MUSIC AND MENTAL HEALTH

Red Hot Chili Peppers - John Frusciante

There is a level of understanding that comes with an ability to look inwards. Realisations come from the awareness of internal conflict and bringing unconscious thoughts into the conscious, which in turn awakens the mind and changes our perspective on life. John Frusciante is a man who actively explores this understanding. He states that there are some key aspects that maintain a healthy mind-state: meditating, reading, and writing.

I spoke to John about these elements and how the inclusion of music can bring a whole host of benefits to our mental health and well being. I asked John firstly about writing thoughts down:

'It's been really good for me. I think it's being able to see the mind from an exterior position. It's another one of the issues that come up especially with people who have mental imbalances: that you're trapped in your mind; there's no escape. It's like being imprisoned. You're inside yourself, you're inside your body, your thoughts are inside your mind- you can't escape. Your thoughts aren't just moving along in some kind of cosmic orbit, they're determined by your surroundings and your conditioning. The realisation of the inability to escape from it, not being able to step out of your mind- the more you think about it, the more overwhelming it can become- especially when you're not happy with the thoughts that are in your mind, you're not happy with your surroundings, and you're not happy with the way people have treated you.

The thought that you can't escape from within yourself is really terrifying. To be able to examine your thoughts when you write them down is really illuminating because you can read them back to yourself 5 minutes later, and have a completely different reaction to it than you had when you were thinking the thought. It becomes much easier at that moment to look at what you've written and say: 'well that's true from one angle but I can also see it from this position.' Your emotions are directly tied to your thoughts and you had no ability to be able separate them. Then you read it a couple of days later and you're in a different mood, and by looking at it from this exterior position you're able to mentally put it in it's place in a clearer way. By the brain taking in those same thoughts but in a completely different emotional context, you're able to establish some sort of separation between your thoughts and your emotions; which if you don't ever write anything down and don't ever look at yourself from the outside, you're incapable of doing.

I've resolved so many issues of my childhood from writing- page after page, when I was all revved up about them. By writing about them and reading them back to myself, somehow in that process I accomplished a lot of the same things that could potentially be accomplished by going to a therapist every week for years. I found it within myself to forgive people that I'd always resented, I'd always felt like a victim because of, and through writing them down I was able to see the balance of it all, and to not blame that person for their own actions but to realise that the way they treat people is the result of the way people treated them. There's no more point in being resentful of another person for something they've done then there is of being resentful of life itself- which to me doesn't really make any sense. The brain that's making that statement 'I resent life itself' is only here by virtue of that brain, so who's the 'I' talking? The 'I' talking is nature itself. If you're attaching importance to the opinion that life is f****d, you're automatically giving credence to life because life is the thing that's talking and saying what you think. Something's built into our characters, we all think a lot of what we ourselves think! Each person thinks their opinions are very true and valid. It's a built-in thing of our character. But I think to do that with your thoughts is really important [to write them down]. It's really bad to get lost inside yourself.'

I spoke to John about being trapped in a distorted headspace with thoughts spinning around…

'It's a really interesting tendency on the part of people- is that they like being twisted. There's a part of you that becomes comfortable there and you don't wanna be released. I get like that when I'm in a bad mood about something and somebody tries to cheer me up, but I don't want them to cheer me up. It's like I'm happier being miserable than I am being happy. There are certain situations where somebody who would rather stay in their misery might be superior in their relationship to life than somebody who's constantly trying to maintain a position of happiness- in that, there could potentially be a kind of emptiness. Sometimes people who go through life sad are some of the deepest people.

I can't imagine it [writing] not being good for anybody. I used to be superstitious about writing down my thoughts, I only would write down poetry. When I started writing down ordinary thoughts, I couldn't believe what a difference it made. Sometimes you might write the same thing all the time 'I'm so sad, I'm so miserable…' I've written those same entries in my notebook so many times- the same exact words. There's a feeling of getting it out. There are times when just the act of writing it itself ends up bringing you to a new perspective. Sometimes it's not even reading it back; as you're writing it the train of thought is different as it's more moderated. When you're thinking things, your thoughts have the ability to go at this incredibly fast pace, much faster than we speak or can write, so sometimes the process of writing is also a process of slowing down the thought stream to where you're thinking at a slower pace. You come to conclusions by thinking slower that you could when you're thinking faster.'

Can you describe the essence of your new album?
(Long pause and a groan from John)
"Ah man. I guess... yeah I don't know if I can answer that. I find myself thinking of the places it was coming from or the things that tied it together. I feel like I'd be doing them a disservice to try to put them into a paragraph or something. I'm sorry about that. I never felt so much like I'd put myself in a state where the record that insisted on being made. It was almost more like the record made me- like the record as a sort of a… I guess you could say like a level of existence that isn't expressed through matter or through people in their activities, that the level of existence that is always there and I had put myself in the right place for that level of existence to express itself through me- and that is just what occurred.

