Meditation location #31 – CBA tour – Amstelveen - I found a park across from the venue where I sat next to a small pond. Reflecting in the water directly in front of me was an upside down tree. I immediately saw in it the classic ‘Sephiroth’ from Kabbalistic (Jewish mysticism) teachings. Also known as the ‘Tree of Life’, the image of the Sephiroth has ten energy centers and is basically a diagram that represents how the universe came into being. It’s often seen as linked to the human body. Do a Google image search to get an idea.

Some views consider the Sephiroth to be like a spiritual map, or a neophyte’s key to understanding hyper-dimensional physics. It’s also viewed as the path of a soul’s incarnation in the physical (as we know it) third dimension. Sounds complex, but all this esoteric language has been reduced to bare bones practicality since the post-Madonna endorsement. Her late 90′s album Ray Of Light was a Kabbalah-inspired coming-out record. She essentially introduced pop culture to these teachings and made the ‘red’ string bracelet a valuable piece of yarn. I don’t discount it’s potency for a minute since the placebo effect alone can work wonders on any believing human, and all power to ‘em.

Go to any big city Kabbalah center or website and you’ll find these bright pop colored coffee table books written in huge fonts elucidating the essence of the teachings. It can almost appear like candy-coated spiritual materialism on the surface, but inside those eye-catching flashy book covers is some good old universal truth, as found in any great spiritual tradition. They make it all seem blaringly obvious and common sense-like. Jews tend to be good at that!

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Cynic’s Paul Masvidal has been chronicling the band’s U.S. and European Carbon-Based Anatomy tour as part of his Metta Mind Journal column here on MetalSucks over the past few days. Check out previous entries here. Today’s meditations come from the band’s tour stops in Copenhagen and Hamburg.

Meditation location #29 – CBA tour – Lyngsby / Copenhagen, Denmark - Sold out show! The most interesting part of my day was photographing these white berries I saw on a small barren tree just outside the venue. From afar they looked like glowing little alien pods in this dark patch of foliage. In one of my photographs, a sprite appeared as one of the pods; it was a centipede-like nymph with the face of a baby dove seal.

I meditated on the emergency ladder, at rooftop height and listened to the freeway on my left, as I quieted the mind and took refuge in stillness. What a gift it truly is to have meditation in life.

I had one person ask me post-show what ‘karmic thread’ means. He was referring to the song “Carbon-Based Anatomy.” I told him that I understood it to be that we’re all accumulating karma on a daily basis by our actions, and there’s a ‘thread’ we’re connected to (according to certain spiritual traditions, this would include past lives), that ultimately ripens. It appears in a more obvious way during the ‘dramatic periods’ of our life. The connective tissue of the karmic thread is always there, so as we accumulate merit with our ability to surrender/love or do the opposite, like going backwards, this thread essentially holds the energetic imprint of our soul. It’s who we’ve always been, mapped out like a universal grid ready to manifest as needed based on personal and collective energy.

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Cynic’s Paul Masvidal has been chronicling the band’s U.S. and European Carbon-Based Anatomy tour as part of his Metta Mind Journal column here on MetalSucks over the past few days. Check out previous entries here. Today’s meditations come from the band’s tour stops in Berlin and Osnabrück, Germany. 

Meditation location #27 – CBA tour. Berlin – Mark, our stage manager, whose bones are built of hearty Aussie stock, warned me with ‘it’s cold out there!’, as I stepped outside. When Mark says it’s cold, I listen. Rain! sleet!! hail!!! snow!!! Repeat… then came the WIND! Holy shit. Our bus driver Max was kind enough to walk Erin (our tour manager) and I up to a nearby restaurant where he treated us to a delicious breakfast.

Berlin has a sprawling big city vibe, packed with humans doing things. My sight line was immediately filled with graffiti. I can appreciate street art in most cities… in this area of Berlin, it’s nearly everywhere you look, like a backdrop. What’s interesting is that, an outsider looking in, at first glance, might think it’s a rough neighborhood == with our ghetto pop culture association to graffiti — although I realized quickly this area was far from ghetto. I think they might actually appreciate the street art aesthetic around here. The neighborhood outside the bus was filled with little boutique hipster stores selling t-shirts, jeans, vinyl, etc, along with the miscellaneous Turkish (falafel), and trendy, posh restaurants.

The streets were busy, and all the humans braving the weather encouraged me to do the same. I found myself up on a bridge where I took some photos, one of which was of a bicyclist riding towards me, squinting his eyes to protect himself from the hail. My feet were drenched. I only packed one pair on this tour and they’re kinda like vans in that they’re made of a sponge-like canvas. I’m reminded of last night’s rain, which was making a beautiful sound. I heard it from inside my bunk as it hit the roof of our bus. The flurry of drops had this complex rhythm going like some new school drum and bass meets electronic white noise. I wanted to record some of it, but was too tired to grab my phone.

