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Stephen Pickering

Category: Philosophy

  • The Secret of Songwriting and Art in General

    Groovin'

    If you’re looking for a how-to article, you’ll be disappointed. No, I don’t have a 10 point list, a “paint by numbers” step by step process to writing a hit song.

    Since Christmas, a lot of song ideas have been coming to my head very spontaneously. OK, I’ll take back that first sentence with one little tidbit you can put to work right away

    • When a song idea comes to your head, usually in the form of an opening riff and first line, finish the song in one sitting. Give birth to that baby, no matter how bad you think the lyrics are. Finish a first draft. You’ll find it takes less than 30 minutes.

    What has happened to me in the past is that an attractive melody and first line or first verse will come to me out of nowhere, and it feels right, but then I’ll bring my “editorial” complex in and nothing I write after feels right. So I’ll stop it there. Record a few moments of the idea, with the thought I’ll come back to it later. Well, guess what? You’ll never come back to it. I literally have a 100 iomega zip drives full of these ideas, that I never have gone back to. Complete the song, right then and there. And what is more, don’t let your editorial complex in. Just write whatever comes to your head until you have a complete song. What happens then? You have a something that takes on a life of its own and doesn’t disappear in your drawer forever. You have material. And then the more you play and sing it, the more you’ll spontaneously edit it with subconscious sounds in your head that have lyrics buried in them just crying to get out. Getting that first draft down, complete, gives them that chance to breathe again.

    But really the point of this article is something more esoteric. Lately I have been doing the above and it has helped immensely. But I noticed that when an idea came, I wanted to finish it quickly and then start recording. It was fun at first, but then stress entered the picture. I asked myself, “What’s causing this?”

    Then I had a spontaneous thought that I tweeted: “The test of a good song is not whether anyone likes it, but, rather, whether you enjoy playing and singing it.”

    With the rush to record, I had gotten myself into this mode of trying to impress an audience. I don’t feel that’s the right attitude. Now I’m starting to have the feeling that, yes, I should finish the song immediately like I mentioned above, but before I start recording let’s play the song for a while, let it build some character, let it breath and start taking on a second life of its own. Then ask yourself, “Do I enjoy playing and singing this song?” The simple answer to that question is whether I’ll start taking the recording of it seriously. If I don’t enjoy it, well at least the process is taking me to a place where something I do enjoy will more likely spontaneously spring to life. It puts the intent into your subconscious mind. If I do enjoy it, playing and singing, then I’ve got something that’s worth the effort of putting down and releasing.

    I would apply this philosophy to art in general. Do you enjoy the process? That’s the key. Not the end result. It’s very much in the sense of the Bhagavad Gita: You attach yourself to the process and be unattached to the result. In other words you don’t stress about the result. You don’t stress about anything. You immerse yourself and enjoy the process. You live in the process. The irony is, of course, your end result will not only be better, but more an authentic representation of the archetypal spontaneity that drives your fulfillment to begin with.

    • So, make it interesting to yourself first, the process that is, and then it will more likely be interesting to others.
    • Here’s another way to put it, “Don’t be concerned about making something like other people are making. Be concerned about expressing what is bubbling up from your own subconscious.”

    What do you think?

  • In Defense of Rand Paul

    “He who is forced against his will, is of the same opinion still.” – Deepak Chopra

    I’m sure you know the back story: Last week, Rand Paul, son of Congressman Ron Paul (R) Texas, won the Republican nomination for Senate in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The day after his victory, his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway, announced on “Hardball” that one of the reasons voters should consider him “out there” or “extreme”, I can’t remember Chris Matthews’ exact words, but you know the typical descriptions of Libertarians: “Wacky, Looney, Tea-baggers, etc.” designed not to intelligently debate them, but to label them in order not to have to have the debate itself.  Conway stated, for one reason, is that Paul wanted to repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act, implying in its entirety. You can imagine all the hairs on the back of Matthews’ standing up. Later that night, on the “Rachel Maddow Show” is when the real firestorm or controversy began. Paul was on the show being interviewed and pressed on this exact question. He explained that his position was that 9 of the 10 sections of the law he agreed with, but the aspect that delt with private businesses, he was against. The red boiled to Maddow’s face.

    “Are you saying that businesses should be allowed to not serve black people if they so chose?”

    Mr. Paul tried to explain his position in a philosophical context, demonstrating for instance the idea that if we think of private businesses as “public” spaces that the proprietor of said establishment would not have the right to ban guns.

    Ms. Maddow would have none of it. She was out for blood.

    “Just answer the question, yes or no.”

