Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: The world of healing can be treacherous. But suddenly Spiritual aims to provide real, honest, practical spiritual knowledge and wisdom for the true seekers among us.
The goal is to ignite the divine human within each listener, raising the collective consciousness for our planet. We will challenge your preconceptions, push your buttons, and encourage deep reflect. We're not here to adhere to the status quo of what the new age spiritual market wants you to buy into and believe.
Consider this your antidote to the woo, woo and a place of woo. You.
When we're talking about this introspection, one of the other questions that inevitably arises is what is driving me in my life and that word drive. When I'm thinking about the word drive, initially it used to be, I guess, a symptom of judgment in comparison, right? Where that person's there, I want to be there. So the drive in me is completely egoic, where I need to be there. So then I just do all these things and it's, it's driving me. But what's happening now is I think that word drive has slowly been replaced by inspired.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
Like, what inspires me? Because for me, the word drive is judgment, is corporate, is, you know, where's your drive for achievement? Well, there's another cinema synonym right there, Achievement, you know, drive, achievement. I know for me, it's, it's turned inspire. Where I've been not wanting to embrace that I am an artist because the connotation of that word again is, is not successful. Not being successful compared to traditional. And this obviously goes back to my parents, my family, and, you know, coming from a good place, they want a traditional career so you can be stable. So that comes from a good place. But now that I'm fully embracing this word inspiration and what inspires me as opposed to what drives me, I'm finding that the inspiration for living a great life, that there's an art to it. Like I'm a life liver, as opposed to here's my thing, I'm labeled. And I always go back to Europe. Growing up, part of the time in Europe, there, it's a faux pas. If you, you, you meet somebody, you're talking, you go, what do you do?
You can't identify somebody by their job. That's not who they are. So when people are talking about what drives you in life, I know for me I've kind of replaced it with the word inspire.
But when people are thinking about that, like, what's, what's your reason? There's another synonym, reason. What's your reason in Life or what drives you? What should people be thinking about with those. With that one question. And maybe they can replace the word with these other things. But I think the connotation is the same now.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: So derive is a very interesting word because I immediately think of learning about like basic human needs and drives.
Like it's Eric Erickson, he has a hierarchy of needs, which is. He's a psychologist, I think.
I can't date him. I can't date. I don't remember the dates. But like it's about human drives and basic human needs and different lessons that we learn on this pyramid. Self actualization, if I'm not mistaken, is at the top of the pyramid. Pyramid of human needs and basic drives.
A lot of drives I find when it comes to career and purpose are actually based in fear.
That has been my experience where it's based in fear. Like you're being driven to achieve in this very narrow, rigid way. And it's something that my very well meaning Greek parents were like, you have to be a doctor.
Not just like we were saying, Sean, oh, just a stable career that you can make a living out of. But no, you have to be a doctor, you have to be a lawyer. These are your career paths. You must be driven to do this because it takes a lot of education for each of those, typically those careers. And I remember I wanted to learn how to play the piano because I was obsessed with the piano. I was like a five and six year old.
And my dad and my uncle would say, you know, our family are not. We're not creative.
We are not creative. None of us are artists.
Here's the plan. You have to be driven to achieve in this country because they came here from Greece.
You have to work really, really hard, be a workaholic, which my uncle and my dad both were the epitome of workaholics before that was even a term. And they really instilled that in me. So I think workaholism, I think it's an addiction to be honest. And it comes through the drive of fear that you'll disappoint your family or you'll disappoint your caregivers and you'll be a. And you'll be a fail, a failure of some kind. So drive is a very particular word. Inspiration, as you said, Sean, which I love that you brought that up. Inspiration is in spirit.
It has nothing to do with fear in. In spirit inspiration.
So it's a much more human, humanistic version. It's a much more humanistic, less about survival because drive is just living. Let me just breathe and be alive and be in this carbon body and be in matter.
And inspiration is like, let me be in spirit. Let me be in this other essence, this other realm as a human being that is outside of matter, that is formless.
So I think drive is almost like the opposite in some way of inspiration.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah. That's very interesting.
When you think about drive, it doesn't go away. If it's a biological drive, if it's a drive to survive, it's always there.
And then people get, quote, unquote, flashes of inspiration.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Right. It's ethereal. It doesn't. It's not around all the time. You have to catch it.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't get inspired anymore. It becomes dictation now. It's the book Big Magic that I always talk about, where the ideas or the songs or whatever they are, they're sentient beings. And then they just get channeled through us to come down.
Because, you know, when you think about that word inspiration, it's like, oh, it's something fleeting. I gotta grab it. I'm chasing, I'm chasing, I'm chasing. Which is a drive, which is based on the fear of not catching it.
