Music box

xmas present to myself – “Band in a Box” (+ Realband) from PG Music. Type in the chords, choose a style from the list, and push the generate button.

I was well on top of the programme about ten years ago when it dealt with only multitrack midi. Today’s version deals with audio as well as midi and there is now a huge list of styles all of which can be edited. The Realband feature has styles with parts recorded by real session musicians.

It is now a highly sophisticated programme but it can still be used by plonkers, in a simple way, straight out of its magical music box.

I suspect that my next period of musical creativity is looming. There is the possibility of developing some of the themes that bothered my younger brain and made it into the two online albums.

The first batch of songs was in the 1960/70s and the second in the 1990s. From a grand total of 66   songs 12 were on the “Cure for the Blues” album and 10 were on “The never ending highway” album. So there are 44 still in the pipeline.

Also, between 1994 and 1998, I wrote 77 toonloon tunes which are on the internet as computer generated midi files in an archival format. Most of them arrived when I was non-egoic and there are a few words pointing to the source of inspiration of each tune. Paulina’s flute is helping to give the tunes a less robotic ambience.

The ICT stuff is capturing a lot of attention. The associated TFM tends to be dark and negative but I see it coming and this prevents it getting a strong foothold so - it fades away.

The computer has been tied up with the ICT stuff so I sat witnessing and making notes about some of the more interesting TFM that ‘came to mind’. But the notes are mostly illegible because of the lack of fine motor control. This limits their usefulness.

But there is no shortage of stuff coming regularly to mind. But ‘I’ don’t have to force ‘my’ ‘self’ to tune in at the moment. So I won’t. Other than to quote a bit of lyric from the Zambia days.

“You’ll find plenty question masters
making quagmires of their brain
The man said, ‘There is no answer’
They said, ‘you are insane’”

Doing doodles

Wikipedia carries an article about doodling and Sunni Brown gave a TED talk on the subject. The word has been around for some time and it’s meaning has changed. It is presently viewed as a good thing in that it puts the brain in a frame of mind for learning.

I am presently sitting on a pile of over 800, self-made, b/w, A4 doodles. I have thought about categories several times but have failed to get beyond the most elementary of systems. If they have a message I am not aware of it.

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Faces – single, groups, large and small, with happy and unhappy expressions

Bodies - single, groups, large and small – some in boxes

Landscapes – clouds, hills, trees

Abstract

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It takes about 30 minutes for a doodle to complete itself. The monkey mind settles for a snooze. Self-consciousness evaporates. There is no doer but naught is left undone. There are patterns and sometimes the presumption of an agent but they are in the unconscious where inputs and memories are churned to generate reactions and responses regarding feeding, fighting and fornication and other assorted basic needs.

I have five sizes of black pens. The first act is to use one of them to divide the page into sections. The first strokes determine which category the doodle will belong to. Thereafter new lines are added and large areas are filled with patterns.

Children have been keen to colour in pictures for a long time and there is presently a craze for it amongst grown ups. The stone age, cave paintings in Lascaux and elsewhere might be early examples of an ongoing, cultural habit. But what purpose do they serve?

We have an inbuilt capacity to notice faces which are made up of two circles for the eyes with a squiggle beneath which points up or down to express happy or sad.

In 1951 Niko Tinbergen published “The study of instinct” and in 1953 “Social behaviour in animals.” These Zoology classics popularised the notions of ‘supernormal sign stimulus’ and of ‘innate releasing mechanisms’. A famous example is the herring gull chick begging response. It looks like the chicks are responding gleefully to their parent’s arrival with food. But what they are actually responding to is a red spot on a yellow background as seen on a parent’s beak. Larger than life models of the pattern drive the chicks into a frenzy.

Objectively it is to be noticed that work gets done eg doodles get drawn and stories get told. This can happen either egoically or non-egoically.

In the egoic state the focus is with the monkey mind which drifts here and there into the past and future.

In the non egoic state the focus is with the task at hand in the present moment. The unconscious is active in shaping the thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) to react and respond to changes in the physical and cultural environments. An example in humans are the emoticons used in social media to trigger a wide range of emotions using a very small range of super-normal stimuli.

This story began with a vague intention to ‘explain’ the ‘purpose’ and ‘meaning’ of the doodles.  I failed. But this is not a serious problem because I value the process of doing doodles. Doodling is invariably non-egoic and thus out of time and space and therefore peaceful. I suppose that the unconscious is sorting itself out in the background. When doing doodles it is easy to be relaxed and lost into the Oneness of it all.


                                           

end of year letter 2016

Dear all

I continue to enjoy retirement from institutions. I realise how ‘work’ kept my mindbrain busy with the cultural agendas of many significant others. Now, due to practicing stillness, there is enough peace of mind to bear non-judgemental witness to the thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) that emerge from the unconscious. This can result in liberation from the parochial and xenophobic aspects of my natal and later cultures. This might be viewed as a first step towards intellectual enlightenment.

I am grateful to have a comfortable house and garden just a short walk away from a smallish supermarket that stocks foodstuffs from all corners of the planet. I am also a short walk away from a garage that does my car’s MoT and from a medical practice and pharmacy that tend to my body’s MoT.

A couple of weeks ago the world came knocking at my door. The fair trade bananas in the supermarket came from the Cameroon and so did the consultant psychiatrist who was checking me for dementia. I haven’t seen his report yet but the meeting seemed to go well (my GP sat in on it). He asked me to put myself on a scale from 1 to 10 for life satisfaction. I reckoned myself to be quite close to the ten.

