So we're all still drinking the Kool-Aid

So we're all still drinking the Kool-Aid

This is part of the conclusion that I came to is recently when we went to see a concert, one of my favourite bands, an American prog rock band called Tool who we saw at the Manchester AO Arena. And it's music I love to listen to, very deep, very complex for that genre and really interesting, built on a lot of classical scales.

They have musical timings that create such incredible changes in the music that they produce, really really class act. They're a very interesting band because they've got a lot of leanings towards a more spiritual view on life, a more broad view on life and they're very much trying to encourage us to wake up to ourselves, be healthy, look at the world through different eyes, through our hearts, despite it being quite a heavy rock genre as well.

I don't know how many people were in the stadium that night, thousands definitely. They're all here to see this band. They're not a run -of -the -mill band that you just go along and see for the fun of it. They're a band that you listen to because you love their music.

I love how they present themselves, they've always been inviting people towards a greater degree of consciousness going back many years in their music. The album that they're touring at the moment, called Fear Inoculum, is very much about kind of waking up to a lot of the stuff that's around you. And in particular, one of their songs, Pneuma, a term that means breath or spirit, the vital spirit that animates the soul.

This a song about fulfilment only really being found through spiritual growth and awareness. That the perception of our reality is limited, that we're living in kind of an illusion, a malaise, and it's an invitation to change that, to wake up, to remember yourself, to become another thing. Some of the lyrics are saying that we're bound, to reach out beyond this flesh to become something more. That we're born of one breath, one word, we are all one spark, sun becoming, that this guise, this mask, this dream that we're living in is something to wake up for. The singer Maynard who writes the lyrics talks about he's inviting a child to wake up, child wake up, child wake up, repeated over and over.

It was a really moving concert for me. I really love that music, and we had amazing seats to see an amazing show. But part of what our view allowed us was to watch was what was happening around us and the space that we were in. Tool are a very interesting band and the fact that they don't allow you to take film and video during their gigs. They ask you not to do that. One of the first things that the singer Maynard says to the crowd is “come with us on this journey, be present with us, connect with what we're doing and journey into this space with us”. And then on the very last song they play, they say if you want to get your phones out and photograph and video this, you go for it. But that's it. They try and keep that that energy alive. And for the most part, people are quite respectful of that.

But as I'm sat there in this event, I'm looking around at people drinking massive gallons of beer, and not good quality beer but just rubbish that is in these venues. You're not allowed to take your own water in with you, so my partner and I, we were only drinking water at this gig. And you can only buy the plastic bottled water, which you can taste the chemicals in the water. You know you're ingesting microplastics within that. You know that the foods that people are consuming, the fries, the burgers, the nachos, the sweets, all of these horribly chemically laden products that are adverse to health, adverse to wellness, adverse to the very message that the band are trying to share with people and yet there we are all drinking the Kool-Aid as we listen to this expression of spirituality and creativity and trying to be something different and again it's one of the things I love about the singer of this band if you listen to some of these interviews he's really trying to encourage people just to be a little bit more cultured educated aware of the path through life that we are taking and yet you've got thousands of people (and I’m generalizing here) that looking ill and unwell in their minds, unwell in their parts of their body, unwell in some part of their behaviour, drinking beer and eating the terrible food.

It just felt like such a weird contrast to me that it really stuck out to me being in that space, for listening to that music and understanding or feeling the message that they're trying to convey within their process and then realizing that people are missing a part of that as they're still stuck in their model of consumption. I'm still in that model of consumption.

As much as I've tried to limit it and refine it and regulate it as best I can. It's something that isn't perfect yet, otherwise I wouldn't have even been in that room with those people, you know, as much as I support the band and love hearing them play that music live. It's that invitation for me as well to try and wake up again, wake up again, wake up again.

I can remember being asked years ago, in an interview what it was like to wake up and my answer at the time was which time? The first time or one of the subsequent times because there are multiple awakenings, multiple invitations to look deeper into life and see different things and this was another occasion just to reflect on the path that I'm walking the path others are walking and notice those incongruences and those disconnections and those unhealthy patterns. It was really interesting to do that.

So I just wanted to put that together and share that and think about that. And I'm curious what you think about that. How many of you are still drinking the Kool-Aid? How many of you are still feeling that you're disconnected from your Pneuma, your spirit, that connection with oneness? I’d love to hear your thoughts.