Vision Quest

How far did they go?
"As far as our imaginations would carry us."

~ Jimmy Page, from Brad Tolinski's Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page

Mage Music 35

Vision: "the act or power of anticipating that which will or may come to be". 

Vision drives everything.  Every normal person has a belief system that describes the world is and what their place is in it.  Belief is the basis for vision of what will be.  Even if they're not conscious of having any vision at all, still people's decisions are influenced by their vision.  Their emotions arise from that vision.

Vision guides and shapes human lives.  The vision may not be based on "truth" - it may in fact be totally unrealistic - but it still guides and shapes decisions and emotions, and vision is the paradigm against which success and failure are measured.

The range of vision is infinite
For most people personal vision is small - that's not a value judgement, just a statement about scale.   Vision is derived from what is believed to be possible, and for most what is possible comes from what has existed or what is known.  Their vision goes not much further than the basics of everyday life.  As "small" as this vision may seem, it is still something extraordinary - few, if any, animals have the capacity for extensive vision.  

Moving along the range of possibility of vision, there are creative people - such as artists - whose vision is broader.  Their vision involves imagination and goes well beyond the basics of everyday life into areas that push the envelope of what is known and accepted.  Success is measured against the internal vision as well as external factors, such as how well the creation is received by peers and audience.

Sages, Mages and other grand visionaries are at the other end of the scale.  Their vision encompasses that which may never have been, and includes the improbable and the impossible.  These are the Masters who don't require external validation - their Work may never even be seen by others.  Their measure of success is how close their Work comes to fulfillment of their personal vision.  What they produce may be so different as to be frightening, so frightening as to be threatening, so threatening as to cause others to want to cast them down.

Vision Quest

Vision is always changing and growing as the human who holds the vision changes and grows. Sometimes, however, the vision is just a seed, an idea with no flesh.  Sometimes the holder of the seed has no idea of how it will grow or what it will grow into.  Sometimes that person only owns the desire to find out.

A vision quest is a search for the clues that will allow the seeker to find answers.  For those with small vision, the goal is to find one's life purpose: Who am I, why am I here, where am I supposed to be going?  For those with greater vision, the goal is to find the purpose of life:  Who are we, why are we here, and where are we going?  

For the Masters, the goal is to find the Way that will allow them to move life along.  For the Mage, the goal is to create a new reality.

For the Mage Musician, the Way is through the vision of the music.  How far can the vision go?  As far as the Mage will allow the vision to carry him.

Muse Music Magick - and a Happy Birthday

2013 - Year of the Muse

~jimmypage.com, January 1 2013

Before all the sweat equity that a Mage must put into Magick - or a musician into music - there must be inspiration to provide the goal, the end point of that journey. But where does inspiration come from?

The neat, clean hard-wired explanation

Scientists today are discovering some incredible information on how communication and creativity work in our brains. They are getting a picture of how truly hard-wired we humans are for what we are capable of. The actual physical pathways of electrical pulses and brain structures involved during acts of creativity are being mapped.  This is very exciting stuff - but what scientists are doing is confirming what many of us have already understood:  Music is something that not only we all can do or at least appreciate, but is a basic and necessary part of the human communicative experience that evolution shaped the brain to do.

But as nice and neat as that sounds, that still doesn't explain the source of inspiration.  Science is remarkably chary of addressing the hard questions:  Why does life exist at all?  What started it?  What's it all for?

The mushy, non-scientific explanation

Like with Magick, music is a process and an experience. Like with Magick, the musical process requires desire and will and ritual (performance). And like with Magick, in spite of what science would say, the source of music is not ultimately to be found in the hard-wired world but in something much vaster than electrical pulses in the human brain. 

Science has yet to venture into to the scary territory of the Mysteries and pretty much either pretends that part of the human experience doesn't even exist or that it's hogwash (although quantum physics is making that avoidance harder and harder to maintain). Even when attempting to categorize, quantify and otherwise pin down psychic phenomena science clings to the notion that there is no difference between the mind and the brain.  

The ancients tackle the hard stuff

Some thinkers have always known better.  To them - particularly the ancient sages of mythology and philosophy -  the mind/brain sameness claim would have been considered ignorant in the extreme.