    Mr. Paul was flustered. He knew that by giving a simple answer of “Yes” that a piece of video tape a few seconds long would be produced in order to smear him and possibly destroy his campaign completely. Why? Because answering that question “Yes” without explaining the philosophical context for your reasoning would automatically label him as a racist. Loaded sound bites like these, whether text or video, are like reflexes in the brain. They automatically fire. They are like branding a cattle. They stick for life.

    Blood Ms. Maddow did draw. She definitely left him mumbling and stumbling. To say he didn’t handle it well is an understatement, but by know means a death blow, because he did emphasize his reasoning, that he was definitely not a racist, nor would support such a business personally. While she won the debate and definitely drew blood, he definitely didn’t come off as the typical politician, seeming like a puppet. He definitely came off, if stumbling on PR Grades, as someone who was authentic and thoughtful. I don’t think anyone watching it, even an African American, would truly think Paul is a racist, though it was clear it was Ms Maddow’s intent to brand him this way.

    I would like to argue that Mr. Paul is right and that Ms. Maddow and her ilke are wrong with two main points.

    1. That the point is moot.

    While Mr. Paul did say he “philosophically” disagreed with the commerce section of the Civil Right’s Act, he did say he clearly had no intention of repealing and that was not part of his platform. His thoughts and point of view were simply to display his overall philosophy. Opponents argue that it is impossible to separate his position on this topic as a demonstration of his philosophy from the danger that he would actually repeal the law, assuming he had such power, and bring back segregation to the country. But this is simply not true. For one, no one could ever have the power to over turn the Civil Rights Act. It would entail overturning the whole law, which no one is for, or could ever have the political will to do so. Overhauling such a law would be a mammoth undertaking: the commerce clause has already been decided in the courts, and no one want to change it because the facts of America today are that no one’s interested in going back to the way it was. We don’t want discrimination based on race even in private business, and the facts of America today is that by and large we don’t have that. Now whether that fact is because of the law itself, or that time and the country have simply moved past it naturally might be up to debate. But no one’s really interested in it. We’ve arrived at the place we wanted. Does it matter now whether it was by boat, train, or plane? No matter how you slice, dice, or cut it, the point of the specific law is history and moot. Mr. Paul clearly demonstrated that he and any reasonable person understood it to be that way. Ms. Maddow, if anything, demonstrated she did not. And I would argue that anyone who thought the point of the specific legislation itself wasn’t moot at this point in time would be the one who is “looney” or “extreme.”

    2.  One can use a moot point to make a broader philosophical argument

    Just because a specific action in the past today is moot, doesn’t mean the action itself can’t be used to make a broader philosophical point, and that philosophical point of view from Mr. Paul’s perspective is this: Freedom is the highest value in our country. Why? Well, I won’t pretend to get in the founder’s head or hearts, but if I were guessing I would say this: In psychology there is the tenant that every brain has a light and dark or “shadow” side. But in order to quell or not let the “dark” side display itself in public, one must somehow find a way, not to exorcise the dark side (that only makes it grow) but somehow ritualistically acknowledge and honor the “shadow” in a private way. It is found that if the shadow side of our nature is honored in a private way, it will tend not to display itself in a public way. For the subconscious knows no difference in “private” or “public” and it’s energy is released with any kind of sincere acknowledgement. Freedom is chosen as the highest value of society for precisely this same reason: a population that is forced in behaving in a way that is deemed socially acceptable, (instead of “choosing” to behave in that way), is a population whose dark side, shadow, and resentment grows, along with its corruption. Instead, a population that has private freedom, has a sacred space in order to deal effectively with their shadow energies, and in turn gives birth to more energy for good in the public arena. A society that chooses to do good, instead of being forced to do good, is the kind of transcendent society that the founders, I believe, had set as a goal, and freedom is its sole and primary driving force. The Founders in their day had seen bad and mediocre societies come and go, but they wanted to build the platform which would foster not just good, but a great society, and the solution they found was a very illuminated one, and as all such solutions are, a very ironic and paradoxical one: the secret to harnessing the greatest amount and best energies of an individual in the service of his society, was not to control him, but instead to free him.

