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Bob Marley sang it best, bringing into mass consciousness the concept of jammin’—the musicians’ favorite pastime. Jimi Hendrix was another legendary aficionado of the art of the jam, honing his chops by sitting in at night clubs after hours. And the jazz greats, it should go without saying… except at a jazz festival today you are more likely to see the players reading from charts. True improvisation, when predictable marketing comes into play, I guess gets too risky.

More than entertainment, jamming brings us into the heart of organic life itself, into the core creative force, into the perpetual motion of Flow.

Long committed to the practice of a balanced life, I once conceived of it as a kind of “lifestyle architecture.” But as one desired project gives way to another over time, a more appropriate model comes to the fore: improvisation. Being willing to tear down or leave behind one edifice to build another, or to ride out free of solid structures altogether.

In making live, spontaneous, original music with others, we ride the roller coaster of creation itself, with no time to think in our static ways. We must bring everything we have learned or suffered or desired in the past into that arrow of forward motion, too fast and immediate to know what’s coming next. Bringing the best of who we are to the shared container, we have nothing left to constrain the joy of living fully. We fly forward, not random but grounded in trust, guided by our muscle memory of what works to nurture beauty, harmony, coherence.

All that said, it’s naïve to think that good music results when “anything goes.” Music, like life, or any other art, requires experience and sensitivity to turn out better than a chaos, a shambles, a shapeless porridge. As a hand drummer I strive to find the appropriate balance in any given situation between a solid foundational beat, and more inventive variations.

How does all this apply to you, if you are not a musician?

Step outside of your established self, for a moment. Suspend your beliefs. Imagine a view with no room. Think Nature, raw and ready for what comes next.

Picture a universal avatar, who responds from the heart to notions of nationhood; juggles eternal truths for closer inspection; tries on hats of other identity. Taking the path that always opens, one foot forward.

When you dance, try moving from the belly. Do improv as a political practice: could it be any worse? We just might glimpse the possible beyond the impossible closing walls.

Nature, Culture and Spirit are all organic (which is to say living) in their essence. Not fixed, not static, not formulated and dissected and rigidly defined once and for all. But evolving, morphing, transforming, growing, changing… alive. Even that trinity of realms are not separate, but overlapping lenses of our whole reality. In a college course I took on music improvisation, the instructor gave us our first homework assignment: Listen to nature.

A spiritual culture is not dogmatic, restrictive, jealous or guarded. It favors adaptation, innovation, creativity, respect, harmony, expression, ecstasy, fun, sharing, beauty, communion, communication, cooperation, intuition, and freedom.

The anthropologist Mircea Eliade observed that traditional cultures conceived of time as a circle. Changes over time meant little more than repetitions of the “myth of eternal return.” Western thought broke that circle of tradition and laid time out on a linear railroad track bound for “the end of history.” If it appears that 2020 has brought us close to the end of that line, it’s probably by design.

Could we not update the time-honored circle, making use of our progressivist notions of evolution, without discarding the natural and human altogether?

How about the spiral as a vehicle of change? That figure would suit what works for music: where solo melodies and polyrhythms can lead the bass beat structure into pleasing avenues of expression, while still respecting the comfort of the common ground.

The circle formed in moving time is a spiral. Always the next moment brings a new resolution, yet unresolved for what comes after. We enter the realm of meta: as the Tibetan chant says, going beyond, beyond… even beyond beyond! (Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate).

We can use tradition to depart from. We can critique present and past politics to prime a springboard to something other. That leap requires letting go of fear. A good antidote to fear of the unknown is to acknowledge the madness and folly of continuing on the dreadful path of the known. That time to leap, unfortunate or not, is now.

The path of the wanderer, renegade, or spiritual warrior (all of whom, in their own ways, are dedicated to bringing genuine light into our world by making the darkness conscious) is far from an easy road to travel, and this path gets narrower and narrower… as there are so many traps, temptations, and distractions that can steer us away from what we are here to accomplish.”

—Bernhard Guenther

We born of the last century were programmed into that linear mindset of Western “civilization” that discarded the ancient cultures in favor of a “brave new world” of urban life and technology, a one-way ticket to… where?