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Cynic are currently on tour in Europe, so vocalist/guitarist Paul Masvidal has decided to revive his Metta Mind Journal MetalSucks column in the form of a tour diary. Earlier this week we published the first group of entries from the U.S. portion of the tour and the first few European dates, yesterday we published Paul’s meditations from Vienna and Budapest, and today we follow with Slovakia and Prague.

Meditation location #25 – CBA tour. Slovakia – We rushed out of the bus and I went into a cafe / bar connected to the venue. Tobacco companies are making a killing in these parts. Across the board, folks of all ages puffing away. I couldn’t hang in the smokiness, so I walked further down the road and found a cafe that was warm and had some ginger tea, in a non-smoking room. Across the street was a park with a large sculpture of a poetically shaped human. Just behind it, underneath its ‘behind’ I sat on my behind and meditated. Surrounding me was a busy city, while various pedestrians made their way across the park. Considering the rough and seemingly dirty aesthetics of these city streets, I found it balanced by a general attractiveness amongst the Slovakian people.

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Cynic are currently on tour in Europe, so vocalist/guitarist Paul Masvidal has decided to revive his Metta Mind Journal MetalSucks column in the form of a tour diary. Yesterday we published the first group of entries from the U.S. portion of the tour and the first few European dates, and today we have longer meditations from Vienna and Budapest. More will follow in the coming days.

Meditation location #23 – CBA tour. Vienna – Woke up feeling melancholic. Maybe it’s my sensitive, organic nature interacting with the dark, grey weather I saw from my bunk window. I brushed my teeth, had some fruit, and meditated in an open field across from a stage for, I’m guessing… summer concerts. I’ll be an intentional airhead today and sink into my body. I walked, and walked, and walked. On my way back to the venue I came upon a mall, and walked to the end of a long corridor on the 3rd floor where I found a music store. Some kid in the back was playing Nirvana’s Teen Spirit and then went into Aerosmith’s Dream On. Just by viewing the back of his body and how he held the guitar I could see he was a natural player. I mentally wished him happiness on his musical journey and left the store.

This day marked the 1/2 way point for our 19 shows in 19 days tour. 19 in numerology adds up to the #1. I’m trusting in the auspiciousness of 19 today. And even if that’s not worth holding onto, I’ll let it be my number for today. When I got back to the bus, I noticed everyone was a bit grumpy and irritable. Tour busses form their own field around them like a single organism. They collectively think and feel together over time. I realized being the human sponge that I am, I was just absorbing the vibes of our collective muck, and with just that one insight I could now play with the yucky energy that was floating around. Likes / dislikes, the game of good and bad. It’s a parade of arguing with reality and believing that our argument is of any good. So I come back to this moment and just breathe deep, for this moment is all I really have and all I really need. It’s that simple.

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Cynic have been on tour for approximately the past month and a half, starting with their headlining performance at the inaugural Metal Suckfest, trekking across the country to the West Coast, then skipping over to Europe. What started as an effort by Paul Masvidal to simply chronicle each day’s meditation with a brief thought and a photo has evolved into an in-depth daily journal, so Paul thought it would be a good time to revive his Metta Mind Journal column on MetalSucks. These journals are also available via Paul’s Facebook page.

Paul began the diary on the tour’s fifth day, in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, Michigan. While his early entries are brief they’re no less interesting to read than the later ones which are much longer and more introspective. We’ve decided to group those early entries together and publish them all today, #5 through #22, which takes us through Slovenia. Tomorrow we’ll pick up with entry #23 from Vienna where Paul really starts to expand the scope of his journal entries.

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Mind-Less

“When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you don’t run around the countryside thinking, ‘I am all this!’ There is simply all this.” —Alan Watts

The end is near; the end of a cycle. We just rehearsed today for the first time since our last European tour that ended in mid-June. It was like putting on an old pair of jeans. We slipped right in and felt comfortable; relaxed enough to loosen up completely and just have fun. It was the kind of rehearsal I enjoy the most, if I had to rate them.

Today was hot and muggy in Los Angeles. Our rehearsal room was even hotter and muggier than outside — and it worked. The clam factor forced us to give in to the discomfort… and rollick. We said, “Fuck it,” and the music flowed out of our biology like tadpoles consuming life. A raw, uninhibited quality took shape and found a way to be heard. It was pure instinct alongside a carefree sense of humor. We detached and let the music do the work.

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*Compassionate Discrimination

*Compassionate Discrimination: Having astute judgment without being scornfully judgmental; seeing difficult truths about a situation or person without closing your heart or feeling superior. In the words of Alan Jones: having the ability “to smell a rat without allowing your ability to discern deception sour your vision of the glory and joy that is everyone’s birthright.” —from “The Outlaw Catalog of Cagey Optimism” in Rob Brezsny’s book, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.

