Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey people, how are you doing today? I hope all is well or that's
Speaker 1 00:00:36 Some aspect of your life is really rocking or at least feels musical in some way. Let me explain. I know life can be tough, but beneath all your problems is a meaningful and purposeful process. Trying to awaken you to something that expands your usual way of perceiving life. Your trials and tribulations can feel totally unfair and wrong, but within the process of being messed up, thrown off, knocked down and beat up is a force that's trying to shake you and wake you to the bigger picture, the deeper dimension, the musical flow of your life. Now I'm not just being poetic. Music is emotional flow, and there's literally an emotional flow state trying to happen in you in every moment when this state isn't made conscious, it manifests as a symptom that disturbs you, depression, anxiety, conflict. In order to force you into a process of change that can connect you with this flow.
Speaker 1 00:02:00 Of course, it's not really a flow state. It's a flow process. A state is static. Whereas a process moves your symptoms and problems mess up your life. But only in an attempt to try to get you to wake up to a new life in some way, one that feels less troubled and constricted. One that flows more. If you can do this even for a minute, you'll feel deeply connected with yourself and with everything else. It's like the feeling you get. When you break through one of your fears or have a sudden apifany where you experience a deeper truth, it's a different way of inhabiting your mind and body. It gives you a more expansive understanding of yourself, your relationships and life as a whole. It frees you. It's like falling in love with life. Some people call this personal growth self-awareness consciousness, or maybe even just mental health others call it truth, freedom, liberation, or joy.
Speaker 1 00:03:15 Some relate to it as personal power, creativity, meaning or purpose. Some experience it as God. And a few words, weirdos like me, call it music with a capital M however you name it. It's the sound of your day. Deeper, more aware self your soul. If you will. It's the unsaid unknown. Unfelt unseen unrecognized, marginalized disavowed, part of you that tries to wake you up by giving you seemingly impossible problems to deal with spiritual traditions. Often didn't view these problems as life's lower level dramas and say that spirituality means rising to a higher level, so you can detach from or transcend these issues. But this is an inaccurate viewpoint. Your problems are your spirituality because they contain all that striving to be born in your consciousness. Self-awareness power, creativity, individuality, love, and spirituality itself. In a future episode, I'll talk about the unfortunate split between psychology and spirituality and how they're really one in the same thing.
Speaker 1 00:04:44 Now, when I refer to the underlying process of our lives as music, I don't mean literal music. Although for me, that's definitely a part of it. I mean that, which music points to what it does to us, where it takes us, where it comes from and how it's rooted in a universal language mathematics I've mentioned in other episodes that I actually learned how to live by listening to old blues and folk songs. They're playing of sounds and poetic wisdom showed me a world that was different from and Morton truthful than the world around me. They took me all the way inside life and then showed me how to make it whole by standing outside of it, observing what was happening. That's what these old songs do. They take you into a deep, emotional flow state, simultaneously commenting on it with a sort of and poetry.
Speaker 1 00:05:47 It's a lesson in participating fully and objective observing at the same time everywhere else I looked, uh, folks seemed either hopelessly tossed about by the dramatic winds of life, with no sense of self observation or self-awareness, or they seem sort of cold cutoff and outside their deeper emotions, even psychology. And a lot of spiritual practices seemed to me to miss the passion, the dance, the music. It's not easy to totally let go into life's ecstatic, crazy joy and pain while also being mindful. And even when I discovered mindfulness practice, which I think is totally awesome, I noticed that people tend to use it to try to be all calm and peaceful and in the process, oftentimes repress or marginalize their true fire, creativity, passion and crazy fun spirit. It's all about wholeness, your whole being your whole process, not just part of it to learn wholeness, you have to experience your process and understand it.
Speaker 1 00:07:16 My understanding of wholeness comes from studying physics, specifically, a part of quantum mechanics called the many worlds paradigm. I'm going to devote a whole episode to it because it lays out the physical evidence for the notion that our reality, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual is a subject of process of selecting and deleting information. There's no set of pre-existing facts, independent of this selection, deletion process. In other words, life isn't objective really this way or that way. It all depends on which information you download and how you process it. This alone creates your life. There are many potential versions of your life that exists in every moment. And you collapse these many possibilities into just one. Each time you make a conscious or unconscious decision about how you'll relate to the information you encounter. Your reality is a process. You, co-create not something that already exists that you simply respond to.