Returning to my own life story, I have noticed rather a recurring pattern—a repeating cycle, in each successive phase of a nomadic life—of attraction, adaptation, assimilation, turning to alienation/disillusionment, detachment, disconnection, leading to a new discovery or decision. Coming to the end of each stage, I arrive at the gateway to change.

I like to think that along the way I progressed, in following an inner call to the wild and free, while seeking also a sustainable home close to nature. Neither stuck in a stagnant circle somewhere in a suburb, nor aimlessly adrift on a solo jam to nowhere… but rather like the eagle in the Rainbow song…

We circle around, we circle around, the boundaries of the Earth… the boundless universe.

I gather these leaves before you, not as an altar to my unique or common history, but to light a small fire for your own inspiration, to warm your hands as you contemplate the course of your life, and of our pressing predicament.

What are you called to play next, on this instrument of your life, to sound in our shared song?

—

Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. His books of genre-bending fiction and creative nonfiction explore the borders of nature and civilization, imagination and reality, choice and manifestation. Connect at NowickGray.com to read more. A regular contributor to The New Agora, Nowick also offers perspectives and resources on alternative culture and African drumming, and helps other writers as a freelance copyeditor at HyperEdits.com.

by Caitlin Johnstone

Do not let the news man train you how to see.

Do not let the pundit train you how to feel.

Do not let the teacher train you how to think.

Do not let the preacher train you how to love.

Do not let the banker train you how to value.

Do not let Hollywood train you how to be.

Don’t let them train you.

They were appointed by the powerful to teach you how to live
in a world that is small, too small for wild humans.

Too small for humans who haven’t been house trained,
groomed, spayed and neutered,
and taught parlor tricks
like how to ignore life’s intrinsic breathtaking majesty.

Too small for humans who perceive their own boundlessness,
their own vast unpredictable inner wildernesses,
their own beauty,
their own holiness,
their own worthiness,
their own innate equality
with those holding their leash.

So they train us.

They train us to believe the world fits neatly
into flat, finite conceptual boxes.

That life is predictable, that our nature is well-mapped.

That we live in a 2-D colorless cage
from which there can be no escape
and about which everything is known.

As though narrative could even touch this blazing cacophony,
let alone encapsulate it.

They are lying to you, my beloved.

They are lying each and every time they open their pixelated mouths.

This life is so much more than they will ever allow you to believe.

So very immense.

So very unexplored.

So very unpredictable.

So very juicy.

So very sexy.

So very, very, very beautiful.

The unknown unknowns dwarf the known unknowns,
and the known unknowns dwarf the knowns.

But they will never let you know this.

So don’t ask their permission.

Take off that leash, wild apeling.

Unblinker those eyes and unshackle those legs.

Those chains are not there to protect you from the world, my beloved.

They are there to protect your trainers

from you.

---

This post originally appeared at Caitlin Johnstone’s blog.

Coronavirus Journal, part 9 – by Nowick Gray

You can’t get away from the masks these days: mandated for health care or retail shopping, advertised on every webpage, fuel for endless online feuds. They just seem to encapsulate all the issues of the current COVID crisis into one compact image: the imposed protocols, the hiding of taboo narratives (natural cures, global agendas, bioweapons, vaccines), loss of personal identity and interaction, silencing of dissent… all on top of the debatable effectiveness and demonstrated unhealthiness of the masks themselves. The result: a population of former humans, divided into warring camps, over allegiance or rebellion around this symbolic flag-around-the-mouth.

Let’s dig a little deeper into three aspects of the mask phenomenon: (i): symbolic obfuscation, (ii) full-spectrum colonization, (iii) induced self-censorship.

i.                    Anger Management (PC Edition)

Take the Ku Klux Klan
as an example to judge:
their stance, black and white.

What about the WHO?
Are they not perpetrators
of mass unknown deaths?

Vaccine trials gone bad:
Africa, India, here;
bioweapon friends;

killing the normal;
suicides, untreated deaths;
suppressing cures.

None of these unknown
but tucked safely out of mind
behind masked silence.

ii.                 The Colonial Project

We of the earth are being colonized, as always, everywhere possible for the last ten thousand years.

I saw a seal sliding out of the water, onto the rocks. No, it was a person. Then, a scattered group of seven. Brown skins, long hair, singing voices. We two paddled in, came ashore, then dove and swam like human seals. It was a vision, of how life used to be.