Which is not to say that human attempts to explain the unexplained (and likely unexplainable) have been 100% accurate either, but at least they tried, and so those of us today with broader vision benefit.  There is much to learn from mythology, and thus we come to Muses, the goddesses who embody inspiration and the arts.

The Muses

In western mythology there were originally three muses: Practice, Memory and Song. However, traditional mythology gives us nine muses - either daughters of Gaia and Uranus, or of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory, daughter of Gaia and Uranus). No matter what the genealogy, the Muse we are most interested in is Euterpe ("giver of delight"), originally the muse of music and later of lyric poetry. She is most often depicted holding a flute or sometimes a lyre.

Diodorus Siculus (Greek historian 1st century B.C.) said of Euterpe, "she gives to those who hear her sing delight in the blessings which education bestows."  The bringer of musical inspiration bestows the blessing of knowledge. But we knew that.

The point of the mythology is not that there is a goddess named Euterpe hovering in the background tapping the head of a musician with a magic wand and knocking inspiration into the otherwise vacant mind, but that the inspiration is a connection from the human mind to another realm, one that is vaster than humans. It is a blessing of enlightenment and delight that appears to spring from outside the musician, in mythology from a Muse.

Truly, inspiration comes from and through the musician, as does Magick. The source isn't the human being exactly - the Mage or the musician opens the way, is a conduit of the infinite and, necessarily, a filter that cannot help but distort (that pesky infinite/finite issue).

Background mosaic of  Euterpe
appears on the front
of a concert hall,
"la salle Rameau",
in Lyon, France.  Click here for full image. 

Who needs a Muse?
So what's with the Muse, then?  If a Mage or musician can do it without one, who needs an ancient goddesses of mythology?  Well, to put it simply, there's the audience issue, too.

The Muse not only provides an explanation for the seeming Magickal blossoming of an idea but is also an audience to bounce ideas off.  All artists, all creators, need an audience - someone impartial who will experience and validate the work. But while in the process of creation, an actual human and fallible audience can be a bad idea - an uneducated comment, or even a good comment at the wrong time, can squash the artist's creative flow flatter than a bug under the sole of a Dr. Martens boot.

While some artists and Mage have a living, breathing person as Muse who provides inspiration and feedback, those extraordinary individuals are rare.  For the solitary artist or Mage, the work in progress must be bounced off of the vision of the heart and soul. It can be done, and must be done that way for the highest-level Mages of Magick, music or any of the arts or advancements in knowledge - new work means going where no Mage has gone before.

The Muse, then, is a metaphor for the artist's or Mage's process of tapping into the infinite and letting the light shine through.  Jimmy Page has declared this is the year of the Muse: A year of inspiration, of creation, of new music and of Magick.

Listen for your own Muse, for you surely have one if you want one.  If not your own, then Jimmy Page's will do.

Happy Birthday Jimmy Page January 9

Mage Music post delay

Posting weekly to Mage Music isn't rocket science, but it does take time and thought.  This week's post will be delayed due to pressing issues at home involving frozen water lines, thirsty horses and such.  Thanks for your patience.

MAGE MUSIC: Resources

MAGE MUSIC: Resources: Ultimate Guitar Led Zeppelin box set added to the Mage Music resource page

Happy New Year from Mage Music

Everything is energy.

The light our eyes perceive is energy, although it is an incredibly small part of the electromagnetic spectrum - a tiny little range of energy somewhere in the middle of the immense spectrum between radio and gamma rays. An infinite range of energy exists beyond human knowledge - energy that humans have not imagined and likely will never identify.

Vision and hearing are two of the processes that humans (and other beings) employ to perceive and use energy in very narrow and specific ranges within the infinite spectrum of possible energy that exists.   Magick is another such process. Just like with vision and hearing, some humans can perceive a greater range of Magick than others, and some can use the energy better than others.

Everyone can access the energy of Magick

...but there are vast differences in the ability to use Magick effectively. The difference is power, which from the human and Magickal standpoint we can understand to be the rate at which humans convert energy into use in some way. With the Magickal process, more power means more success in converting the energy of Magick into reality within a given time.

