Gracias a Skmknc y skviorhcp de FunkyMonks:
There is a level of understanding that comes with an ability to look inwards. Realisations come from the awareness of internal conflict and bringing unconscious thoughts into the conscious, which in turn awakens the mind and changes our perspective on life. John Frusciante is a man who actively explores this understanding. He states that there are some key aspects that maintain a healthy mind-state: meditating, reading, and writing.-----------
I spoke to John about these elements and how the inclusion of music can bring a whole host of benefits to our mental health and well being. I asked John firstly about writing thoughts down:
'It's been really good for me. I think it's being able to see the mind from an exterior position. It's another one of the issues that come up especially with people who have mental imbalances: that you're trapped in your mind; there's no escape. It's like being imprisoned. You're inside yourself, you're inside your body, your thoughts are inside your mind- you can't escape. Your thoughts aren't just moving along in some kind of cosmic orbit, they're determined by your surroundings and your conditioning. The realisation of the inability to escape from it, not being able to step out of your mind- the more you think about it, the more overwhelming it can become- especially when you're not happy with the thoughts that are in your mind, you're not happy with your surroundings, and you're not happy with the way people have treated you.
The thought that you can't escape from within yourself is really terrifying. To be able to examine your thoughts when you write them down is really illuminating because you can read them back to yourself 5 minutes later, and have a completely different reaction to it than you had when you were thinking the thought. It becomes much easier at that moment to look at what you've written and say: 'well that's true from one angle but I can also see it from this position.' Your emotions are directly tied to your thoughts and you had no ability to be able separate them. Then you read it a couple of days later and you're in a different mood, and by looking at it from this exterior position you're able to mentally put it in it's place in a clearer way. By the brain taking in those same thoughts but in a completely different emotional context, you're able to establish some sort of separation between your thoughts and your emotions; which if you don't ever write anything down and don't ever look at yourself from the outside, you're incapable of doing.
I've resolved so many issues of my childhood from writing- page after page, when I was all revved up about them. By writing about them and reading them back to myself, somehow in that process I accomplished a lot of the same things that could potentially be accomplished by going to a therapist every week for years. I found it within myself to forgive people that I'd always resented, I'd always felt like a victim because of, and through writing them down I was able to see the balance of it all, and to not blame that person for their own actions but to realise that the way they treat people is the result of the way people treated them. There's no more point in being resentful of another person for something they've done then there is of being resentful of life itself- which to me doesn't really make any sense. The brain that's making that statement 'I resent life itself' is only here by virtue of that brain, so who's the 'I' talking? The 'I' talking is nature itself. If you're attaching importance to the opinion that life is f****d, you're automatically giving credence to life because life is the thing that's talking and saying what you think. Something's built into our characters, we all think a lot of what we ourselves think! Each person thinks their opinions are very true and valid. It's a built-in thing of our character. But I think to do that with your thoughts is really important [to write them down]. It's really bad to get lost inside yourself.'
I spoke to John about being trapped in a distorted headspace with thoughts spinning around…
'It's a really interesting tendency on the part of people- is that they like being twisted. There's a part of you that becomes comfortable there and you don't wanna be released. I get like that when I'm in a bad mood about something and somebody tries to cheer me up, but I don't want them to cheer me up. It's like I'm happier being miserable than I am being happy. There are certain situations where somebody who would rather stay in their misery might be superior in their relationship to life than somebody who's constantly trying to maintain a position of happiness- in that, there could potentially be a kind of emptiness. Sometimes people who go through life sad are some of the deepest people.
I can't imagine it [writing] not being good for anybody. I used to be superstitious about writing down my thoughts, I only would write down poetry. When I started writing down ordinary thoughts, I couldn't believe what a difference it made. Sometimes you might write the same thing all the time 'I'm so sad, I'm so miserable…' I've written those same entries in my notebook so many times- the same exact words. There's a feeling of getting it out. There are times when just the act of writing it itself ends up bringing you to a new perspective. Sometimes it's not even reading it back; as you're writing it the train of thought is different as it's more moderated. When you're thinking things, your thoughts have the ability to go at this incredibly fast pace, much faster than we speak or can write, so sometimes the process of writing is also a process of slowing down the thought stream to where you're thinking at a slower pace. 'You come to conclusions by thinking slower that you could never come to when you're thinking faster.'