Now remote, in gentle pockets of nature like this; or extinguished, eradicated by guns or disease, money or culture; killed off or voluntarily abandoned. No regimes left to change; just blessings of spontaneous revival. No movements, but moments, to be snatched from the jaws of time’s colonizers and savored like those ephemeral notes in the breeze, seal eyes popping to the surface. Bubbles in a cauldron of universal conquest.

For a while we thought we had it figured out. The right to vote would solve our problems, give the people back our self-determination long lost to the overlords. The Internet would allow us to find and share information and ideas about everything under the sun, so we’d all vibrate together in one big happy global brain. We would ascend out of the mire of ignorance, poverty and oppression and make a paradise on earth.

But democracy was a scam. A good idea, that got weaponized. Bought off at the top, propagandized at the bottom, policy choice reduced to a narrow band of “necessary evils.” With the aura of freedom, the illusion of choice, and the commercial manipulation of belief, that classical ideal modeled on the Greek city-state got pulled over our eyes like a sleep mask.

Plato saw it coming: the tyranny of the majority watching the flickering shadows on the cave wall and calling that truth. Challenge that perception and you will be outcast – back to the real world outside, which you were blessed (or cursed) to have glimpsed. No going back to Cave-TV now.

The arms race in the battlefield of belief was lost with the refinement of mass psychology under the tutelage of leaders in the field: in theory, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays; in practice, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels. The failsafe trigger was located in fear.

With concentrated wealth poured into mass advertising, education, public relations, corporate lobbying, grant foundations, think tanks, military research, clandestine special ops, and false flag events – all filtered and massaged by a handful of media conglomerates and tech giants – “free speech” is reduced to Twitter storms and arguments on Facebook.

Free thought is even hijacked by the above onslaught of mind control (not even to speak of more exotic technologies, from subliminal TV ads of the fifties, to new generation two-way AI nanotechnology scheduled to be injected into your DNA soon, if the self-appointed masters of the universe get their way). In such a world, an unhealthy majority of the virtual sheeple support mandatory masking for all. The aim from on high, as King Gates himself proclaims, is for everyone to get the vaccine, so the masking mandate serves the purpose of a large-sample dry run: a ‘live exercise,” as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo let slip.

Yet the masses follow their self-appointed leaders, because the culture and the society have programmed us from birth to obey authority. Mask thyself, free citizen. Do what the doctor and the teacher say. Do what the government says, to keep us all safe.

Deeper psychology (Freud) makes it a piece of cake when we naturally substitute authority for our parents. Training to worship God and his priesthood goes nearly as deep. And the archetypal psychologist Jung gives us insight into the heavy pull of tribalism, to stick together and to target outsiders – or dissenters – as the enemy, based again on that lynchpin, FEAR. Today there are few actual lions, tigers and bears left to fear, so we are left instead with their virtual replacements: False Evidence Appearing Real. And where conflicting evidence abounds, as in the COVID crisis, we default to the story we fear most.

What is the cure for this plague of the mind that has been visited upon us, we natural humans? Are we so buried under layers of history and indoctrination, engineered self-definition and designer identity, that we no longer even care about nurturing that flame of reality within us? Starved of live human-to-human connection, is that fire of love and fellow feeling that binds us in the human tribe reduced to a pilot light, a fading spark, a masking device that glows in the dark?

iii.               Unmask Manifesto

Your hand masks your mouth.
You ask yourself: is this me?
What is your answer?

Truth behind the mask:
We all want to stay alive.
Are we still human?

This is one timeline:
A mask wrapped around our face.
I won’t breathe that way.

---

This article first appeared in The New Agora (29 July 2020)

Image credits: feature – Wackystuff, Flickr; 1 – Piotr Marcinski, Dreamstime; 4 – AZ quotes; 5 – SarcasticConservative, Imgflip; 7 – Critical Thinking 101, Twitter

further reading:s

Coronavirus Journal | Quarantine Reading List

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Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. His books of genre-bending fiction and creative nonfiction explore the borders of nature and civilization, imagination and reality, choice and manifestation. Connect at NowickGray.com to read more. A frequent contributor to The New Agora, Nowick also offers perspectives and resources on alternative culture and African drumming, and helps other writers as a freelance copyeditor at HyperEdits.com.