Somewhere, uh, Musically, Beyond Grunge: II

How do we get unstuck and in touch with our own sense of inspiration? For some people, the first step is to acknowledge feeling stuck. For others, it is to notice the moments when they do feel at least hints or flickers or whispers of inspiration and to follow those hints. If you take my walls and fluidity description, you can be very consistent in looking for cracks in the walls and looking for places where water seeps through. Earlier, I wrote about the process of PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGE. You can take ANY moment, anything you notice and choose, as a sign to begin priming for inspiration. Got despair? That's a sign that you want change. Got hope? Another sign. That sort of perspective leads to priming oneself for the actuality of change rather than letting change or inspiration remain as some idealized thing that doesn't seem to touch your life. When you start thinking of yourself as someone who wants inspiration and therefore takes anything as a sign to look for inspiration, we star flowing through a different form than the form of suffering. That attitude/perspective and the priming it allows is a beginning, but it's not the whole process.

Once you begin seeing your life circumstances and internal reactions as signs that show you as an individual who is looking for inspiration, the question moves to that of how you can begin truly engaging inspiration. There are two major ways that we can engage. The first is to hold onto our walls for as long as possible, to allow "mind" to pile up behind our walls like water piling up behind a dam. The longer we try to stay the same, the more the pressure builds. And eventually the dam breaks. That can be terrifying and exciting. Because the psychological universe is closer to how dreams work than actually facing a real flood, death is not a serious concern even if it is a fear. We--unrealistically--fear that "I" may die when the walls of my self-identity are broken. Think of how often you have felt fear in a dream. How many times has that fear-in-a-dream lead to your actual death? Fear concerning losing our self-identity's walls is like that. It is more likely to lead to us waking up than actual death. Are you curious about what is outside those walls, wondering who might be there with you when you wake up, considering walking out your front door?

So one way is a sort of "forced change" when life breaks something in us. These breaks can lead to breakthroughs or breakdowns. Since I'm not a big fan of breakdown in my own life, I tend to recommend steady change. Let a little water in or out, take the walls down piece by piece until you are certain that change is nothing to fear and can't be avoided anyway. Change is not something that happens to you; it is you. Mind moves; you cannot spiritually be leashed any more than the nature of water can be leashed, although you might pretend to be leashed or imprisoned. There is no way to actually fight the movement of time. Utilizing receptive states or moments of receptivity allows us to take change when we are most open to change--but make no mistake, change is happening to us all when we are aware of it or not. The dam may not be breaking at this moment, but water pressure is building.

Now, some of you are wondering, "In all of this talk of fluidity and universes and change, what about that fountain of youthfulness?" Let's get back to that. Inspiration is the fountain of youthfulness--pure and simple, natural. When we feel inspired, we live; when we don't, we age. Another way of describing it is to say that trying to remain small, trying to remain within the psychological walls of our chosen self-identity, cuts us off from the normal and continual replenishment that comes from exchange and flow within the entire universe of imagination in which we live. Take a moment with that idea: we live in a universe of imagination, our minds are constantly and unavoidably fed by the universe of anything-being-possible. The challenging part of that is that it means if we imagine or idealize God, part of the power in our psychological universe resides in "God". That's okay, but it means that we will want to commune with God in order to feel our power, to feel alive. The catch is that if you can imagine evil, you will have to relate to evil--you won't be able to simply set it outside your walls and keep it there forever. The pressure will build up, and nothing that men can build will last forever. The things we try to set aside are powerful, just as the things we try to draw near are powerful.

Rumi suggested dealing with everything that comes to your door as a guest. That includes external circumstances as well as our internal reactions to circumstances. What sort of mindset does it take to invite God in or accept that invitation to come out? What sort of mindset does it take to admit that evil is not only somewhere outside of my house, to admit that evil is as much within me as without?

It's been very interesting to grow up with Grunge as the most unique and defining musical influence for me, descriptive of my age cohort. (Rap may be as defining of a musical moment, but rap began earlier and seems more lasting.) I'm really enjoying Chris Cornell's solo work lately. Overall, Grunge strikes me as less resilient than the Blues. It's more of a dirge, like singing for one's own funeral. And Curt Cobain is certainly one of the defining characters whose life and music defines Grunge. But if you maintain through that Zeitgeist, if all of what goes into angst and disappointment with life and resignation doesn't break you, you come out the other side changed. And there is something to be said for Dave Grohl and Chris Cornell not only singing about hearts and butterflies. There's something real about Grunge, and something real about making a good life for your self, maybe getting married and living in France, maybe making music somewhere, uh, I guess one could say "beyond Grunge".

