Episode 43 - One Wild Life Body (Part 3)

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and the path to wisdom to enlightenment we often see things at a distance before we are able to reside there [Music] for instance we may see that we want healthier eating habits but are unable to discipline ourselves enough to follow through we may see that we want to be a more compassionate person but are unable to maintain the perspective of putting others first all of us have this tendency to fall back into old habits and ways of thinking even if that's not what we desire to do even when we recognize that the ways we used to live don't work we often have a hard time staying in the transcendence that we've tasted [Music] this song breath within the breath is about this tension at this point of the record there has been a revelation we've seen the sort of life we want to live we want to be present to the light that is right before our eyes we want to be present and still within that sacred empty space within that is free from noise and attachment the breath within the breath but as we open our eyes we don't just see the light we see the world around us and the world is messy [Music] the beginnings of this song were written in response to some of the political and social mess in our world right now brexit trump racism isis list goes on and on so much is so broken there have been times when i felt embarrassed about being a human being i remember going to the movies a couple months ago in the middle of all sorts of violence that was happening terrorist attacks police shootings and an attempt to get away from all of that for a bit just going to the movies trying to relax i looked around and saw that on the movie posters there wasn't a single one without a gun on it i was just so disgusted at it all all the violence and the hearts of human beings and it's easy for me to look and point the finger but there's some part of me that knows that it's in my heart as well i drive down the street i see all the cars in los angeles polluting the environment i see all the tension the loneliness the suffering the anger i've tasted that breath within the breath that makes all of this beautiful but it's so easy to lose that perspective i can't help but ask how long will it be like this how long until i can actually remain in the kind of perspective and life that i want to live breath within the breath um starts out a little bit of a dark trip [Laughter] but that's okay uh it gets darker [Laughter] no amazing it's just amazing to go from like that light and then just you know the world is full of liar full of cheats you don't you didn't know me then but when i was a younger man and earlier in my marriage i was basically a pathological liar i just lied all the time it just if i could get away with it or to make myself feel better and it's a it's an impulse that i still occasionally hear call to me from this day and the only reason i can fight it is i remember the the fallout in relationships from being dishonest and the song is more about obviously more than just lying but i love the way it drew this parallel between how we tend to force onto an external frame and see in other people like what we despise in ourself but then understanding that in some way that's part of the entire human experience really really really powerful [Music] i think we all have these experiences where you see something you see the light you have a moment where you really feel like oh i get how it is and then you see other stuff and you're like you know i mean a lot of us had born again experiences like that early on in our lives where we became christians or the old way of life wasn't working and then jesus has saved me from all of this stuff and it's you're alive and it's all you see the light and then you're part of a church for a while and you see how that works or you have a mystical experience i mean i think you always have these like moments of clarity and highs and then the pendulum swings back uh and it can be a tiring fight and so this is kind of uh it's a post where we've already we've started seeing the light but one experience when does that ever happen where it's like yeah it happened and i've just always been perfect ever since i've always just been present there's that that swinging that happens and and how do you navigate within all of that and now let's hear breath within the breath [Music] the world is full of liars full of cheese [Music] the ritual down the pool beneath their feet [Music] i don't see that wickedness in me [Music] but maybe i'm just blind and cannot see sometimes i get tired of being alive embarrassed by the plight of humankind [Music] i thought i had the answers once before searching for that emptiness inside the breath within the breath sight inside how long will it be like this [Music] imprisoned in the constructs of belief that i'm an individual with needs the soul inside is longing to be free [Music] [Applause] [Music] maybe that's okay part of the fight so how long will it be like this will it be like this [Music] [Music] [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash well the next track is my new favorite ganger song of all time really which is lovely broken yes wow yeah wow um wow i'm i don't know why i'm surprised about that i guess you don't like the song as much as i do that's your opinion i like no i like it it's exciting actually too really that's their favorite of ours ever wow i did not see those comments i like the song i just had no idea it was people's favorites it's so this song uh for those of you poor souls who haven't heard it yet again what is wrong with you um [Laughter] it's got a a a dual voiced melody and the voices take contrasting viewpoints and lead to a convergence which when authors do that in books it's the hardest way to write a story and it's amazing when they can pull it off and i had that same feeling in this song and didn't see it coming and i feel like this kind of lays out the two energies between presence and distraction hope and despair life and fear of death that have played through the record so far and oh it's just so beautifully done that's not a question that leads you to be able to say anything oh thank you thank you wow but so what made you how did you approach this from a songwriting perspective of of creating these kind of two voices well you know it's it's interesting because we actually wrote this one you know the chorus of this one during beautiful no the first verse the oh it's just the first verse that's right was it during