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.