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.

//////////

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

////////

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.

 

Plumbing the depths

When they first meet the ocean most people walk along the shore and rarely enter more than knee deep. Some people dive in and stay near the surface while others use goggles, snorkel and flippers to immerse themselves for longer. A few people use skuba gear and stay deep for even longer. A very favoured few sit awestruck in a submarine in the great deep where ‘reality’ is wildly weird and sulphurous.

The unconscious is unfathomable like the ocean. Most people do little more than dampen their mental toes. They fear the psychological equivalents of killer whales and man eating sharks. They are the simple minded salt of the earth people who know ‘the truth’ and cling tenaciously to it. They are easily persuaded to kill and die for king, country and creed.

The persuaders educate and brainwash the masses to ensure that they act as efficacious workers, consumers and cannon fodder. There are four main groups of persuaders:

Sacred persuaders: Elders and priests (local, national and transnational) who are informed, inspired and directed by what is believed to be an omnicompetent God who works in mysterious ways. (eg John Knox and Scottish Presbyterianism).

Profane persuaders: Employers and their advertisers and propagandists who manipulate the perceptions of workers and consumers in small to medium enterprises and in transnational corporations.(eg Frederick Taylor and factory line production methods)

Princely persuaders: People who believe in the divine right of kings (eg Donald Trump as businessman rather than politician)

Outlying persuaders: for cultural evolution to work there has to be variation upon which selection operates. Tenured academics usually support the status quo so it is up to freelance philosophers to generate alternatives. (eg Karl Marx, and the communist manifesto as a paradigm shift).

SO – back to the ocean metaphor.

Most of the persuaders and persuadees remain close to the shoreline. They acknowledge only their self-conscious and are unaware of what happens in the 99% of the mindbrain which is the unconscious.

About 2500 years ago there was a busy period for a few outlying persuaders. They were the mystics who used meditation to still their monkey mind. They paid heed to their thoughts, feelings and moods and realised that their mind had a mind of its own and that it was vast. Note that scientists and engineers were also changing their minds but they did not get much beyond the myths and magic of those times.

… then a miracle happened …

Today’s sub-mariners are paradigm shifting outliers. The emerging perceptions draw upon a blend of (a) neuroscience which illuminates ‘how’ the brain works, (b) evolutionary psychology which illuminates ‘why’ it evolved in the way that it did, and (c) meditation as in mindfulness based stress reduction.

The ocean is like the unconscious in that their depth and complexity is vastly greater than the shoreline pundits suggest. Those who go deep come across amazing things. “Those who speak do not know!”

How many of us will make the shift? – and when?

Still a workaholic

I am still a workaholic. Despite being several years into retirement I need to be doing something useful and important. After all, the devil finds work for idle hands!

It is therefore cute to note that the mindbrain is busiest when it is not focused on doing anything specific. This is understandable given the need to see ‘patterns’ and ‘agents’ active in the interaction between three sets of data

1. new data arriving from the sense organs,
2. older data held in short and long term memory, and
3. ancient data that is hard wired as instincts, intuitions and various forms of bias.

For millions of years my ancestors lived by foraging (hunting and gathering.) We made a success of it. Go forth and multiply. Forage, fight and fornicate. Make a few tools and enter the lengthy old stone age. Emigrate from Africa. Populate the planet. Exterminate the big game. Exterminate the non human hominids. Homo sapiens rules OK. Farm, fight, fornicate, philosophise and factory-ise

The move from foraging to farming meant that some people were released to engage in tasks other than food production. These included:

1. Pragmatists - shopkeepers, traders, potters, joiners, bankers etc
2. Politicians - princes, priests and their policemen
3. Poets and philosophers - creatives - including story tellers and entertainers

During my working life I was an educator. In the early days I taught science and biology to students. In the middle years I facilitated senior educator’s appreciation of leadership, management and administration. In the later years I focussed on plain language editing of policy documents so that ordinary people would have a better understanding of the issues.

Common to all three phases was the concept of changing minds – mine and those of other people. There has been a paradigm shift based on new thinking about the evidence from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and meditation.

This is a topic that fascinates me. I read books and journal articles, listen to talks by cutting edge thinkers, and keep in touch with their thinking on the social networks. Thus do I change my own mind; and I keep a blog to record my understanding and thus possibly encourage others to change their minds.

I am still a workaholic.

cosmic zoom

Wow 

biggest to smallest - our place in space

cosmic zoom

The self-learning rhinoceros

Everyone processes thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) which are promoted by nature, nurture and serendipity (NNS). Individuals are unique in fine detail but are like others from their particular cultures and subcultures.