beautiful things i think so or right after i mean it was a long time ago and we always really liked it but just for whatever reason couldn't finish it didn't feel like it was complete or if sometimes it felt a little too production-wise a little too like kind of disney the way we had it with with when i'm singing it was all very like flowery and then mike will come in and sing so my part was a very major flower rainbows and his was really really dark so kind of too uh contrasting so um but we also i don't think we had the maturity to know how to bring them together it was sort of like you had to live the story but part of it is like lisa's lisa's personality versus my personality yeah yeah yeah it did start like that because there was a while of like well this is yeah this is lisa and then this is michael and they even got to the point where though like some other people had commented on that where it kind of made me frustrated that that's how they saw us because i think internally my internal dialogue is sometimes very different than i think how i'm perceived by people or what or even how i want people to perceive me you know i think i am naturally a happier person um but my internal you have your darkness sometimes very dark you definitely have your darkness yeah yeah so as we've grown and especially a lot of the things that we've wrestled with the last few years um has really made us embrace beauty and pain alike so it's not just oh this is there's only two sides there you can either have like this cheery disposition or you're more melancholy and dark it is both and it's important to embrace not just to push aside one and feel like you have to be one way or the other but like it says in the chorus see the love see the heartbreak see all of it which we also say in the previous albums that's a hint to some of the previous um songs that we've done through the through the trilogy of embracing all the whole of life i also think i recognize both of those things in me i love the study that you often talk about in your talks now with the split brain thing uh have we talked about that in the podcast i don't know if you've ever done split brain on the podcast what you guys haven't that is that like changed my life [Laughter] are you kidding me i bet we have at some point lost maybe can you give a a little brief summary of that because that that idea i think probably helped this song finish and be what it is yeah do you think it is that idea helped me stay alive as a human being me too do you want to tell me that's neuroscience cue science music uh so your brain has two hemispheres the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere most people know that uh those two hemispheres are connected via a thick channel of nerves called the corpus callosum and in the 20th century scientists realized that epileptic seizures were caused by feedback between the two hemispheres of the brain across the corpus callosum and they decided to try to treat that because in some cases those seizures were life-threatening with experimental surgery that involved severing the corpus callosum and they had no idea what would happen when you did that so the first patient when they woke up they really didn't know what would occur and he was completely normal and in the weeks that followed he remained completely normal and so they started doing the surgery more often experimentally and and and you know keeping track of people who'd been through it and it was going so well that some neurosurgeons were contemplating doing corpus callosum brain surgery as a pre-emptive strike for anyone diagnosed with epilepsy because as brain surgery went it was a pretty easy procedure intel one of the first patients who had this happen went home one day to give his wife a hug and he ended up punching her with his left hand she was shocked but he was more shocked because he didn't make any conscious effort to punch her and then another woman who had the surgery grabbed a dress in her closet to go to work and as she was walking out of the closet her left hand grabbed a really loud floral pattern dress and then pinned her right hand against the wall until she dropped the dress and then another man said he had insomnia he couldn't sleep because his left hand closed around his own throat while he was going to sleep one night it's called alien hand syndrome and it led neuroscientists to theorize that maybe since you have two hemispheres you have two prefrontal cortexes do you have a separate consciousness in your right brain that acts as a mute slave to the left frame and they decided to test that by setting up a display system where they could set up a question where only one half of the brain can see it now the left brain can speak it has your speech uh center in the left temporal lobe the right brain is mute so they train the right brain to use the left hand to move scrabble tiles to answer questions and so they asked a young boy what he wanted to do when he graduated and he said out loud that he wanted to be a draftsman which is a thoroughly sensible occupation and then they asked him asked his right brain what he wanted to do and his left hand spelled out automobile racer these are dramatically different occupations and the two habits of the brain were not in agreement and now that there's no corpus callosum there the right brain could assert its agency without being controlled by the left and so in another case they actually ask someone do you believe in god and the person's left brain said no i don't believe in god but the right brain said i will always believe in god and so you had documented medical evidence of a theist and an atheist sharing space and a skull and so we talk about this idea of cognitive dissonance because since the enlightenment we've seen ourselves on this pursuit of truth through empirical knowledge and any failure to adhere to the evidence we call cognitive dissonance but it turns out that holding contradicting positions simultaneously is just a fundamental aspect of human consciousness like part of you wants to eat pizza right now and be thin later and that's because different parts of the brain want different things and so in that way that song could be viewed as different parts of a single brain speaking to itself and the way that we we have this embodiment of optimism and pessimism hope and despair joy and suffering learning to embrace both is learning to fully embody the human experience and anytime you try to stick to just one of the polls all you're doing is denying a large part of