Today's Paradigm and The Working Musician - Part II

This is the second part of a twelve part mission. Cacophony. Have you ever had the occasion to be standing outside the door of a junior high school band room? All the little ones have their new instruments that their parents want them to learn to play. And none have a clue what is going one. The sound is: cacophony. God bless the school music teacher. We need more teachers who can do this job. So why are we talking about a discourse of sound? I will get to that. Right now let me congratulate you for still being here. Remember in high school physics you saw how the eyeball worked? Or you may have seen it in biology. But anyway, remember the photo of a tree on one side of the poster and an eyeball on the other side. The poster shows how the image of the tree enters the eye and is actually projected upside down on the back side of the eye. The brain does its marvelous thing and inverts the tree back to normal. You never know that this process is being done, it is just one of the things our brains do. Well in the same way all information that comes to you, whether from conversation, television, paintings, and music has to filter through the same brain path. And this brain path is filled with emotions, feelings, thoughts, fears, and beliefs. All of those things influence the outcome of what you perceive. It is a powerful thing. Let me explain. We all know about the physical laws of the universe. Gravity is gravity whether you understand it or not. You can not deny gravity. And it has no emotion at all. It fulfills the law it defines without taking into consideration good or bad. If you jump off of an object that is three hundred feet high you will fall at a certain rate, another physical law, and you will impact the earth at a determined force. It does not matter one iota if you believe that to be true or not. Well there is another kind of immutable law and that law is a mental law. Mental laws are in effect all of the time just like physical laws. If you are unhappy or if you are not accomplishing what you would like to accomplish you are tampering with the mental laws. They have a more subtle appearance than physical laws. But they are there none the less. The first law is the Law of Control. Basically this law says you feel good about yourself to the degree you feel you have control over your life. When you are whacked out it is from a feeling of loss of control. If you have ever been in a job that you believe you can not quit and you have a jerk of a boss, then you have some anxiety building up because you feel you life is controlled by your job and your boss. That is a bad feeling and almost everyone is in someway dealing with some issue. The thing is that the force that is bugging you can be external or internal. The only way to alleviate the anxiety is to take control of your mind. Self mastery is the only viable exercise to harmony and happiness. You have heard it since Kung Fu was a television show. No one can cause you distress unless you allow it. You really always have but two choices: take action and change the situation, or simply walk away. Because of this law you have to know exactly what you want. If you know exactly what you want your focus becomes very pointed. The question is this: Am I holding myself back with a feeling of helplessness or am I taking daily action to obtain what I really want? Truthful self examination is required. The second law is the Iron Law of the Universe. This law is more commonly known as the law of cause and effect. Here it is in a nutshell, and I will tell you beforehand that it is so simple that most people miss this entirely. Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects. Your thoughts are the cause of your condition. And everything you are is the result of a thought by you or someone else. You are what you think. If you do not want to be where you are at this moment then you have to start by changing the way you think. What is really great about this law is that by believing it, really believing it, you take control of all other aspects of your life. The Law of Cause and Effect applied correctly will bring you in harmony with the Law of Control. Every aspect of your music and your music career, success or failure, can be explained by this basic law. Simple as that. The third law is the Law of Belief. Whatever you believe, with emotion or intensity will shape your reality. Your beliefs are a filter always editing out what does not conform. It is this way. You do not necessarily believe what you see, but you see what you believe. If you are to be a professional musician, you must believe with everything that is in you that you will succeed. You must have a belief that no matter what happens you will keep going forward. Always working toward you goal. Never, ever even consider quitting. And keep moving forward. You have to develop a belief that is separate from the paradigm of “being in the right place at the right time.” That paradigm is placing your entire career in the realm of luck. You might as well try and win the lottery. Get the luckitis out of your life. You make your own luck by doing the right thing over and over and over. Believe and the belief will influence your actions. The cycle of beliefs works like this. The more I really, intensely believe, the more my actions are geared toward that belief. These actions in