What would you do if you knew couldn’t fail, would you write about; if you knew that a song could create a reality?

The first part of this question is a premise from NLP, designed to focus the mind about change.

For change to happen we have to either believe that it can, or better still suspend our disbelief, because it is our belief systems that tend to hold us back, this is often enough. Taking this idea further if you are a musician what would you write about if your song could create a reality? Just for a moment allow the possibility of this being plausible, so that we can create!

My guess would be that the writing about lost love or how difficult life is would not only create a cliché, but it also might set the mind on the course to look for that situation to fulfil.  For a change to happen we must write something far more positive, for example about having money, health or happiness.

Interestingly successful artists do tend to write positive songs! The most obvious who spring to mind are The Beatles, who wrote about love and quoted the word more times than any other band in existence, and they seemed to do quite well in reflection! But along with those, are artists like Robbie Williams, Bob Marley, Abba, Queen, Neil Young and Michael Jackson.

Whether or not the Beatles were in the love zeitgeist of the time, or whether they actually helped to make that ‘Love Movement’ happen in the 60’s is obviously debatable, and of course they were not the only ones! But there is an interesting interaction between art and reality; as in the quote’ life mimicking art’, so it must happen enough times for that quotation to exist, that there is a certain amount of conjuring the future through art.

The unexpected outcome of this is that we end up with interesting pieces of music. I have been experimenting with this concept, with people at Bluescamp, and private pupils for couple of years. There is something in that creative process that is worth pursuing, and in some cases produces some weird results. It doesn’t have to be a song, it could be a poem; just create something that focuses the mind in a different direction than just rambling through some crude clichés!

Taking Guitar Exams - Do they help you?

Over the past twenty years of teaching guitar, preparing candidates for exams and working as an examiner for the RGT in the UK.  I have often pondered what impact taking guitar examinations has on someone's rate of learning, and can it in some way damage a player’s creative approach to playing?

I have become very sceptical in the past about examinations in other areas of education, especially when children are subject to the process of testing that the education system in this country uses.

The idea that all things should be measured is has been taken from the world of business and the time management philosophy of Denning to the classroom, as if everything is under scientific scrutiny. Well, from the world of the arts and music we have a message for you; not all things can be measured, welcome to the alternative world of the creative.

As musicians and artists we are only too aware of the small things that happen which have a profound influence on us; a small idea that literally transforms our lives and our playing. I am reminded of the pre-enlightenment age of revelation where something can just suddenly be known. Often in music you will simply ‘know’ what to do without knowing why or how. The education system that we have is very left brained, focusing on ‘facts’, but my lasting memories of education and the moments that had most impact were subtle things which were life changing for me.

So, back to the world of examinations and to the experience of the years of teaching, and what can be drawn from this. I recently looked at the pupils of mine that did well and in some way great or small became ‘successful’. I can safely say that all of these took the guitar grades, not all to Grade 8, but certainly to the upper grades, and the ones that never took a grade did not fare so well.

The first thing to consider is that to take the grades you need to have a mind-set that is organised, focused and dedicated to put in the practice to achieve the standards required. Of course these are also the requirements for you to achieve anything in the world of music.

Look deeper into the way that examinations affect pupils and you might see that a person is acquiring a particular way of thinking which is becoming prescribed. This is not in my opinion always for the better, and needs to be balanced with creative experimentation. However , the structure of examinations can give the pupil a goal, this is a practical nature of the discipline; preparation and organisation, but one needs to make the journey important and not its arrival.

So for my pupils the ‘journey’ remains the most important aspect, and grades seem to help with this.

When it comes to the diplomas then I am not so sure how valuable they are from a playing point of view.  At this point, the pupil is cutting their own way through the music jungle armed with the tools that they have picked up along the way.So if the higher exams help with them to become teachers then so be it;  but again I am not so sure. Creativity is often traded off against ideas that come in as training.

Make sure that if you or your pupils decide not to take examinations, then it is not because of laziness but you have something else that acts as a driver. There are lots of people out there playing, and you need to be in the top five per cent if you want to achieve something

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.