    Related Outside of this Blog:

    New York Sun – “Rand Paul & the Constitution” May 21, 2010

  • How to Write a Poem
    I’ve been thinking and working on blogging, the techy geeky stuff, which interests me to a point, but finally the headache begins. And the over saturation. Then I move back to what I really love which is creativity. Blogging and the techno stuff is just the new medium, the new publishing as it were, and with all its advantages, one wonders why it can be so difficult at times. Why can’t one say, I want to put this here, and that there, and have this line up over here on one’s web site without this insane lingo known as programming? It’s the revenge of the nerds on us all. No, actually, it’s a bit of the pleasure of finding things out. It does feel good when you finally figure it out. You feel a little self important. Maybe that’s what its about, feeling important. At any rate Squarespace seems to be advertising what someone like me is wanting. So maybe I’ll move in that direction. It’s just that still, all the squarespace sites I’ve see, seem to look the same. Oh well, who knows. As Loren Feldman says, “It doesn’t madda. ”Wait, wasn't this about how to write a poem? Oh yes, a poem. I get on and off streaks of writing poems like I do getting into tech, but you can guess which is more fun and more gratifying. Hands down a poem, or anything creative. A poem is not something you sit down and intend to write. It's an adventure. A line pops up out of no where, when your totally doing something else, or not doing anything at all, and what it does is not describe how you feel, because like Paddy McAloon wrote, "Words are trains for moving past what really has no name," but rather the sounds of the words, the arrangement, how they're put together, their "music" as it were, express how you feel at that particular moment in a way that is transcendent of that moment. It's an expression of eternity in the field of time. Blake said, "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." The soul is like energy. It's eternal and of the moment at the same time, but you can't see it or feel it or touch it. "Oh," you say, "but I've been shocked before!" Yes, but that shock wasn't energy hurting you. It was the atoms energy was moving that hurt you. Energy has never been seen, heard, felt, touched,  or tasted. It's like the invisible man who can only be sensed by throwing a blanket over him. Energy is to an ocean wave as the soul is to art. Art is the expression, the outline in matter, of that which felt outwardly, only inwardly. Dance is a metaphor for effortless movement. Singing is a metaphor for the exuberance of being. Painting is a metaphor for the picture of the soul and for capturing in time, that which is timeless. Music is a metaphor for adventure as represented by the melody, and the magical helpers who appear from no where as represented by the harmony. Sculpting is a metaphor for finding the secret treasure that's inside by working with the "hands" those magical coming from no where helpers again. Fiction is a metaphor for existing simultaneously in two worlds and "dancing" and "singing" between them. Drama is a metaphor for knowing, not that everything is connected, but that everything is the same thing when outside, "bigger" forces, pull the hero or heroine out of there everyday existence, and also a metaphor for the Self behind the self, both participating and observing, there and not there at the same time. Poetry is a metaphor for spontaneity and quantum leaps, where something is nothing and nothing is something. "For poems say nothing," said Auden. But that nothing is precisely the treasure chest buried in your own back yard, which again is a metaphor for the dark parts of the psyche, that we ignore, disregard, or tell to sit down and shut up if they make too big of a rouse. Anger comes from attachment, taking sides with a system over a soul. Art is a metaphor, not for "living" as we so often hear spoken, but for the knowingness that eternity is right here right now, that this IS it, that you ARE it, right here right now, and that no only does magic exist but that it is the only thing that exists. So, here's how you write a poem:
    1. You must have something to write on every second of every day for the rest of your life, which is forever. The thing about the adventure is that it never ends.
    2. A small pocket notebook will work just fine, but I've found the iPhone very useful because if you are at a social gathering and a poem seizes you, you look weird writing in a notebook. They don't notice you typing in your iPhone. They think you're emailing or texting. So it makes you look cool too.
    3. Write down every line that comes to you that sounds good, that feels good, that feels like its spontaneous, coming from some other place than your mind, that you're not writing it, but its writing you.
    4. If you're lucky these lines will come most often just one at a time and not interfere with your life, and then when you've got enough of them, you can gather them together into one poem.
    5. If three different lines come to you on three different days, don't worry about whether they "match" or sound right together, you can put them together in the same poem or not. "It doesn't madda." Look at it this way. either your three lines into a poem, or you got three different poems going on. Either way you win. But in all seriousness, you can decide later and I mean much later on things like this. There will be drafts and more drafts before the editorial process comes in. So you can save those kinds of decisions for the editorial process.
    6. On a really bad night, the lines won't quit coming and you have to leave the bar or party early. You have to chase down every spontaneous line like a fly ball. If they keep coming you keep running, no matter WHERE it leads you.
    7. And that's a KEY point: You cannot editorialize or make judgement on ANY spontaneous line that comes to you out of the blue. No matter what it is you write it down. You are not a writer. You are a secretary. And if the lines keep coming, you keep following them, like a doe that catches your eye in a forest that you follow without thinking about if you're going to make it back.
    8. You'll know when the rough draft of a poem is complete when a really beautiful, perfect ending comes walking in, like the girl of your dreams sitting down next to you, when you thought the night was over.
    9. If you write that draft into a any kind of word document to save on your hard drive, you'll never see the poem again, or think of it again, and your subconscious mind will get angry, go away, and you'll probably never write poems again, which is too bad, because they are lovely entertainment, but at least you'll have a life again.
    10. Publish the finished first draft on your blog. You'll be so embarrassed that you'll work on drafts all night and day, until it at least doesn't embarrass you anymore. Then you'll forget her for a while, but you'll meet up again someday in Casablanca, and she'll never stop loving you.
    11. 5 years later when you do meet up either she'll be married with children which won't be bad, because in some ways those children will have been influenced by you, or you'll fall in love again, and this time you'll take the ball all the way to the hole or end zone
    12. The whole thing will be just perfect for a while, and then you'll find yourself back in the Kingstown bar again. But that's okay, because that's where it all began. And it gets more beautiful with every draft.
    13. Oh, I should have put this first. My writing juices get flowing when I read. Get one of the volumes of The Best American Poetry Series and start there. Just read it for enjoyment without intending to write a poem. When I read those volumes, or poems out of the journals like the Paris Review, I find myself almost jumping to the computer to write. It's almost an unstoppable force. I WANT TO. It's FUN.
    14. Don't read or write poems for meaning. Read and write them for fun. Don't worry whether you understand them (whether yours or others') Art that you can understand isn't art. Worry about whether your having fun doing it. If you don't, find out what you have fun doing. Follow that. It'll lead you to the same dance. "Many roads, one destination."

