Fullest possible perspective

Blind spots fascinate me – the gaps in cognition that trip us all up in various ways to various degrees at various times – and this as far as I know is without exception.

So I had an insight into the underlying mechanism informing one of my own a couple of days ago I thought you might find helpful.

It went like this: you may or may not know but one of my undercover non-Barefoot sub-personas creates an ongoing plethora of different dance music projects similar in hue and tone to all the psychoactive sound I purvey on the site under the Barefoot umbrella, but rather than be designed specifically for healing purposes it’s designed purely for parties. I have a circle of various influential DJs and record industry characters I send finished tracks to for feedback, promotional purposes and what-have-you. Over the years, decades actually, I’ve learned from experience never to send a mix straight out of the studio however good it sounds, until I’ve first checked it in the car and on two or three crappy delivery systems, this because studios and headphones can make tracks sound better balanced than they are. And you don’t want to have to send them all over again with an apology for wasting their time.

However even knowing all that I’ve occasionally and sometimes often made the same mistake again (and again) – and it’s not because of excitement for how great I think the tracks are.

I finally got what it was the other day.

So there I was, just finished the last remaining mix on one of the albums I’ve been working on and was doing the admin bit – collating projects in folders and backing them up on a couple of hard-drives and then before checking the sound sending the WAV files to be uploaded onto the relevant platforms and what-have-you, only because they’re massive files and I happened to have a fast upload speed where I was and could always send the odd one or two from a slower connection later if any corrections were needed.

I was then just about to send the mp3s to the circle without having checked them and without even thinking about what I was doing.

It was then I realized I’m prone to a sort of procedural dyslexia.

It was because I was doing admin – sending, saving, backing up and so on I was in plough-through mode with almost a compulsion to get all admin bits done even though that would be getting the steps in the wrong order and cause problems.

Fortunately I caught it in the nick of time. Not that it would be the end of the world either way, but it serves as a good example.

So then I realized this procedural dyslexia arises when my internal overseer is absent.

When present ‘he’ would say, “OK, stop the admin now and move onto checking the tracks before resuming the admin”.

So then I examined who the internal overseer is.

Obviously it would be tempting to assume it’s the so-called higher self, the all-knowing subconscious, and so on. But it was clear the overseer is purely a construct of my own, comprised of various voices from my formative years, my mum’s, my dad’s, my schoolteachers’, my martial arts master’s and so on, somehow mixed and conglomerated into a single voice.

And without the overseer watching and guiding the action, such blind spots as the above inevitably occur.

So then it occurred that spatially speaking that voice originates from the midbrain, whereas the voice of what people conditioned by the vertical hierarchical church steeple with God above the clouds model call the higher self but which in Taoist terms is really the deeper self, originates in the back-brain.

Hence that the constructed overseer is the executive of the deeper self rather than boss of the whole show.

This then led me to acknowledge I hadn’t been allowing a clear enough throughput of information flow up and down the connection between my doing mind and the deep subconscious, whence springs all wisdom and the best instructions to follow at any given moment.

So I spent a moment sinking back and reconnecting at a deeper level and what was interesting was at that point the overseer became almost irrelevant – the view of everything in my life spread itself out in full panorama and it was evident how to proceed with everything (not just when to send tracks to people).

I tend to hesitate before using instances from my own life as examples as I find when people do it smacks of self-indulgence and look-at-me-ness, which I confess to detecting a small element of, in look how clever I am doing all this stuff etc, but if we just discount that as stray vestiges of former narcissism I wonder if following the thread here has inspired any resonance and triggered any insights of your own in respect of getting to the root of these bemusing blind spots.

Obviously there’s far more can be said about blind spots but this is a start.

And as for the gift bit – I suggest donating to yourself a full 8 minutes (or more if you want) to doing nothing but entering the inside of your skull as it were and feeling the sensation in the midbrain and then in the back brain and sliding back into the back brain as far as possible while picturing the amygdala in the midbrain hanging loose like a pair of bull’s testicles on a warm day. Because this will relax your system profoundly and set you in the optimal viewing position to gain the fullest possible perspective. And were you to indulge this luxury each day even just for a minute or two the wisdom-increase effect would be exponential.

With love, Doc