a guitar exam in the future leading up to you achieving your degree. So as well as imagining taking the exam and visualising the examiner writing excellent remarks on his report, you could imagine the number of the grade, let us say grade 8, as an infinity sign floating in the air, and printed certificates floating down like tickertape with cheering, marching bands playing outside.

Now if the Greeks had that memory system in place it is reasonable to assume that they learned it from somebody else. Like any  number of things that have been accredited to the Greeks, for example their mathematics, much of it came from Egypt and older civilisations such as Babylon or even earlier cultures such as the Sumerians.

Much of our understanding of ancient culture has been slanted towards the Greeks and the Romans as the West is a classical influenced culture. Much of this is based on Victorian and Edwardian ideas that the Greeks and the Romans were the originators of many innovations; of which they were not. It is becoming abundantly clear now that cultures such as the Sumerians and Babylonians set up the number systems that the Greeks used, and I would guess what we understand as psychology, that is usually ascribed to Classical Greece (even the word is Greek) probably was understood by their earlier Mesopotamian counterparts. Let’s face it they organised massive cities, and of course we must mention the Chinese, as they were at least the equal of anything from Mesopotamia and they would fill another book on the subject.

Cost analysis

Writing something down was very complicated particularly if it had to be embossed into clay, or one had to create papyrus or velum. Even then only a few people could write or read, therefore storing masses of data in your head was a good idea and cheap.

We know that the Homeric tales such as the Iliad were originally memorised and then transmitted orally. It was a few hundred years before they were written down. We also are not sure that Homer existed as one person, like many people in the ancient world, particularly if they were slightly mythical, may never have existed. Blind storytellers however did, having prodigious memories to remember massive sagas; we know this is to be true because good storytellers even now have the capacity for many hundreds of tales in their repertoire.

So the concept of the map and the timeline may be more to do with our cognitive processes in regard to how they work than about the map itself, just as computers reflect our memory, this reminds me of the biblical term’ God made man in his own image’. This is true when it comes to humans, as well as God, that we create the concept of journeys and time and distance, maybe these things actually don’t exist as such, that’s just how we perceive the world. A little while ago it was inconceivable to think of time as being ‘unreal’, but now with the scientific exploration of quantum physics we realised that time isn’t as we think it is, and space isn’t what we think it is either. I think a lot of people understand that time is strange; we haven’t quite got around to the thinking of distance being strange yet. Apart from walking in a straight line around the world you would actually end up back at the same starting point. If we consider the universe as a hyper sphere not only are we unknowingly moving in a circle in directionality, maybe we are moving in the circle of time as well. Therefore our relationship of time and space are truly a function of our minds, and not reality as such.

Reverse Time

Think of all the self-help books who talk about visualising what you want in the future as if it has already happened. Many of them use the NLP process of working back from the future to your position now, a sort of ‘reverse time’.

So the question here is if they are all using a similar concept can they all be wrong, considering many are involved successfully in sport psychology, and in the case of Anthony Robbins(love him or hate him), who is active in coaching successful sports stars and business people; he has a great following who can attest to the effectiveness of his ideas.

So for the sceptics there are many people who have highly successful results using these methods.

One case in point is Robbins’s work with Andre Agassi, who had dropped from in the seedings to lower than 200 to return to the top five seeds within a year after being coached by Robbins.

So within a thought experiment lets name all this ‘magical thinking’, although psychology shies away from this label, an NLP only masks this, although Bandler and Grinder published a book on NLP entitled ‘The Structure of Magic’, and Garner Thompson’s book about using language within the medical profession was called ‘Magic in Practice’. Understanding that words are magical and we use them to cast a spell, whether that is in advertising, politics or courtship is exactly what using words is doing, we are spelling them. Magical thinking is free, therefore try it because if it works then that is fantastic, and if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost anything.

So continuing our thought experiment, let’s look at a typical map and see what it contains. Now think of your time with those map elements added to it like hills and valleys shown as gradients. Think of the land marks that you can place on your timeline to represent things that need to be reached on your journey. Draw it out and make it real, then in an open space walk your timeline. Be creative, place signs which you have written out on the path to represent the places on the map that you have drawn. Feel the hills and valleys and places that you have created.

This brings to mind the rock art of the San people of South Africa which dates back thousands of years. They were possibly drawing out the spirit world, there are ladders leading to the other world drawn on to the rock. It looks like it is the place they go to call for rain and for the Shaman to talk and be at one with the spirits, similarly the Sami people of Scandinavian lands drew the map of the spirit world onto the drums that they used for their shamanic journeying.

Ritual

This is an aspect of human consciousness that goes back into the mists of time. We ritualised many things that we do, from how we get dressed in the morning, how we clean our teeth, to how we do the washing up, or who goes to the bathroom first, it is all a ritual, it is more or less the same every day, why do we do that?

Firstly we need patterns we are pattern creators, and pattern finders. Again this says something about us, but if we make a ritual in the fullest sense it really kicks us into another gear.

So if you ritualised what you’re doing, it seems to have a multiplier effect on your consciousness. The ritual can be anything you want, you could create the spirit of the map in your mind that you make an offering to. The offering can be a glass of water, a piece of bread with some salt. A glass of whiskey or a glass of vodka, anything that you feel has some potency to your ritual. If you are inside a house you could light a candle, burn some incense, put some flowers out, offer prayers, sing a song or dance wildly. But most of all use your imagination.

When I was doing my NLP Master Practitioner training in London many years ago, I was talking to a young Sikh about Muhammad Ali, that he would tell the story of the fight that was coming up. Muhammad Ali would go through each round saying when he was going to knock his opponent down and that he was the greatest. Even as a kid I noticed that the fight would often go exactly the way that he had said. It transpired that Muhammad Ali was future pacing the event by imagining the fight in advance. My friend who was on the course said that was exactly what the Sikh Warriors used to do before battle. They would go into the future and fight in the spirit world to ordain the outcome of the conflict.

When Muhammad Ali was beaten by Joe Frazier his explanation why he lost was that Joe Frazier had dreamt the fight better on that occasion.