We all have at least a little bit of Magick in us.  Anyone who wishes to can generate sufficient desire, will and some sort of ritual to create Magick to some degree.  Not all can be Mage level, but still this does mean...

You can create Magick.

May you walk in the Light 

and 

find the Magick in your life in 2013

Happy Holidays from Mage Music

May your holiday season 

and all your days always be 

In The Light

Image adapted from Led Zeppelin: Celebration Day movie.

The Magick Muscle

"...improvisation onstage...where the real magic takes place".
                               ~Jimmy Page [1]

Mage Music 32

Improvisation is creating something new on the spot, seemingly without preparation, practice - or even thought. If there is one thing that Jimmy Page is known for, it is his incredible improvised solos.

Improvisation is composition, two sides of the same coin. One takes place over time, the other in the moment. Composition is the creative act of making up something new that has not existed before. If creating something that wasn't there before isn't Magick, it would be hard to understand what could be.

Emphasis on “seemingly”
Just playing any random combination of new notes won’t do it, of course. A musician comes up with great improvisation based on music that has been played before and what is known to work. A first time guitarist is not likely to come up with much more than noise because practice and more practice is needed until the instrument is a seamless part of the creative process rather than another obstacle to it. Thus although the inspiration may pour out from the soul (or, according to Mr. Page – out of the ether [2]) it helps if the musician can perform so well that conscious thought is not involved and the mind is free to create. For this, muscle memory is required.

Muscle memory is a very cool thing. It's what lets you tie your shoe and what totally screws things up if you think about tying your shoe. It’s what allows you to get the forkful of spaghetti in your mouth instead of in your eye. It is what allows an artist to not have to think about the how of creation and instead allows the creation to flow freely.

Automatic behavior
Ouija boards, automatic writing, improvisation, Magickal ritual: They all work best when there is no conscious control of the tools involved. We say that practice “teaches” muscles to perform without conscious control, but what is really happening is that repeated behaviors, ones that are corrected each time in aiming for ideal results, are cemented into different neural pathways than the ones used when learning to perfect them. As the repetition occurs, the brain’s direction of these performance tasks are moved from working (conscious) memory to parts of the brain that handle other automatic tasks, such as breathing, walking, and feeding yourself with silverware (or chopsticks or any other tool), and in doing so free the mind from the need to pay attention to the physical processes involved.  By relegating these tasks to automatic behavior systems, the conscious mind can be involved with other things.

Interestingly – or perhaps unsurprisingly - some of the areas of the brain involved with muscle memory are the same as those involved with ear worms and other behaviors that we have no control over. That limbic system comes into play again, the more primitive part of the brain involved with emotions and emotional behavior. Scientists think that the limbic system plus the other adjacent parts of the brain involved with muscle memory evolved to free us for thinking so that we could use tools for survival purposes such as building shelter and hunting – and the creative processes.


Magick Muscle

A Mage must perform ritual without allowing the ritual to become an obstacle to the desired results. A musician, too, must perform solos without allowing the musical instrument to become an obstacle. Muscle memory frees the Mage Musician to perform the creative arts that result in Magick.

It is muscle memory, too, that allows the musician’s signature sound to remain consistent over time, so that we recognize who it is that is wielding the guitar. It is muscle memory that allows the guitarist to recognize when he is playing outside his identity, outside the ideal that inspires him and that he strives to bring to the light.

"Well, I'm not trying to be flippant here, but I just play the guitar, don't I?", says Jimmy Page in an interview in Guitar World magazine, October 1988. Indeed.

♪

Suggested listening: Outrider (studio album) as well as the Outrider tour.  Forget the vocals, forget the rhythm section.  Just listen to that guitar.

♫

* Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page by Brad Tolinski  

*“The whole improvisational aspect, the riffs coming out of the ether ... it was a magical vehicle collectively soaring into the stratosphere.” Jimmy Page, as quoted by Cameron Crowe in the notes for 

The Song Remains The Same (Remastered / Expanded) (2CD) reissued version, 2007.

Thank you Sue C for the muscle memory suggestion.