When I was younger, I would easily become attached to people when I first met them, especially if I felt we had a connection—and I would often cry when I had to say good-bye to someone I felt connected to. I still occasionally cry when I’m saying bye to a friend I may not be seeing again for an indefinite period of time. The good-byes are encapsulated mini-deaths that force me to let go. Perhaps the attachment stems from a childhood of constant renewal, instability, and change. It’s the kid in me wanting to hold on for just one more minute because back then, I never could. Eventually, I learned that friendships change and evolve in their own unique way.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to have friends, what it means to be one—and how we often think that we’ll know our friends for a lifetime, or that they’ll always be around. The truth is, like everything in life, our closest friendships are always changing and growing, and may eventually end. Some friendships will grow apart and other people I never felt close to may someday grow near.

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Slender Threads

Last week I was having coffee with a couple of friends in a cafe restaurant. One of my buds was sitting across from me on a large table and we were having a hard time hearing each other speak over the noise, so I began to make funny expressions and movements with my hands, embodying a style of humor that an old mate used to perform for a bunch of us when I used to work as a bartender. Back then, Jeff would pretend that he had long hair and would mime shaping it into the form of a Mohawk, or massive spikes protruding from his head. His facial expressions were serious and committed, as though it was a real job to style his invisible hair. He would look into a mirror and prepare his massive punk locks with gels and glue to form these extreme shapes poking out of his cranium. His outstretched arm would perfect the point on each spear, his facial expressions exhibiting great purpose while taking on this important task.

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“Violence is unconscious rage fueled by deep sorrow.”

—L.C.

Someone broke into my home last week and left it looking like an FBI raid with nothing left unturned, including my cat’s ash box that was left open, along with every other small box, case, and container in the house. They even scoured the attic, most likely looking for cash and maybe some jewelry. As soon as I stepped through the front door, I had an intuition that there was some kind of phantom thought-form energy that had found its way into the house. Immediately, I grabbed the sage and began smudging all the rooms. (Smudging is a ritualized way of clearing energy, which can be electromagnetic, emotional, ionic and so on.) When I dialed 911, the operator told me there was another case that took precedence—a homicide on the west side of town, close to where I live—and that my burglary was “put into the queue.” After hearing those words, my problem became miniscule. What are material objects compared to the loss of a loved one? Someone else had just lost a friend or family member. It was in this instant that I was reminded of how much violence pervades us as a species.

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…the paramecium senses no more of the flute’s sweet warble than we do of the radio waves that pass through our bodies. It spends its life in silence, or more correctly, in soundlessness, for silence is the delicious muffle of an auditory system in repose, and an animal lacking an auditory system can no more know silence than one born blind can know darkness.

—from Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy by Robert Jourdain

I’m back at it with a particular tune, noticing how the space of silence is critical to the ebb and flow of a song’s evolution and ultimately, the shape of its birth.

Silence is not just about absence, subtraction, or less than. In any arrangement, silence can be performed in the service of contraction or expansion, very much like inhales and exhales. Silence also has a resonant quality because only in the vibrational space of silence can we better feel the parts composed of sound.

I was thinking about this spatial-songwriting concept on the way to rehearsal today and realized that, at present, I’m inside this particular tune as its shape evolves subtly and I’m hurling myself into a modus operandi that I have little control over. My only job here is to maintain a slow, nurturing cultivation….way more detached than smothering. A disciplined patience that sits, waiting for nothing to happen. Calmly active and nowhere to go. Just radiating simple “IS-ness” through the creative process.

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Don’t think I haven’t noticed how that rotten Paul Masvidal (armed with his lousy awesome columns about happiness) has raised the intellectual level of MetalSucks to at least high school. And I must protest. Yes, Masvidal is wonderful, but c’mon dude! We’re trying to bicker about Mustaine and boobs here, man.

It’s like his guileless insights, so eloquently stated, render sub-retards like me too self-conscious to, say, publish 6,800 words about the hand-hug from Ronnie James Dio a fortnight ago that has changed my life. And suddenly, after I complete a second extended harangue about Stephen Pearcy, my finger hovers over the button that reads SUBMIT FOR REVIEW ‘cuz I’m thinking, “Will Paul think this is bullshit? Wait a minute. This is bullshit!’ It’s like I have another editor. A silent, invisible editor by remote suggestion!

MASVIDAL!!!!!!!