So you're always chasing inspiration. So for me now it's. I get myself into a state where I can communicate with this sentient being that is a creative idea and then partner with it and then have it realize itself in this dimension, 3D dimension.
And when I do that, and the most creative people I know, you'll hear them doing interviews and they're like, yeah, I wasn't even part of that. It was just dictation. It just. It was stream. It just came through me and I was just the secretary, and I recorded it. And here you go.
And then I didn't remember doing it because it's gone now.
Like, it just came and went.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: That reminds me of. I don't know if you've ever read the book the War of Art.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So he talks about, like, you have to sit in the chair and do the writing every day. Like, you have to. You have to make the muses. Because the muses are these beings in Greek mythology where they inspire people to do things inspired, like creative pursuits, usually. And so he's like, you have to make a time that the muse can come and visit and visit you. And I remember I was listening to Stephen King, the author, Stephen King, Speaking to George R.R. martin, the gentleman who wrote the Game of Thrones books.
And George R.R. martin is like, how do you write a book in three months. Like, how do you do it? Like, I'm lucky if I write three pages in a year.
And, you know, the audience was laughing, and Stephen King's like, I write three pages every single day without fail.
And Martin was like, well, are they clean pages?
Do you have to edit them? He's like, I've gotten to the place where they're pretty clean. And then by the end of that three months, I have a rather, you know, pretty good first draft. I go through the editing. I mean, he's been doing this, obviously, for years. He even wrote. I mean, Stephen King even wrote a book about writing as well. And he really puts his butt in the chair. You know, like Steven Pressfield was talking about, put yourself in the place to do the thing and do it even if you don't feel inspired.
And you'll write or you'll paint or you'll create music, and maybe one line of a song will be great, and the rest you'll throw away. But at least you're in the practice. You're creating the space so that the muse can visit you and you can have it be a safe space for inspiration. So you're not chasing it. Like, you're not chasing the dragon of inspiration where you have a regular place where you're exercising that form of your creative expression.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Well, you need the discipline, right?
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Right. You need the discipline to be creative.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: 100%.
You need the discipline to be a free spirit.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: Yeah. And that. That is one thing I'm finding that is, above all else, sort of the key for everything I'm finding over time, where, yeah, I don't feel like being creative.
Why not?
I don't feel like being a human being right now. No, you are. That's your essence. How can you not feel like being. And it's funny. I'll have this conversation a number of times, like, okay, I'm sitting in this chair right now, and I have an idea.
I want to go to the kitchen.
So do I just close my eyes, wiggle my nose, or blink my eyes three times, and magically I'm in the kitchen? Well, I Dream of Genie and Bewitched. For those of you I just dated myself.
No, you actually physically have to have the discipline to go, okay, I have this idea. I want to go to the kitchen, but now I physically have to get up out of the chair, walk over to the door, open the door, walk, walk down the stair, be in the 3D world, physically move and get there. And then when I get to the Kitchen. I can go, hey, I'm in the kitchen now.
But I needed the discipline to broaden the analogy. Just kind of an idea of doing something. We live in a 3D world with gravity, and we have to move physically in the world, and that takes discipline. Just having the idea is one thing, but recognizing that, okay, the physical stuff needs to happen. And that's why you get people who are talented who don't work hard, and someone who is not as talented but works 10 times more and they get further ahead. Now, if they both work equal amounts, the person with the talent will always edge ahead if there's equal work done.
But more often than not, I'm finding people with the talent to say, oh, well, I can adjust the amount of work I need to do because the talent will take over. It's like, no.
Now, the person who works hard will always get further ahead, regardless of talent, but if they both work the same amount. So I'm finding the talent is sort of the thing that's there. But if you take out the hard work, the discipline to do the work, you'll never, ever do anything you want to do.
And there's so many people out there who've been lied to. We've been told, if you do this and this and this is. And I'm going to bring this up now because I see it all the time now. This is the CHAT GPT syndrome, because people want to cheat. They want to skip.
They want to bypass the discipline.
Like, oh, imagine if Stephen King was using AI to write to cheat because. Or Martin were going, man, I can do. I can do three a day now. I can just use ChatGPT. I can cheat. I don't have the discipline.
I can cheat the work. I can cheat it to go ahead. And this is why people are like, oh, my God, I can do this.
Okay, but then what are you doing with the time you save, what are they doing?
And then when you look back at the quality of the work, okay, because it is a muscle. And this is a danger I see with AI. I'll wrap this up here on AI. But the danger I see is it's training us to be less human and lazy.
Yeah. And then the artists and the people who are listening to this, who are digging in deeper and doubling down on humanness, they'll be separated, and then they'll be better at being human.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: I can write better than ChatGPT.
I remember Sean was reading one of my blogs, and he's like, oh, did you use GPT for this? I'm like, no, I wrote it.