return result in positive growth in my profession which in turn enhances my belief which will in turn cause my actions to take on a more focused effect which effects my beliefs again, over and over and over. In the same way negative thinking does the exact same thing. It is a law of the universe. The opposite is negative thinking, bringing about setbacks, which bring about more negative thinking, which…..you get the idea. This is the key. I know you hear it all the time. I have seen the positive effects of this in my own life and I guarantee it works. You have to believe. The fourth law is the Law of Self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what you expect to get. This goes a little beyond the just believing aspect. What you really expect to happen will happen. Your mind does not know the difference between what is visualized and what is real. You do not get what you want, you get what you deep down really expect to get. Those that are going around saying “if it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have not luck at all,” are correct. The fifth law is the Law of Attraction. At the time I am writing this there is a book out about this that everyone is talking about as if this were something new. But this is a universal law and as old as the universe. Let’s take music as an example. Have you ever taken a pitch fork, say and A, and hit it on you knee and placed it on the face of your acoustic guitar. The vibration of the fork will cause the A string of the guitar to vibrate. In short any vibration will cause a like and sympathetic vibration in something of the same kind. You need to watch what you say. Words are powerful vibrations. You need to watch who you are hanging with. A negative person will cause you to be the same. The more emotion you attach to a thought will cause a strong attraction to bring that thought into fruition. That is what is making all of this happen, and at a great cost of energy. If you learn to harness your beliefs and have the discipline to bring your thoughts into harmony, then you will receive what you are expecting to receive. The sixth law is the Law of Correspondence. Emerson wrote, “What you are shouts at me so loudly, that I can’t hear a word you are saying.” What you are on the inside corresponds to what you show on the outside. To be the musician you want to be, become that person/musician/performer on the inside. This does not mean to sell out to the world paradigm of what a musician should be. However remember that the crowds and the fans have a need that you will be supplying. Part of that need is to see the musician on stage giving up his heart on a platter. That is what they really want. Most of the time the musician feels so inadequate, maybe not in his musical ability, but in his lack of personal growth that he mistakes what the crowd is really looking for. They want the honest truth as told in your music. They want your heart on a platter in complete, non-fearing trust. This is why musicians create an on stage persona. It is a self preservation technique. They are creating a character that they are throwing to the lions and hoping for the best. And if the crowd loves this persona, no matter if honest reflection of the music or not, then that feeds the persona which grows off stage. Finally, knowing the truth deep within, the poor musician feels somewhat raped. He finally has nothing more to offer. The road to self destruction is paved along these lines. The seventh law is the Law of the Mind. Thoughts are things. First you have thoughts and then they have you. You actions are determined by what you are thinking most of the time. We have already said you are what you think and you are what you believe. This is similar except more in the realm of everyday, every minute thinking. What you are thinking will guide your actions. Sometimes those actions are not necessarily positive towards personal growth or toward our music business. Guarding our thoughts moment by moment may not be easy, but you can eliminate negative thoughts. You can also eliminate any thought of fear or doubt. This is so necessary. Fear of rejection is the prime motivator behind action or lack of action on our part. If we are afraid of failure we will act accordingly. Remember our mind and subconscious wants to fulfill what we are thinking and believing. Fear is ever present. To counter act fear you have to be prepared. You have to know your instrument and know your limitations. Sometimes bands or individual musicians try a little too hard to impress and step over the bounds of their musical ability. I am not saying playing it safe is what you do all the time. However when you go for it, I mean really go for it, you should know if it is the proper time, the proper song, the proper audience. You simply can not go for it in every song. Those are the mental laws of the universe. You need to take each one and see how your thoughts, beliefs, and words are affecting your health, your relationships, your business, your life as a whole. Your whole band should do this. Each alone and then as a group if you feel you have the guts. To become a band is to let down all the B.S. that we put up for the whole world. The crowd wants to see heart felt, non fearing honesty. It starts with a band having the same desires and beliefs. It starts with a band that is programming their minds for success. As Always, Be Cool