There is a great article that came out in a Sydney newspaper yesterday about Missy Higgins and her forthcoming album “The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle”. 

In this piece Missy opens up about her existential crises over the past few years, and the process of rediscovering her faith in music.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/out-of-the-dark-20120521-1yztw.html

MIssy is amazingly honest about her first trip to India for our wedding, and how her encounters with Amma provoked a deep identity crises and a lot of emotional turmoil.

I wanted to use this article as a springboard to briefly discuss something many experience: the deep agony of self-reflection and spiritual/psychological enquiry.

There is an amazing term that some of you may have heard bandied about in various spiritual circles: “The Work”. I have heard it used to describe the process of engaging with yogic paths, various occult sciences, psychoanalysis and work with psychedelics.

“Doing the Work” is an intriguing and exciting concept, my upcoming album is called “Ayahuasca: Welcome to the Work”. But of course one has to ask - what is this work? Are all these variations of “The Work” different? Or is there a common goal?

My understanding of “The Work” comes from the ancient philosophical tradition of “Alchemy”. In its most base and literal sense, alchemy is thought of as the science of transmutating one material into another; often base metals into noble metals of gold or silver. However, as with most spiritual teachings, the true essence of alchemy is not to be found in an exoteric or literal understanding, but with a poetic, esoteric understanding. In fact the true transmutation aimed for is to be measured in the internal world, the transformation of the “darkness” of our soul, into “gold” or “light”. Basically, this means taking the feelings and ideas that terrify us, that haunt us, that torture us, bringing them into focus with our awareness and concentration, and allowing them to become a powerful part of our psyche, rather than an enemy. 

We live our lives with buried fears, with a psychological “shadow”, as Carl Jung called it, that bears the burden of all that we could never allow ourselves to live out. “The Work” means coming to understand this shadow. As we come to know our fears and darkness more intimately, which is not an easy process, we stop running from it. At this point we can begin building a life based on real choices, embracing the true creativity inherent in leading a human life. In this way, we have transmuted a base element into a higher element, metal into gold.

What Missy describes in this article is the process of beginning to confront her psychological shadow, the young woman who didnt want to play music, and who didnt know who she was behind the facade of the confident pop musician. This can be a highly disturbing time in our lives, and requires engagement with nightmarish worlds inside. But as she describes later in the article, the levity that comes after this process has a beauty and simplicity to it that we cannot possibly comprehend without having first travelled through the darkness.

Missy’s journey involved visiting Sakthi Narayani Amma, and traveling to the Amazon. My own path has been equally colorful, including work with the jungle medicine Ayahuasca. However, these are all simply tools for beginning the process of engagement with “The Work”. It continues in our everyday lives, as we examine the way we interact with ourselves, our loved ones, our communities and our ecosystem. It is “The Work” of being honest with ourselves about the part we have played in the story up until this point, and the part we wish to play for the next chapter.

Love

Ben

Daniel Pinchbeck speaking at “The Ayahuasca Monologues”

small gathering at Mario C’s last weekend in memory of Yauch

Adam Yauch’s passing this week had me reflecting a lot about the impact he had on my life. He was the first person I met in the music industry who was, in a sense, “out of the closet” regarding his interest in spirituality. These days, its quite common to meet musicians who meditate or are in the program or have a spiritual practice of some kind. But in the early 90s, this was quite rare. As my own spiritual interests have become such a dominant theme in my life over the last 10 years, I now realize how much it helped to see someone else who was attempting to walk that path.

The connection between creativity and spirituality seem clear to me now. Every spiritual text seems to begin with a creative act. Whether its “the word” in the old testament, or the merging of Shiva and Shakti in the Vedas, all spiritual literature seems to be telling us off the bat that this very existence is in fact a creative one. This idea is reinforced throughout the ancient spiritual myths of all cultures, as “God” (or whatever they perceive that to be) performs miracle after miracle. And what are miracles other than acts of creative genius that lie outside the realm of possibility until they are witnessed? “Miracles” are events that redefine our sense of what is possible in the world. An act of creative genius does the same thing. Think of what we knew the guitar to be capable of once we saw Jimmy Hendrix play it. Or how our conception of what acting could be changed after Marlon Brando. Miracles are creativity in their purest, most undeniable form.

Quantum physics has taught us that we are all artists, actively creating the world around us simply by looking at it. Just as we find an electron where we look for it at a quantum level, we create our world through the perspective from which we view it. This simple but mind-blowing truth has led to many theories on “manifesting” and various systems of “creating the perfect life”.

So why don’t they work? 

The fact of the matter is that although, on paper, we should be able to create our world in any manner we like, we are incredibly bogged down in unconscious fears and belief systems that dictate the options we see available to us. Social conditioning, family pressures, religious mind sets, political dogma, sexual conditioning, all of this factors into the way we believe the world to be. And therefor the world we encounter. Life becomes more problem solving than creative. We have limited options, and are open to these being combined in a few various combinations of outcomes. But real, radical changes remains elusive. This is very depressing.

All spiritual paths, in their essence, ask us to admit, if only for a moment, that we might not know all the possible outcomes. We are asked to humble ourselves to something bigger. Anything bigger. Nature. Intuition. Art. Beauty. God. Whatever you want to call it. We are asked to admit there might be more options than we can conceive of from our limited perspective. Ideas that might be outside our realm of comprehension, that we might not be able to envision.

It might sound small. But the simple act of a moment of humility can have massive repercussions on our life. One moment of admitting we might not know best, that we are not in control, invites forces of intuitive intelligence into our being. Intuitive intelligence is the real source of creative genius. Of miracles. It makes unexpected choices, compete 180 degree turns. Choices that seem radical and possibly terrifying. When we look at the lives of artists we admire, people like Adam Yauch, they seem to make big changes at points of their lives. They might make a series of choices that seem irrational and crazy to outsiders, as their life moves in a new direction at an unexpected time. They are listening to the intuitive “knocking on the door” that asks them to perceive an an entirely new set of options or outcomes for their life.

This is the job of the artist. To make friends with a widening set of possibilities. To stop resisting change. To embrace radical inner progress. And we are all artists. That is the message of spirituality. We are all here to create. But to do that, we have to start getting good at humility and flexibility.

In this moment, lets collectively open up to something bigger. Anything. We don’t have to understand it. We dont even have to believe in it. The tiniest flicker of possibility is enough. And lets be grateful for people like Adam Yauch who have walked this path already. Knowing that others, like us, have been through it, can give us a courage we wouldnt otherwise be able to access.

Love

Ben

Coldplay pays tribute to Yauch

For Adam…

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: that is NOT me in the Digiorno Pizza commercial