  • The Health Care Reform Act of 2009

    Article 1

    1. The Health Insurance Industries’ exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 is hereby revoked.
    2. All citizens of the United States shall not be barred from purchasing Health Insurance from any company or individual, foreign or domestic.
    3. All policies may be written in any manner, for any amount, with any provisions the contractor chooses and the contractee accepts.
    4. Congress shall make no laws regulating the contracts or any of its provisions for Health Insurance legally signed between the contractor and contractee.
    5. Congress shall pass no laws forcing any United States Citizen to purchase Health Insurance.

    The End.

    This meeting is hereby adjourned.

  • Shamans and Medicine Men


    Whenever I’m reading a book or watching a video there may be one snippet that really turns the light bulb in my head, or should I say my heart, on. I want to start writing these down so I can have a repository of them to look back on. Two of my inspirations are Deepak Chopra and Joseph Campbell. I saw a video today that Deepak’s son, Gotham Chopra, produced. In one segment he was talking to his father, and Deepak said one of those snippets that caught me like that. The quote comes at the 2:38 mark in the video above.

    And so, what Medicine Men have done throughout ages, is actually triggered the body’s response to what it normally wants to do.

    I think the reason this struck such a chord in me, in my deep inner self, is that it seems to be saying something that my deep, inner voice has been whispering to me for many years: That the answer is not so much in what to do next, as in what not to do next. In other words the concept of “Being.” There’s a will in nature that is antecedent of our mind, that will take us exactly to where we need to be, if we only would get out of its way. This reminds me also of a quote from Joseph Campbell:

    that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are (will be) living. (link to full quote)

    This reminds me of the thought that wisdom comes from nature, up through the body to our consciousness, not the other way around, down from consciousness to be imposed upon nature. Or the idea from the German Romantic philosophers (Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) that the brain doesn’t produce consciousness, but rather consciousness produces the brain, and all other “objects.”  It also reminds me of a Timothy Leary quote: that the LSD experience was like driving consciousness down to the cellular level and putting it in touch with what the cells were communicating. Most of the time the mind is only indulged in (or deluged by) stimuli from the outside, macro world (Blake’s “Nobodaddy”), whose messages are blocking out the voice of your soul, which is a spontaneous, instantaneous awareness of your calling or purpose. In a sense, the only thing that you have to do in life, to make if work for you, is to Be True to Your Calling. When you can relax and be in silence, ask yourself calmly, “What is my purpose? Why am I here?” And then wait for your soul’s answer. Not the answer that’s been planted in your head by other people or by society. In the above statement by Campbell, “Your bliss” is equivalent to Your Soul’s True Calling.

  • The Sun Like The Moon

    Enough fog this morning to look directly at it. 93 million miles away and it’s as large in the sky as the Moon at a quarter million miles. A million Earths would fit in it. Every atom in our bodies was made in the very center of such a star. Amazing how literally acurate the myths are when the say we are it’s children. Who will be our Sun’s children? What will they do, who will they be, how will they feel? If digital is eternal will one of them happen to read this? I wonder if he’ll wonder how I felt just at this moment. Or is that moment and that one, and all the same?

    My message? I think about you.

    Sent from my iPhone

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