I have not yet forsaken curriculum development and the production of one-pagers. The present focus is on evolutionary psychology and brain science and on the need to have them interact with new ideas from a range of associated disciplines.

When a cute idea turns up I write about it and publish it on my blog. There have been 518 blogposts so far this year and page views average 45 per day – so the blog has not gone viral but it draws viewers from a wide range of countries. Visitors rarely leave comments – why not?

The structure and function of the unconscious is a key topic. Most of the mindbrain workings are hidden from conscious awareness but by taking thought it is possible to enter a non-egoic state (flow, groove, zone etc) which exemplifies the zen saying ‘No self, no problem.’

I have been experimenting with the creativity of the unconscious; most notably while churning out these blogposts but also while doodling. (There are now over 800 doodles – A4 b/w.) I sit with paper and pens, and ‘stuff’ appears. ‘I’ vanish while the doodling progresses. In retrospect, it is a good feeling but when in flow, there is no ‘I’ to have feelings.

‘I’ also vanish while reading, writing, meditating, watching telly, shopping, cooking, eating, washing up and etc. This exemplifies the zen saying ‘present moment , wonderful moment’.

My self-appointed task and purpose in life is to gather some words about my unconscious from an insider’s subjective point of view. A background concern is to connect with like-minded people in amplifying the voices speaking about a new world order. This involves dropping the illusory supernatural and replacing it with an enhanced appreciation of the normal-natural and it’s place in the cosmic zoom.

My intellectual debts are many but key amongst them is the Big History Project, the written and spoken ideas of David Eagleman on brain science and, recently, Yuval Noah Harari’s best seller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”.

I now belong to a group of four musicians and we are making live arrangements of my songs although that project is on hold while we practice a set of tunes for the xmas carol singalong on the 18^th. I am also a member of the JP Collective of singer/songwriters which will be based in Portsoy come the new year. JP is Jim Paterson who is famous as the trombone player with Dexy’s Midnight Runners. He will have his studio on Aird Street.

My medication was increased a couple of months ago and my ability to play the guitar and bass has improved a bit. My singing voice remains useless as is my handwriting. As part of my new recording studio I bought a Zoom R16 multi purpose gadget which came with a copy of Cubase for sound engineering on the computer. Both present steep learning curves and I have not yet figured routes to the top but I am now easy about hanging around in base camp.

ICT has a way of getting under my skin. Recent problem areas included Windows 10, Cubase LE8, Microsoft Front Page, WordPress, getting FTP to work, and several programmes on my old laptop that cannot run on the new one. I foolishly expect stuff to happen without my having to read the manual.

Anxiety and panic sometimes threaten but ‘I’ see them forming and this prevents them from taking over. Attention can be focussed on meditation, reading, writing, housework, doodles. An alternative is to open the many menus associated with programmes that I use regularly and learn some new tricks.

I deliberately cut back on my social life for fear of it using my time and energy which is better used trying to figure the big picture. Changing my mind about my place in time and space.

Am I painting too rosy a picture? I don’t think so. I now have the habit of gratefulness – especially for spicy meals, robust poos, and for the warm electric blanket when I get into bed. Left to my own devices I am never bored. I can, however, get impatient when listening to other people prattling on about nothing in particular. So I go lonely as the rhinoceros.

My work life was varied but TFM about it rarely appears in upfront consciousness. The ‘New Internationalist’ magazine arrives once a month but I rarely do more than skim through it. Even so it tends to call up the arrogant and colonial ‘white man’s burden’ line of thinking ie convert everybody to the rapacious, greed is good, capitalist world view. (Note: Harari is hot on this topic.)

Present moment TFM. I could list the books I have read and the talks I have listened to this past year. But why? This year’s posts are listed chronology on the blog. And there is a search box in the right margin.

Several doodles have little people sitting on the shoulders of giants. I do not claim to have original thoughts. I aspire to facilitate learning by presenting exciting, cutting edge ideas in plain language.

Feeding unconscious processes

I flicked through my blogposts. There are 518 of them to date on the ‘changing minds’ blog and 507 on ‘existential soft rock’. This averages 73 per year or 1 every 5 days.

I do not remember writing most of them. It does not, therefore, seem proper to call them mine. They come from ‘my’ unconscious but ‘I’ am not in control of it. So who or what is in control? And to what end?

The contents of the unconscious have evolved. The mindbrain is in a state of constant churn as it searches for patterns and agents. A vast number of variations are produced for selection to work on; and these can be natural, under domestication, or cultural.

‘My’ mindbrain is not an independent agent. ‘I’ exist because of processes rooted in nurture, nature, and chance.

The nurturing process began when one of my Dad’s sperm fertilised one of my Mam’s eggs. That was in the Spring of 1948. The ongoing process involves a constantly churning set of thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) that guide my involvement with culture specific feeding, fighting and fornication.

Some of the nature rooted stuff (instincts, reflexes, intuitions, biases etc) goes back millions of years but I am presently interested in what was going on during the long phase of foraging that went before the recent development of settled agriculture.

BUT … I have been reading the fabulous Yuval Noah Harari (2015) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He is an academic historian to trade and recognises three revolutions – cognitive, beginning 70,000 years ago, agricultural, 12,000 years ago, and scientific since 500 years ago.

He has gathered an impressive amount of evidence in support of his storyline and is thorough in pointing to weak and contentious areas. I am inclined to trust his scholarship and so far find his speculations to be convincing.

SO – ‘my’ unconscious will be processing Harari’s thought trains intensely for the next few days and sporadically for as long as I keep breathing.