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Moms, Magic, and a Little Legwork

I started writing lyrics for a new song this week. For me, each song has its own story or feeling that it’s trying to share, and my job is to discover the song’s truth, or, get as close to articulating what it’s trying to say. The vibe of this new tune is reflective and assertive at the same time, kind of like being gently nudged into a river, knowing that we won’t drown, but that we’ll have to learn how to swim ourselves. After finishing a first draft of the lyrics, I realized the story of this song would also lend itself well to the next column, so here we are:

Between the ages of seven and ten, we lived in a house that had a big trampoline in the backyard. My friend Anna was over one day and we did our usual jumping routine. One of our favorite games was double-jumping each other to see who could go higher. It’s a trick where one jumps a split second before the other and it causes the second jumper to multiply the strength of their bounce by fifty percent or more. During one of these double jumps, I found myself soaring higher than I’d ever been, but on my way down, something didn’t look right. As gravity had its way, and with the trampoline no longer beneath me, I watched my legs hurtle toward the metal rails that framed the trampoline’s edge. My left leg slid perfectly into the narrow space between the two rails, but too narrow for my knee. I heard a loud “Crunch!”

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Remember, friends, as you pass by
as you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare yourself to follow me.

—From a headstone at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California

In the early nineties, Sean and I made a record called Human with the Florida band Death. In the month prior to our recording date, Chuck Schuldiner and Steve DiGiorgio made their way down to Cynic’s rehearsal studio in Miami to tighten up the songs with us. One night, I was driving the four of us back from the Coconut Grove area, where we had stopped for dinner after rehearsal. Just as we reached the fork in the road where Ingraham Highway splits with Matheson Avenue, I saw something strange. I noticed some tiny lights blinking off in the distance through green foliage and trees. I slowed down, saying, “Those lights look weird. Do you mind if we turn around and check it out?”

I pulled a U-turn and we made our way back to the edge of the lot. We parked and walked up to find two bodies, along with motorcycle parts strewn across the grass and shrubs. We saw one helmet on the ground and were able to piece together that they must have swerved off the road and bounced off the giant oak tree that grew in the center of the enclosure. I approached the first body and saw that it was a girl with long red hair. She was lying there, twitching and unconscious, her body twisted in an awkward and unnatural way. The man, who appeared to be severely injured, started moving slightly and was trying to say something.

Steve approached him and asked, “Are you OK?”

In a hushed and pained voice, we heard the man say, “Give me my gun.”

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Journal entry, twelve years ago:

“Today I am sad. It hurts to be human. The walls are closing in on my peace and I go deeper into a sadness all too familiar. The tears from my formative years when I would cry incessantly because of psychic pain have arisen again. A resurgence of that old pain is in my body like a parasite I can’t control. I’m a suffering child. The human experience can be very trying and today I am tested. Today I am broken. All hope is lost. I am exhausted. Where does my fervor for life come from?”

…after that journal entry, I wrote this poem:

Cactus
Black bones in me
Corroding everything
They’re floating free in my eyes
You say I’m losing my sight
Don’t rescue me
I don’t plan on getting out
I’ve lost the key
Hug me I’m a cactus

I was on the edge that day.

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[Welcome to Mettā Mind Journal, the new MetalSucks column by Cynic guitarist/vocalist Paul Masvidal. Expect a new entry every Wednesday from Paul about life, art, music and the world at large. -Ed.]

One question that comes up a lot during interviews is, “So, how did the band start?” Sean Reinert and I met in elementary school at Gulliver Academy, in Miami, Florida. The principal was a lady named Mrs. K. who I severely offended time and time again just by being me. One day, in 6th grade, as I was walking to class, I ran into Mrs. K., who took one look at my hair that hung just below my shirt collar, and said, “Your hair’s too long. You need to come into my office.” I followed her down the hall, took a seat in her office, and staring me in the face was a plaque of the famous “Christ at 33” image. And out of my mouth came this:

“Would you have him cut his hair if he were a student at your school?” This pissed her off and she threw me out of her office, saying I wasn’t fit for her school. My mother came in and tried to reason with her, “Do you ask the kids to cut their nails? It’s just hair, another natural part of their body…and it’s not that long.” She didn’t like my mother, either.

I made it through 6th grade (it was the tale end of the school year) and went to a school called Riviera for 7th grade. It was smaller, more liberal, and they let me grow my hair out past my shoulders. I remember not liking how straight my hair was when it grew out, so my mother took me to the hair salon and got me a perm! It actually became embarrassing because I went from straight hair to spiral curls overnight, and most of my fellow classmates weren’t that impressed. I didn’t particularly like it, either. It was too much too soon. Luckily the curls relaxed quickly and I grew to appreciate what I had naturally. One of my fondest memories at that school was my suspension trick. I’d break a stink bomb in the corner of the classroom and the stench would be so horrid that we’d have to evacuate and sit outside. Of course the teacher would need someone to confess to the dirty deed, and that would be me… heh heh. I would then be sent home (mission accomplished!) where I could play my guitar in peace.

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