Man is a social animal and individuals have evolved to worry about what group members think about them (gossip). This means that most individuals are easily made to change their minds in tune with cultural fads and fashions

Various words are used to label the process:- enculturation, brainwashing, indoctrination, training, education, and enlightenment. The process is supported by advertisements and propaganda.

In more sophisticated cultures there is also (a) facilitated self-learning and (b) the promotion of study skills in support of evidence based critical thinking. These days this involves taking account of social, evolutionary, cognitive, positive and behavioural psychology and their links to neuroscience.

Many of the above words carry a heavy emotional load. For cultures to survive they must address the psychological impacts of change. This includes (a) grappling with the implications of the illusory nature of the mind-made ‘self’ and, (b) planning beyond the elegant duplicity of stage managed heurism (ie facilitated self-learning ie enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves).

Although this is easier said than done it is do-able - especially when individuals belong to a group of like minded people - which may or may not include a specialist teacher eg an enlightened guru, a trained therapist or a wise granny.

Arguably our ancestors were accustomed to life in relatively small groups of foragers. But in recent times foraging gave way to settled agriculture and then to more sophisticated forms of cultural organisation ie city states, empires, nation states, and so to globalisation with wealth and power in the hands of transnational corporations.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that we have stone age brains struggling to survive in the internet age. There are the concepts of ME, US and THEM. There is one set of beautiful rules and regulations governing behaviour for ME and US and another belligerent set for US and THEM.

There are few absolutes and the boundaries between the categories have been and can be significantly reworked. On one side are suicide bombers, genocide, the holocaust, Hiroshima, the trenches in WW1 and consumption of commodities. On the other side is the United Nations, the trade union movement, social activists, art, music, and stamp collecting.

We now live as greedy and competitive individuals with boundaries close to a selfish ME. But this is not inevitable. We are also hard wired to be generous and cooperative amongst US but, in many people the gene has not been switched on so we demonise and slaughter THEM. But this is not inevitable. By paying attention to our TFM we can flick a variety of epigenetic switches and awaken culture patterns better suited to environmentally friendly post capitalism.

SO – how to make the changes? Change minds. Notice what you feel and let the feelings go.

AND - Let it begin with me; and with you (?)

Some form of Buddhism lite (please specify) might be preferable to the hard line approach as outlined in the Dhammapada (300 BC):

Turning your back on pleasure and pain,
as earlier with sorrow and joy,
attaining pure equanimity,
tranquillity,
wander alone
like a rhinoceros.

neoliberal non-sense

Thoughts inspired by George Monbiot in the Guardian

Neoliberalism (new freedom) is an economic theory based on the thoughts of Frederick Hayek.

The theory is that human nature is competitive but some people (entrepreneurs) are more creative and hard working than others.

In a free market cream rises to the top where the elite becomes obscenely rich and some of the wealth trickles down to the relatively impoverished masses. 

Neoliberal objectives include:

• ·         massive tax cuts for the rich
• ·         crushing of trade unions·          
• ·         reduction in public housing
• ·         deregulation
• ·         privatisation
• ·         outsourcing and competition in public services

·          

Some notable variations on the theme:

• ·         Washington consensus – the same agenda but for the third world poverty reduction strategies
• ·         The Third Way – half way between neoliberal (right wing) and social democrat (left wing)
• ·         Austerity - cut back on public spending

There is the concept of the undeserving poor. The masses are work-shy, wasteful and need to be kept in their place. The fact that the rich are rich is a sign that God approves of what they are doing. There is an invisible hand that ensures that market forces result in neoliberalism. There is no alternative.

So what is to be done?

• ·         Promote and increase neoliberal agendas – promote globalisation and transnational corporations.
• ·         Promote the more centrist social democrat agenda
• ·         Promote a socialist agenda with more power to the people. (subsidiarity)

·          

OR!!!

“Those who tell the stories run the world.

Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives.

The key task now is to tell a new story of what it is to be a human in the 21st century. It must be as appealing to some who have voted for Trump and Ukip as it is to the supporters of Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.

A few of us have been working on this, and can discern what may be the beginning of a story.

It’s too early to say much yet, but at its core is the recognition that – as modern psychology and neuroscience make abundantly clear – human beings, by comparison with any other animals, are both remarkably social and remarkably unselfish.

The atomisation and self-interested behaviour neoliberalism promotes run counter to much of what comprises human nature.

Hayek told us who we are, and he was wrong. Our first step is to reclaim our humanity.”

Yoh

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/neoliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_fb