Somewhere, uh, Musically, Beyond Grunge

Creativity is the most fundamental level of subjective development in mammals--including those that walk upright. Isn't that something? Chuang Tzu woke from dreaming that he was a butterfly and wondered if he might not actually be a butterfly dreaming himself a man. We are so fundamentally creative that we can even imagine ourselves to be uncreative, uninterested, and boring. Frankly, I prefer butterfly dreams to L'Estranger, but Camus certainly did have his moments.

For most adults I've met, disinterest is a bigger problem than an excess of wonderment. Most of them rarely ask why it is this way. We're a little TOO certain that we are not the multi-colored living art fluttering by, living on sunshine and kisses. (Luckily for me, I'm dating a butterfly.)

I've addressed in other places why creativity is fundamental to mammalian life. That leaves the questions--if we are fundamentally creative--then how do we come to see ourselves otherwise and what do we do about it all anyway? How we get this way is a sad story and I feel too celebratory today to tell it, although it is a good story. The "what can we do about it" part is a good story too.

WHAT CAN BE DONE? We probably all know people who blithely or beautifully respond, "Dance, sing, love." And many of us tack onto that a, "...for tomorrow we die." (I guess I'm letting some of my internal Eyor show.) There is something to be said about being stuck here, something to be said for being there (dancing, singing, fluttering, etc.), and something to be done about getting unstuck in order to allow our inherent singing out. (You know you like hearing Elton John's "Tiny Dancer".)

One of the first things to realize is that the fountain of youthfulness (because a Fountain of Youth is just a fairy tale) is not a triple espresso, an adrenaline rush, a hot affair, or a vacation away from anything. Youthful creativity--vitality--comes from living, never from avoiding the actual circumstances of one's life. The struggle is only about recognizing creative playfulness as the most fundamental aspect of who we are and being able to touch and express it. I'll leave how you're going to express it to you, and--at the risk of seeming the frotteur--stick, for now, with the touching part. Once we find out how to get in touch with that aspect of ourselves, that aspect becomes more interesting, fun, and convincing than any explanation of why creativity is fundamental. So I like hows, how it happens.

A friend of mine recently sent a link to the Mental Bank self-hypnosis site. In the introductory 2-hour talk, the speaker emphasizes the importance of entering a suggestible state and then utilizing that state by including goal-directed affirmations and structured measurement of progress towards specific goals. The program itself is not really exciting but it may be effective, and if it is, the results can be exciting. Part of this speaker's point is that one naturally enters a relatively suggestible or receptive state in the last half-hour or so before falling asleep. By utilizing this time, we don't need someone else to implant suggestions for us, we don't need to try any extreme cultish groups or techniques, and we can essentially--with no special skills--begin to interact with our ongoing unconscious flow.

This idea of utilizing more receptive states holds a lot of promise. Dream yoga is a somewhat more intense or radical way of interacting with one's streaming subconscious. We find something similar in being part of a crowd that we are moved by, aroused physical states (in which the arousal is above average but not so intense as to overcome intention and memory), relaxed states, novel situations in which we don't feel threatened, etc. Basically, if we aren't just acting habitually within our comfort zone, something interesting happens; we let the wonder in. Rhythm can set us up to be receptive, narrative, art, you name it.

Part of what amazes me is that anything that you can imagine is part of your subconscious subjective universe. That's a lot of stuff. Based on personal choices and social pressures, we create a sense of how we want to be and try to carve out part of that universe as "who we are". And then, in order to maintain that construction/facade/self-image, we have to build psychological resistance-walls against all of the material in our imaginative universes that is "not me". Is the man "not-Chuang-Tzu" or is the butterfly "not-him"? In this conscious construction, every thing or form has its foil, its opposite. When we identify with our conscious constructions to the exclusion of the rest of our imaginative universe, we give up our psychological power, we decide that all of that creativity is "not me". Interesting, neh?

The trouble with that set-up is that the conscious construction is only a small part of the bigger universe. The more exclusive our psychological walls are, the less fluid can we be, the more we have painted our selves into a corner. We might, then, invest a great deal of energy in maintaining our walls. There is a very interesting psychological law that is similar to time. Time always moves; you can never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus put it. Dreams are a great example of how this psychological fluidity works. Timothy Leary got high on LSD's ability to open up conscious access to this "fluidity". Artists search for moments in which they can bring a degree of fluidity to their craft and mix it with some sort of excellence. So what happens when we believe in solid walls? Napoleon comes along and kicks our ass or Hitler blows through the Maginot line; life moves beyond our walls and eventually moves US beyond our walls. We end up investing increasing amounts of energy into maintaining certain forms and denying others, and since it is the nature of mind to move, any form that we want to maintain takes a great deal of effort. Like trying to fight the flow of a river. Only you are trying to fight the flow of your own mind, of your psychological universe. Then we look around and wonder why we feel tired, why we don't feel creative. It's mostly because we've decided to keep investing in stability when that is an interesting idea that has little bearing on the way minds actually work. Mind moves.