I've just never felt so much like, except maybe with the exception of my first solo record- it felt like that same thing was happening. That it felt like there's some other plane of existence that's expressing itself through me that couldn't be expressed any other way than for somebody to be in exactly the mental place, the mental and spiritual and psychological place that I was at, at that time. And for it to be through music and could not be expressed in any other way but music and words set to music.

The essence of it is some immeasurable, unfathomable, unquantifiable place that's not a place that anybody could put their finger on. That’s the best way I can describe it without just trying to reduce everything to understandable things- that would be true to what happened. It was almost like I've had ideas for things and they would just seem like ideas of a direction I wanted things to go, or sound that I was looking for- and the way that circumstances would end up, so in harmony with that, whatever that vague spot was: as a concept. What was happening a lot was that these vague ideas of a concept or direction or continuity in the lyrics, as things gradually came together as I worked on this record, every so often over the course a year I would find that things that would seem to be chance would end up having a direct link to fleshing these vague ideas- that wasn't something vague at all. And so it carries that feeling that this is something trying to express itself and it's using me to do it. And although I had specific conceptual ideas in relationship to it- they were much more vague than the final result was. And for that reason I felt that my brain and my soul were a sort of a middleman, and felt like the real participant in it was something unknown, and the final result which couldn't be anything other than it ended up being.

That's the closest I can come to describing the essence of it because it's something that isn't accessible in any other way than exactly the way I went about accessing it. I was really wanting to make a record that I could sit down and listen to late at night and it would trip my head out. I really wasn’t listening to much rock music and was really wanting to make rock music that had all the qualities that I was wanting to hear in music. I can't go too deep into it but things like tonal variation and things like sonic effects and certain psychedelic... the music sorts of builds like a… the music builds spaces. You might be in a room with a 12 foot ceiling but the music you're hearing makes you feel like its a hundred foot tall or something. I wanted to produce those kind of effects with music. It was important for me to need to create these spaces with music. So I think a lot of my motivation was wanting to build rooms and spaces and create a certain artificial environment through the electronic medium of the studio. I guess I don't want to ...I'm not prepared to go into the lyrical aspect now, but what I wanted to achieve with the lyrics was also very specific. And again I had no idea how specific it was gonna be. As specific as it was to me in relationship to anything else I've done- it was still very vague in a lot of ways compared to how specific it ended up being. And for this reason I feel like I was just some sort of a link- that there was something that needed to be expressed. So the essence of it is probably all unknown stuff.’ (John laughs)"

I talked to John about how music influences on one’s mind state:

‘Everything that happens has a big influence on the state of mind. Our senses are constantly being bombarded with all kinds of things that are making a constant change to what goes on inside of us. We have so many tendencies that have been put in place by things that have happened to us in life, and everything that happens to us to some degree affects our tendencies in the future and affects our state of mind. To me what I’m noticing more with music- that separates it from incidents that happen- that change somebody’s state of mind, is that it seems to come through another channel besides the five senses. When the music is being created, the ideas enter the musician from an unknown source, through a channel that there’s no medical term for, no biological term, no psychological term for. There’s some channel that the ideas come through and the sense of musical balance that the musician employs in order to organise the ideas. That’s also something that there’s also no word for. It’s all the unknown, and a person that has a good sense of musical organisation has no idea where that sense came from. Partially it may come from loving and listening to music and really appreciating the balance and organisation of music that’s so cosmic, but there’s a lot of people who appreciate it that don’t have a sense of it, of how to manipulate that organisation, how to take control of it.

I would say that in the creation of music, where the ideas are coming from- why one idea means a great deal to me and another idea means nothing to me- and that there’s some sort of mental criteria to distinguish between these two things; it’s not something that anybody has grasped in any way. And then in the reception of music, I don’t believe it’s just the notes, chords or melodies in themselves (although there’s a lot to ponder just in those- why they affect people in the way they do). I also think that what’s underestimated when people are judging music is that you are hearing the intention of the composer or musician or the band or whatever. I believe that there’s a sort of  6th sense when we’re hearing music and some people have this. For some people this sense is clearer than for others.

You can hear when someone is doing something for reasons such as personal gain or ego gratification, and when the intention is to purely explore this wondrous thing which is the nature of music as it’s presented to us by the laws of the cosmos. If you put some crap, some commercial band who’s only doing it because it’s how they make their living and they get a certain amount of ego gratification from it- if that same band played a Fugazi song, it wouldn’t mean the same thing as what it means to somebody who needs to hear Fugazi to feel good. It’s not a matter of the song, it wouldn’t matter how well it was played; we’re hearing something behind the music. We hear the psychological state of the people who are playing or composing it, and I feel that something else comes through into the listener besides what’s apparent to the senses. I feel really sure of that.