And you were kind of surprised, like, oh, you wrote this? Yeah, I wrote it.
What I'm noticing is that chatgpt, it's devoid of soul. Obviously, it's an AI and it doesn't have the level of creativity that any human being would have.
And so, like, even splicing videos, using an AI, like, it picks video pieces that don't make sense. Even though it's a really good AI for videos, it's just.
You're like, that's not that important. Why did you pick that out of all of the video? You know, it just seemed very odd. So I think double down on humanness and using AI where it makes sense, where it's things that you really don't want to do that are more technical but. Or menial. Yeah, but if it's about creating something, a piece of art, writing whatever it is, like, sit down and write the three pages.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And even the fact that you're doing it kicking and streaming and being bitter about, man, I don't want to do this. While you're writing it is making it a great piece of art because that'll come through in the writing that you're bitter or angry, whatever. The emotional come through. Like, I hate doing this, but ChatGPT can't do that. And, like, it can't do emotion, it can't do anger. You can't do happiness, can't do sadness. Even the best AI. And I've been testing them all as well, as far as voice goes, because this is what I do.
And I don't hear the soul because I've been going back and forth. I'm like, okay. I can tell right away that's an AI. Okay. The pacing, the breathing. And then just a light bulb went off. I'm like, yeah, I can't hear the person's soul. There's a frequency to the soul, and I can hear it. I don't know what the frequency is, but I hear that it's not there.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: You were talking about voice.
I've been in spaces where people don't technically have these amazing operatic voices, but when they're singing, it really pierces me. Like, it really touches me in such an emotional way. Even though technically, from a musical standpoint, it may not sound the best, but it's something about the spirit behind the voice, which is completely ineffable.
And that's what really moves in classical, like, beautiful, perfect pitch. All that stuff is amazing. It has its place.
But when people are singing to heal others, because I believe that you can find healing in music and singing, or were they working through their own healing through their voice?
[00:18:33] Speaker A: That's very timely because currently, for those of you who don't know, aside from all the stuff I do, I am making music currently, and I'm working with a singer, and everything's going really well. We've got about 10 songs done.
And, you know, the universe has dropped her into my lab because I've been looking for her for about 10 years. I've been going through trying to partner with other singers and. And then I just stopped. And then the universe went, here you go. Okay, you're ready, Sean. Here she is.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: I love that.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: It's. It's just amazing where I will just do one thing, send it to her, comes back, it's a full song, and it's. It's because her writing skills are top notch. And all these songs that are coming back, it's just. Everyone is just emotional. And she's crediting me. She's like, okay, when you send this stuff over, it's the chords and the sounds. You change. And then it. And here's that word. It inspires me. I get a feeling and then I write to it. I'm like, okay. But I'm telling her now when I get that back, it's like, you writing to that. Yes. I'm leading you with this sound in these keys emotionally.
But here's the thing, Maria. Before, when I would write music, it would be technical.
It would be, here's the sound, here's the this, here's the that. Because I hate music theory, I didn't want to learn it, but I had to learn it because until then, I was a beat maker, I wasn't a producer. So now I lead with the chords that evoke emotion.
So recognizing that when I send her that stuff and she comes back because she's inspired, but she has life experience, you can hear that back to the point. Here's the point, folks.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: We're getting to it.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Is that you're talking about the emotion coming through in the sound.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: And when she sings these lyrics, her voice cracks. Sometimes it does this because there's emotions there. And when people hear the music that we're making, right away, they hear the music I did, so they get evoked. An emotion gets evoked from the chord changes because depending on the notes, they're aimed at different emotional states. And then when her lyrics come in, there's added emotion to that. It enhances. And you're hearing her soul come through.
And we go to A lot of shows. We're actually going to a show tonight to showcase just to hear other singers. And I've had other singers approach me, too. The want to work with me, and then I hear them singing, and it's soulless. And what I mean by that is they're going through the motions. But here's the thing, Maria. There was a time where I couldn't notice that all the top songwriters, all the top people that I've worked with, they hear it, too. Like, when you hear Bono sing a song, you hear that and you feel it more importantly.
But now I've evolved to the point writing my three pages every day, having that discipline to just listen to music and try and create it, that I can hear that right away, where when somebody's singing, I'm like, that is great. I'm not judging. I guess I'm assessing where they are on their journey.
But then I kind of just go, yeah, those are great words, but I'm not feeling anything.
And I think it's because they're not feeling anything when they're doing it.
They're doing what they think they should do, as opposed to, let me just express my humanness.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Where in your life are you just singing the song that you think other people want to hear, and you're not singing the song that really, really is at the core of who you are?
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Agreed. And on that note, sing your own song, folks, and we'll see you next time.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: See you next time.
