Tuesday 19 June 2012

Dystopia & Eckhart Tolle

Some years ago I was really into metal. I wrote a fanzine about it, put on bands I liked and travelled around the country screaming into a microphone for two bands. Metal was pretty much all I ever thought about. If someone didn't like metal then they were a dickhead. Other music was generally shit to me - monotonous bullshit played by passionless twats who just wanted to make money. In my mind, metal was a pure form – played from the heart without concern for profit and fame.

Besides this skewered view, my general outlook was bleak – everything was slowly getting worse. Humanity was destined to destroy itself and the planet would have been better off if we’d never existed. The overall soundtrack to my life was screamed vocals, down-tuned guitars, bowl-loosening bass and drumming played either as fast as humanly possible or as slow as humanly possible. The lyrics I wrote and shouted into microphones in the grindcore and sludge bands I fronted were embittered and misanthropic. I thought I‘d developed all these pessimistic feelings throughout my life and venting them onstage was a catharsis.



Using my unwavering passion for metal, I created Load of Noise fanzine so that I could use it to further a fledgling career in music journalism. A perk of this was receiving free music and gig tickets. A friend had introduced me to Dystopia a few years earlier and their track ‘Stress Builds Character’, particularly struck a chord with me…the first line of the song is: ‘Life is swell, now I want to die’. Now that could easily be seen as some teen angst type of lyric but if you hear it, you know he’s not fucking around. My actual life was more or less fine but I felt emotionally numb and my mind had become a very dark place. Seeing only the negative in everything can gradually imprison a person in their own psyche.Then something really important happened. I was sent a copy of Dystopia’s new album to review in the zine. I placed it in the CD player and the first track ‘Now and Forever’ began. The band had decided to use a sample throughout the first three minutes of the song. 



The sample was taken from the audiobook of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I had never heard of the man before, but the words he was speaking immediately grabbed my attention: ‘So anyone who is identified with their mind and therefore disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in being, will have fear as their constant companion…Are you always trying to get somewhere other than were you are? Is most of your doing a means to an end? Is fulfilment always just around the corner or confined to short lived pleasures?...Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear, are caused by too much future and not enough present – guilt, regret, resentment, sadness, bitterness and forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough present.’ Needless to say, I was quite familiar with all of those feelings.



Something about Tolle’s voice and the fact that I’d never heard anyone talk about feelings being directly related to time perception in such a way really got through to me. Various aspects also appealed to the misanthrope in me: ‘You may win ten-million dollars, but that kind of change is only skin-deep, you would simply continue to act out the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious surroundings. Humans have learned to split the atom – instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button – is that real change?’

I searched the sentences online and downloaded the audiobook of The Power of Now. Soon after doing this, my life changed. All the pessimism and misanthropy that’d been sapping my energy just fell away – a near-tangible psychological weight just dissipated. Incredible. I understood how my mind had been working against me for all the years before. I was excited, rejuvenated. The by-product of this was unfortunate in terms of my previous goals. I no longer felt such a strong identification with metal. I still loved the music but I no longer defined myself by it. Whereas before I saw being onstage as a catharsis – I now felt as though getting onstage and screaming misanthropic lyrics was actually making my feel worse by reliving the state of mind of the lyrics.



Other areas of my life improved dramatically and I found myself listening to many other music genres and getting a lot out of them. Just to clarify, I have not become some spiritualist metal-hater – I don’t accept everything in The Power of Now as fact – it was just a massive help at a time when I needed a different perspective.