Speaker 1 00:08:36 As you can see, I draw on both science and art for my understanding of what makes us tick to really grok life. You have to be able to hold the coin in your hand and look at the side that says science and analysis, and then flip the coin over. And at the other side that says art and experience and realize that one without the other is like, I don't know, like an electric guitar without an amp life is music with a capital M it's all about connecting with the emotive power and meaning in your experiences and living both at their center and outside them with an objective eye. When I play a concert, I'm totally inside the nuances of the music and I'm also outside it albeit in a mindless sort of way, but it's an informed mindlessness and invisible guidance system that in to me to see what I feel and hear in each moment in episode 30, how do you songs that pop into your mind for healing and growth?
Speaker 1 00:09:52 I shared a really fun, fun, and effective way to use music as a personal growth method. Music is one of our universal languages because it comes from great out of nature, mathematics spirit, and it requires an old learning to enjoy it. Anyone can listen to music and be moved, but how does this happen? How do a bunch of sounds put together in a certain way affect us so deeply? There are lots of different sounds in the world, but none of them act on us like music does. I mean, dogs barking and cars driving by our sounds, but we don't care much for them. Way. Musical sounds are put together, right? Nate's with human experience. The word resonates here is interesting because I don't just mean it metaphorically. I mean, it literally the frequencies at which musical sound waves, jiggle amplify brainwave patterns, that evoke deep experience.
Speaker 1 00:11:00 And there are two levels of this. One levels, more superficial and evokes either pleasure or repulsion. The other level goes deeper and brings out the contents of the subconscious, which can result in profoundly moving experiences of rapture, ecstasy, trance, happiness, freedom, insight, or melancholy, pain, and sorrow. Both levels can be used to increase your self awareness. If you choose to process these experiences, the exercise shows you how to do this. A song puts you into a specific state of mind and it isn't just random. It's a state of mind, that's all ready present in you. The song just brings it into your awareness to bring the contents of your subconscious into consciousness. You need some kind of intervention. That's what processing methods are for, but music is a method to, it's no coincidence that music has been used since the Dawn of time in religious and spiritual ceremonies. It's a high speed. Train that
Speaker 2 00:12:21 Right pasture everyday reality and hits you in a deeper place.
Speaker 1 00:12:26 A part of you that's beyond your little mind and connects you to the big mind, the mind of God, nature, infinity, love, power, emotion, rage, vision, heart, and soul. If you're a musician, sometimes you can just pick up your instrument and tap into this deeper process right away. That's how powerful music can be. For example, I might be feeling a mellow peace in myself, pick up my guitar and suddenly some kind of angry energy comes out of me. What the hell is this? Oh right. I'm freaking pissed off. I just didn't want to acknowledge it. Or the opposite might happen. I feel all amped up and tough. Sit down at the piano. And a few minutes later, I'm playing something that makes me cry. The music you like and dislike, reflects your inner process. It's a mirror you can use to reflect back to yourself.
Speaker 1 00:13:36 What's happening in your psyche. Whether you're a casual listener, a hardcore music fan, a musician, a song writer, or all of him, music alters your state of mind. Just enough to experience yourself and life differently for a few minutes. But for me, and probably other musicians too, music goes beyond this. Writing a song is more like my therapy catharsis and InVenture into the unknown than just a pleasant little trip. I never know what kind of music or words are going to come out of me, but it always connects me with an experience and awareness. I hadn't previously known. It's like going to school to your favorite class and your teacher is going to lay something new on you. Sometimes the process wakes me up to feelings and ideas. I hadn't been aware of other times, I discover a whole new way of looking at something.
Speaker 1 00:14:43 And still other times I tap into the collective unconscious and have an experience of meaning. That goes way beyond my personal life. Speaking of music, being a direct route into your psychology, I spontaneously created a song in five minutes, no words, just music that expressed exactly what I was feeling. One day in London. I had a vision of a street in London called Dover road, where I once met and enlightened drunken Sage at 5:00 AM standing on the street corner, true story. I was coming home from a gig and started talking to him and he said some things that really showed me the way in life. And I remember this experience I felt, and I wanted to express it in some way. So I just picked up the guitar and multi-track some notes, chords slide bass, and I got on the drums and fiddled around and boom, I had a little song it's short and sweet and it's called morning on Dover road. Here it is.
Speaker 0 00:15:58 <inaudible> see you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at doctors awake and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctors, wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting 20, 21 weekly personal growth tips and lots more be well.