your own human experience so amazing i mean that is so important to a lot of us that have tension in our thoughts can help us understand ourselves more so let's listen to this song here in a second uh one more note about the production though it starts with this single note just this c sharp on the guitar so you're looking at this one thing and based on how you're looking at it you're you're seeing that one note as major or minor which it isn't either it's just a note um but interestingly that production decision ended up kind of enriching the lyric to me just the production itself by by looking at this one thing whatever perspective you're looking at it from it can be either thing you can sing major over you can sing minor over it and when you're doing that it feels like that um and so it's all it's all about perspective and there's also the musical element of this where there's kind of uh is this swung is it not how the eighth notes this is that's a musical thing uh for the nerds out there but it's kind of the song is kind of swung and kind of not depending on when when it is where you're looking at it from uh are you listening to the drums you're listening to guitars so welcome to the ambiguity of lovely broken everything is lovely everything is bright everything is here because of glorious desire [Music] everything becoming our salvation you and i [Music] we will survive is broken everything is pain everything is dark and pointless what is there to say everything is empty everything will die you and i [Music] see the night see the sunrise [Music] look at all the starving look at all the world how we cut the world to pieces tearing us apart look at all the mothers babies in their eyes look at how they give their bodies just to keep them warm [Music] every life is [Music] see [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we will be right [Music] and then we move into free uh which first of all kudos for um opening up that melody to really let william matthews do his thing yeah oh so good i mean it's it still fits sonically within the record but it it is it definitely embodies like william in in the melody line in the movement um tell us a little bit about uh what what where this song came from so i was actually uh just sitting at the piano uh messing around with some of these ideas because i was very brokenhearted with a lot of the shootings that had been happening the police brutality and people turning a blind eye to it and getting in fights on twitter and social media and uh so it was one of those moments i was feeling pretty um devastated with the way our world was and will we ever change or is this are we going to continue in circles and um i had called up william because we've been wanting to write a song together for a while and so so i called him up and said hey why don't you come over and we'll let's i think i need your voice in this william was feeling this tension pretty heavily as well that day so he came over and it was actually really easy to write this song so this song is very dear to william's heart because it depicts what he has grown up in and lives every day and i'm really i'm really glad we got to write it together and i'm really really glad he is he's featured on it and i think he he kills it he he sings it with passion and with a lot of honesty and he's become actually a really close friend of ours and i i feel real grateful that he's on this album it builds to such an anthem i mean it is a really powerful song yeah and you know we even when we were writing it the whole we the transition from we will all be free like with this we will thing to we are we kind of went back and forth on that even like well are we are we free are we it's definitely a kind of a declaration of hope to me where it fits on the record as far as like the concept that wrestling of lovely broken has been a big thing of my life my faith and deconstruction and where i've ended up since is never able to you know for so long i kept wrestling with theodicy and how could a good all-powerful god exist with the world that we see and so lovely broken is kind of is sort of the embrace of paradox it's the embrace of different perspectives of different planes of reality having paradox as part of the perspective being comfortable with tension and paradox allows some freedom to do the work of justice in a little better way even in a more efficient and productive way where you're fighting for equality on this earth we're fighting for justice but we're doing so not out of just out of one soul subjective selfish place but we're we're doing so where the burden is where is easy the yolk the yolk is easy the burden is light when you come to that place where you're not worried about tomorrow but you're still working for tomorrow you know it's it's a it's a challenging place to find to get to to it's a complicated paradoxical place to get to in your mind and your heart to let it all work together like that but i think when you can you can say it at the same time we will be free and we are free and the kingdom of god is advancing and it's here and it's not here and it's you know what i mean like you can deal with all of it um and work better at it when you're not so attached and when you're when you're actually free inside i think you can work for freedom better outside silent casualties oh god grant us peace in these sleepless nights i can hardly breathe despite brutality i know that we'll be free i know that we'll be free let the light keep it shine let it break into the darkness in these desperate times love will hold us here love will join our hands teach us to have no fear so we lay our way down to wash their feet when we see our brother [Music] all the love tears [Music] let it break we'll be free free we'll all be free will be free free will both be free [Music] we will all be free we [Music] [Music] let it all the break tells us [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we hope you've been enjoying this series of podcasts on one wildlife body if you have been enjoying it please do share with your friends the podcast and of course the music we'd love for you to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you listen to your music make playlists share it on social media you can talk about it with at conger music and then of course we are at the liturgists and we'd love to hear your thoughts uh thanks so much for the patrons that support this show on patreon and everybody that makes this possible we love doing this with you guys so much love talk to you tomorrow you