I really feel that when you’re talking about the reception or music or the creation of music- the most important parts of can’t be quantified or measured, and there’s no way to put your finger on them. I feel like it’s that way with love and to any person who has a special thing; if there’s a guy obsessed with mechanics or if there’s a guy obsessed with plants or something. These things produce an excitement in people that can’t be measured by just the virtues of the subject themselves. There’s some sort of connection between that persons soul and whatever that thing is that they really love, and it seems like music has this direct connection to excite a much larger group of people than most isolated subjects. I think part of the reason for this has to with the fact- I think there are messages that are coming across in music. There are messages that music is conveying, there are truths about the nature of existence. In nature, you have your things like trees and flowers, grass, human beings and brains, water, and air. There are these other things that are part of the fabric of existence that exist- like for instance numbers exist as a part of nature regardless of whether there’s the human understanding of them.

In other words the human understanding of a number is more a symbol of the thing. We have no way to actually grasp numbers in of themselves, even thought they’re an inescapable part of existence. With music you have mind boggling things going on with numbers. The truth about numbers themselves is that they all exist as one thing together. They’re all dependant on one another. There’s no existence of 4 without the existence of 3. There’s no 1 billion without the existence of 2 billion. All numbers are interdependent on one another and need one another to exist, and so they are one thing. But it’s the nature of the human mind to perceive these differences from one thing to the other. I don’t think that these differences exist not only with numbers, but I don’t think a tree is any different from a person- is any different from the air- is any different from the water. I think we’ve been blessed with this psychological ability to be able to differentiate between one thing and the other. It’s all existing in harmony with one another. To me it expresses that no one thing is different from anything else. With numbers, every one absolutely needs the other one to exist, and so- are all one number. Or you could say numbers are all one thing.’

I asked John to elaborate on his meditation practice:

'In your daily life, if you have a thought that's motivated through insecurity or fear, (or in a lot of cases garbage that your brain is manufacturing, that you find yourself caught up in) - it's the nature of our minds that once a thought arises, for that thought to become another and another, with our days going by with these trains of thought. These trains end up being interrupted by something circumstantial: You run into a person and start a new conversation and the thoughts go away for a second, or you sit in-front of a TV screen and that blocks the thoughts out. In your daily life you're usually consumed by these thoughts when there's no distractions. A lot of the time you're worried about whether this or that is gonna happen, or is this person mad at me, or am I not handsome enough, or am I not sexy enough or whatever it is. These kind of thoughts end up producing these really vast trains our brains are inescapable from, because the whole thing is being led by the emotions. The thoughts and emotions are tied to one another.

With meditation a lot of people have this misconception that the purpose is not to think anything, but to me the most valuable part of it is to establish a type of detachment from your thoughts, in which your emotions and thoughts are cut off from one another. The purpose when you're sitting down with a technique like Vipassana is to observe your thoughts and to not get involved in them. Let them move by like they're a cloud.

And so for me the most valuable part that I've noticed the effects of are: Before I meditate there may be some things I'm worried about, that I'm thinking about all the time. I'm pointlessly going from one possibility to another of what is going to happen if this doesn't happen, worrying about things. You sit down to meditate and let's say you're doing some sort of mantra based meditation for example, the thought comes into your mind of this thing you've been thinking about, but you bring your attention back to the mantra. Or with some form of Vipassana you bring your attention back to a body part or just observe the thought but don't jump to the next thought. And what happens is, in that one moment of where you made that decision, though the thought exists I'm bringing my attention back to the mantra. It's like you've untied the rope that you're connecting to. One second you were tied to building and the next you untied the rope and you were walking away.

And so in a situation like that where something has been bothering me, I sit down with meditation and the same thoughts come up; I continually apply the technique of centring my brain, doing the technique of the meditation. Coming out of it the same thoughts come into my brain and yet they don't produce the second or third thought. I've established a disconnection between them and it's almost as if the thoughts are afraid of me instead of me being afraid of the thought. You end up finding that the thought doesn't have the same power over you because in that one moment you disconnect with that thought the thought from your emotion. The thought occurred in your head but it didn't occur in an emotional state. It occurred when you were just applying the technique and the next thing you know the thought doesn't have as much power over you.

To me it wouldn't matter if you were thinking the whole time when you were meditating. As long as you were making that effort to do what the technique consists of, you're doing something very powerful by not letting your whole inner mental rhythm be determined by your emotions and finding another focal point for yourself that has nothing to with anything emotional. It might be boring to some people, but that's the point of it. To have a half hour of sever boredom is actually really valuable as you're not bored when you're worrying and being insecure; you're consumed by it.

People with problems, their lives are really exciting. People that create drama around themselves, their lives are really full of excitement all the time. That's not what I'm looking for in life. You develop that relationship to what initially appears to be boredom, and then you see it was more like my emotions were addicted to fear, insecurity and worry, and you can gradually through that process learn to disconnect yourself (the parts of you that felt they needed to be scared or insecure or to find some sort of excitement). By disconnecting your emotions from those thoughts you end up opening up room in yourself to find excitement in other areas, and more excitement from the places that can really do you some good like music or friends or books.'

The next part to come soon…

Interview by Chris Phillips.