Saturday, June 4, 2011

Being Already Dead

I've been given a second chance.

Within the past year the accomplishments continue to mount as I am extremely honored and proud to say I have completed 2 albums in '11 which are undoubtedly going to be life changing. The first is with the multi Grammy winning, legendary rock star Andy Summers of The Police. They are all tunes he formulated for movies but decided to use them for an original project. Originally the idea was to travel to India to play Police tunes but as rehearsals progressed and we drew on each others energy, the best plan of action was to complete an original album which we started and completed early this year. This is a very promising endeavor which as well puts me in a place with some great artists whom I have always looked up to. It is a great relationship which I am excited about cultivating. I have already learned a tremendous amount and had a blast.

The second album completed is fusion guitar god Prashant Aswani's newest album which features myself and Jose Pasillas, the drummer from one of the biggest rock bands in the world right now: Incubus. This is also a very promising and exciting adventure as the music is very challenging in that it is calling for me to evolve fast and exponentially grow. I have in the past played with Prashant but this is a different level in that we are now older and much more equipped for life. The completion of this album is another progression on my path and getting the message out there. It also gives me a chance to focus back on my musicianship which I have not been too focused on recently because of school and working on others music.

As for activism, I'm developing deeper relationships with different members of the organizations I am a part of and it is just solidifying and helping me define more and more what needs to be done. As I examine my past convictions I have been delving deep into the variables within each argument and have been trying to pin point the real source of a problem. There is an underlying problem in most situations which cause most everything else but we tend to focus on the products of these problems and not the real issue. Anti Injustice Movement, Guerrilla Republik, Zulu and RHHF movement are in full effect and we are growing stronger and more determined as life happens to us here and around the world. We just need to take the focus off the superflous bullshit and harness all that angst towards something lasting because our discomfort is not. I'm lucky to have found determined and profoundly educated people to build with and bond with. These movements help all of us in the goals to help the human race evolve past the semi disciplined hominoids we are now.

In getting completely engrossed in my biological anthropology class and world religions class this past semester, learning about the origin of mankind and culture, I am forced to really examine the human condition. We are the only species on the planet that thinks its SUPPOSED to be happy and sometimes I think these extra neurons that are really the only difference between us and chimpanzees are really our largest mental prison. The human condition is this continual obsession with "freedom" whether it is physical and or mental. This struggle for freedom comes in the form of a path to enlightenment or a dream to reach "heaven" or a "happy place" after death. It comes in the form of addicts getting high, or drinking to get in the "right" head space, which to me more often than not means to temporarily alleviate our consciousness of being human. We institute laws to protect our "freedom" and we use "freedom" as an excuse to kill other homo sapiens on the planet because in our overstimulated ape-like brains, these other people may be infringing on our "right" to be "free", when in reality, its only a small group of misled self consumed "dominant" men who truly have taken their primitive uni-male existence to the limit. Our entire lives we're striving to be something other than human, essentially to be "free" of what it is to live on this planet as a human. We are doing whatever we can to not feel discomfort whether by self medication or religion. We WORK to not HAVE to do what we do not WANT to do. We see shiny things and we want to wear them on ourselves. We like foods that have animal fat, sugar, or salt. We have our vestigial appendages and we shave off our hair to be "presentable" in complete denial of who and where we came from. The human mind can barely comprehend what a number like 50,000 looks like let alone comprehend the trillions of years the earth has been here and the 6 million years bipeds have been walking plains in search of food. We want to believe we are so much more but like AK from AIM quoted to me "If triangles had a god, it would have 3 sides." We need to stop pushing away our humanity and embrace it and we need to do it BECAUSE we have the capability to examine ourselves. What we do have is a chance in every day life, because of the extra neurons to process problems, and more than anything, an ability to relate to others pain of being human. What we can do is help the evolutionary process and that will only work through education and providing youth with a feeling of stability so they do not have to be afraid of everything and invent imaginary places to console a fear of death.

In this frame of mind, I've had this comforting feeling when thinking about death. When looking at larger chunks of time, which is man made anyways, I'm using hundreds of thousands of years as an increment. The earths polarization flips every 250,000 years. What will matter of what I'm doing now 250,000 years from now? Will my new shoes make a difference? Will my self medicating at the bar make a difference? Will my unpaid parking ticket matter? If I want to truly leave the world better than how I found it, I need to take steps everyday to make sure the seeds that growing up around me have respect for each other as we are all just highly evolved primates in comparison to the rest. They need to know as Neil De Grasse Tyson put it, "that the atoms that make up the molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars," and they need to know that we are "connected to each other biologically, we are connected to the earth chemically and that we are connected to the universe atomically." This will be one of the only things that will have a profound effect on the outcome of all civilizations. Lately I have felt as if I have a second chance to make the right moves now as in 250,000 years from now, I will be dead. Its refreshing to see your life past almost as a spectator but then be given the opportunity to engage and keep working.

The flip side of this is the resorting back to our primate mind and say, "its all about me." At that point, 6 million years of evolution has simply given us twitter to inflate our ape-like tendencies to an encompassing level.

If there is a divinity in us, and this is in the form of the extra neurons, brachiation, and a lowered larynx, we should utilize it to keep the evolutionary process going and the duality we learn as we grow in life needs to be addressed less. If the goal is ultimate freedom and this freedom is realistically from ourselves, we need to examine our actions on a daily basis because the youth are going to follow in whatever direction we take ourselves. To imagine ourselves as already dead and to be given a second chance to help is the reality and is actually a gift of being human.

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