I talked to John about how music influences on one’s mind state:
‘Everything that happens has a big influence on the state of mind. Our senses are constantly being bombarded with all kinds of things that are making a constant change to what goes on inside of us. We have so many tendencies that have been put in place by things that have happened to us in life, and everything that happens to us to some degree affects our tendencies in the future and affects our state of mind. To me what I’m noticing more with music- that separates it from incidents that happen- that change somebody’s state of mind, is that it seems to come through another channel besides the five senses. When the music is being created, the ideas enter the musician from an unknown source, through a channel that there’s no medical term for, no biological term, no psychological term for. There’s some channel that the ideas come through and the sense of musical balance that the musician employs in order to organise the ideas. That’s also something that there’s also no word for. It’s all the unknown, and a person that has a good sense of musical organisation has no idea where that sense came from. Partially it may come from loving and listening to music and really appreciating the balance and organisation of music that’s so cosmic, but there’s a lot of people who appreciate it that don’t have a sense of it, of how to manipulate that organisation, how to take control of it.
I would say that in the creation of music, where the ideas are coming from- why one idea means a great deal to me and another idea means nothing to me- and that there’s some sort of mental criteria to distinguish between these two things; it’s not something that anybody has grasped in any way. And then in the reception of music, I don’t believe it’s just the notes, chords or melodies in themselves (although there’s a lot to ponder just in those- why they affect people in the way they do). I also think that what’s underestimated when people are judging music is that you are hearing the intention of the composer or musician or the band or whatever. I believe that there’s a sort of 6th sense when we’re hearing music and some people have this. For some people this sense is clearer than for others.
You can hear when someone is doing something for reasons such as personal gain or ego gratification, and when the intention is to purely explore this wondrous thing which is the nature of music as it’s presented to us by the laws of the cosmos. If you put some crap, some commercial band who’s only doing it because it’s how they make their living and they get a certain amount of ego gratification from it- if that same band played a Fugazi song, it wouldn’t mean the same thing as what it means to somebody who needs to hear Fugazi to feel good. It’s not a matter of the song, it wouldn’t matter how well it was played; we’re hearing something behind the music. We hear the psychological state of the people who are playing or composing it, and I feel that something else comes through into the listener besides what’s apparent to the senses. I feel really sure of that.
I really feel that when you’re talking about the reception or music or the creation of music- the most important parts of can’t be quantified or measured, and there’s no way to put your finger on them. I feel like it’s that way with love and to any person who has a special thing; if there’s a guy obsessed with mechanics or if there’s a guy obsessed with plants or something. These things produce an excitement in people that can’t be measured by just the virtues of the subject themselves. There’s some sort of connection between that persons soul and whatever that thing is that they really love, and it seems like music has this direct connection to excite a much larger group of people than most isolated subjects. I think part of the reason for this has to with the fact- I think there are messages that are coming across in music. There are messages that music is conveying, there are truths about the nature of existence. In nature, you have your things like trees and flowers, grass, human beings and brains, water, and air. There are these other things that are part of the fabric of existence that exist- like for instance numbers exist as a part of nature regardless of whether there’s the human understanding of them.
In other words the human understanding of a number is more a symbol of the thing. We have no way to actually grasp numbers in of themselves, even thought they’re an inescapable part of existence. With music you have mind boggling things going on with numbers. The truth about numbers themselves is that they all exist as one thing together. They’re all dependant on one another. There’s no existence of 4 without the existence of 3. There’s no 1 billion without the existence of 2 billion. All numbers are interdependent on one another and need one another to exist, and so they are one thing. But it’s the nature of the human mind to perceive these differences from one thing to the other. I don’t think that these differences exist not only with numbers, but I don’t think a tree is any different from a person- is any different from the air- is any different from the water. I think we’ve been blessed with this psychological ability to be able to differentiate between one thing and the other. It’s all existing in harmony with one another. To me it expresses that no one thing is different from anything else. With numbers, every one absolutely needs the other one to exist, and so- are all one number. Or you could say numbers are all one thing.’
[continúa...]
Ahi va la primera parte
Hay un nivel de comprension que viene con la habilidad de mirar hacia adentro. El comprender viene de la conciencia que se tiene en el conflicto interno, y transformar lo inconsciente en consciente, en este caso, despierta a la mente y cambia la perspectiva que se tiene de la vida. John Frusciante es un hombre que explora este pensamiento activamente. El sostiene que hay algunos aspectos clave para mantener esta salud mental: Meditar, leer y escribir.
Hablé con John de cómo estos elementos y la inclusión de la musica conlleva un buen puñado de beneficios a nuestra salud mental y nuestro bienestar.
‘Ha sido muy bueno para mi. Es como estar capacitado para ver la mente desde una posición externa. Es uno de lo problemas que tiene la gente con desproporción mental: de que estas atrapado en tu mente, no hay escape. Es como estar aprisionado, estas dentro de ti, dentro de tu cuerpo, tus pensamientos estan dentro de tu mente, no hay escape. Tus pensamientos ni siquiera se mueven en una especie de orbita cosmica, solo estan determinados por tu entorno y condicionamiento. La comprensión de la inhabilidad de escapar de ella, el no ser capaz de salir de ella- cuanto mas pensas en eso, mas abrumador se vuelve- especialmente cuando no sos feliz con los pensamientos que tienes, mi con tu entorno, o cuando la gente no te trata de la forma que querrias.
El pensamiento de que no puedes escapar de ti mismo, es realmente escalofriante. La habilidad de analizar tus pensamiento cuando los escribis es realmente iluminante, porque lo lees 5 minutos después, y tener una reaccion completamente diferente de cuando pensabas el pensamiento. Se vuelve mas facil en ese momento mirar lo que escribiste y decir ‘bueno, esto es verdad desde un angulo pero tambien lo puedo ver desde este otro.’ Tus emociones estan atadas directamente a tus pensamientos, y no tenes capacidad de separarlos.Luego lo lees un par de dias después, y tienes otro estado de animo, y mirandolo desde esta otra posición tienes la capacidad mental de ponerlo en su lugar de forma mas clara. Con el cerebro captando, esos mismos pensamientos, pero con otro estado emocional, eres capaz de establecer una suerte de separacion entre tus emociones y tus pensamientos, cosa que si no escribes nada, y no te miras a ti mismo desde otro lugar, eres incapaz de hacer.
He resuelto varios problemas de mi niñez ecribiendo, pagina a pagina, cuando ya estos me molestaban. Escribiendolos, y volviendolos a lee, de alguna manera en ese proceso, comprendi cosas, que potencialmente podian ser comprendidos yendo a un psicologo, todas las semanas durante años. Compre que tenia que perdonar a la gente de la que estaba resentido, de las que me sentia una victima, y a traves de escribir pude hacer un balance, entendiendo que no tenia que culpar a la gente por la manera en que me trataba, pero si el entender que era el resultado de cómo yo trataba a la gente. No hay nada mas claro que entender que siendo resentido hacia otras personas, se es resentido hacia la vida misma- cosa qe me resulta sin sentido. El cerebro hace la oracion ‘yo soy resentido de la vida misma’lo hace solo por una virtud de ese cerebro, entonces, quien es el ‘yo’ que esta hablando? El ‘yo’ que habla es la naturaleza misma. Si das importancia a la opinión de que ‘la vida es una m*%$”’ estas automáticamente dando credito a la vida, porque la vida es la cosa que habla y dice lo que pensas. Algo viene de fabrica en nuestro carácter, todos nosotros pensamos en lo que pensamos! Cada personas piensa que sus opiniones son verdaderas y muy validas. Es algo que viene con el carácter. Pero pienso que [escribir] tus pensamientos es muy importante. Es muy malo perderse dentro de uno mismo.
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