I have been so focused on writing and surviving the chaotic life situation I’m in that I haven’t touched a guitar in weeks. I have sat with a guitar in my lap for 50 years, and to this day it is a measure of well-being: if I don’t find myself playing, I am clearly struggling, because in the most central part of my Self, I am a musician through and through, and it is what matters to me the most, after my beloved wife and our rescue cats.
But the other day, I found myself picking up the guitar again, after a break of several weeks. And something extraordinary had happened.
Let me give you a bit of background information. Well over a decade ago, I had the pleasure to study improvisation with jazz legend Gary Burton in a 12-week online class, where he would guide the small group of students. We would analyse melodies and improvisations and then record our own improvisations and professor Burton would give detailed feedback to each student.
He said that whatever my improvisation is — because it is not jazz in the traditional sense — it works and I should keep developing my own voice. I think that is the most meaningful feedback I’ve ever received as an instrumentalist. Burton guided us in using 10 musical scales in a musical manner, and with those 10 scales, one could at least potentially tackle any song and improvise fluently over the harmonic changes.
I could immediately integrate 9 of the 10 scales into my improvisational vocabulary, but one — the altered scale — proved to be my Achilles’ heel. I could use it, but only mechanically, and it would not become a part of my natural vocabulary; I had to force it in there deliberately. My own golden rule for improvisation is that if you have to think of it while doing it, you are off and need more work on it. Another one of my teachers, Ron Thal, says that when it’s time to play, you play and let it just come, and analysis comes later, if needed.
I have lived with that one damn scale for over a decade. And to my surprise, it finally integrated into my playing without any conscious effort, and exactly when the effort had paused. In philosopher Lauri Rauhala’s terms, it had become integrated into my subjective worldview when I was not playing the guitar and was thinking about anything but music.
This might seem paradoxical to many because we are taught that the only way new skills integrate is through intentional effort and repetition. And so musicians drill and drill — licks, scales, techniques — until they become what psychology calls procedural memory. Procedural memory is what we call muscle memory in everyday language.
But there is more to it than that. Certainly, motor skills require procedural learning, but we are not only mechanics; we are also beings with consciousness. And so, armed with Lauri Rauhala’s theory of consciousness, I can see the bigger picture of what is going on.
For Rauhala, consciousness is a collection of experiences; it is everything we have experienced and experience now. Experiences exist in consciousness as meaning functions. A single experience is represented by a plethora of meaning functions. So, the altered scale for me is present as its name, as intervals in a notation, as a form on the fretboard, as a nuisance, as a learning challenge I want to overcome, as a mark for my musicianship and so on. It is worth noting that I am not aware of all the meaning functions associated with the scale and, in fact, most meaning functions are unconscious.
Human consciousness automatically organises these units of meaning into interrelated networks, and it happens mostly outside our awareness. We can witness the results, but never the organisational process, except maybe in sleep, when, in dreams, surprising connections, associations, and moods spontaneously appear and get linked.
The self-organisation of consciousness is not something we can intentionally direct. We can only bring rich experiences into consciousness and let it do the work. It will integrate something easily, while other things remain peripheral in our consciousness, and most of it is outside our awareness anyway.
So, we do what we do, and our consciousness does the rest. Now, this does, of course, not make something like practice futile. It is important because keeping a thing at the centre of awareness certainly seems to do its work in consciousness over time. Consciousness is anything but a static entity; it is continuously evolving and growing, and we help it by focusing on what matters and concentrating on meaning functions that are favourable to whatever we chase in life.
So, to tie this back to “the damn scale”. I had spent my time drilling and thinking about the scale, like identifying it at work in the improvisers I admire. But my consciousness took its time to put it in a place where it would become second nature to use. So, when I picked up the guitar for a short improvisation on Wayne Shorter’s Footprints, it just came out as an organic part of my normal everyday improvisational vocabulary.
Even though I was pleasantly surprised, nothing mystical had happened. It was just that in my consciousness, with whatever logic my meaning functions are organised, it took a good amount of time for the scale to find its proper place and become usable as naturally as I stitch words together into sentences. The analysis, practice, and thinking processes involved slowly paved the way for the integration, but no guitar was in the end needed for the integration to become real. Consciousness did its thing at that point regardless of what I was actually doing.
In the end, the altered scale became available for intuitive use, but not through intentional effort — even though the work I had done absolutely contributed. And it was not a question of muscle memory. If it were up to that alone, it would have happened all those years ago.
Intuition, as a capacity of our consciousness, deserves more attention than it receives in everyday thinking, even though it is an important feature of our noetic consciousness. Rauhala sees intuition as “one realiser of high-level noeticity, and its functioning presupposes a high degree of noetic development”.
What does this all mean in practice? You cannot force your consciousness to accept something that it doesn’t readily accept. It may take time and repetition, but it is not only a question of volition; consciousness does what it does. This doesn’t leave us irresponsible for what our consciousness does, nor does it leave us helpless. It highlights only that the work we do to think and act better, needs our commitment even though there are no guarantees of outcome.
The beauty is that realising this allows us to be compassionate about ourselves and our learning process. There is an amazing amount of experiences in our consciousness — as many as there are atoms in a glass of water. And precisely because of that, some new skills, thoughts, attitudes, emotions or whatever can blend in there right away and become readily available. But others will always feel alien and some never make sense in our subjective worldview in the first place.
And so it should be. If I think of what is going on in the world, there is so much human action I do not understand and never will. And it is a great thing: it means my consciousness is not prepared to form itself to reflect what it deems worthless in some leaders’ worldviews. The values we adopt deeply are central to our organisation of meaning. According to both Lauri Rauhala and Viktor Frankl, we are capable of ethical self-direction — and therein lies our most human essence.
And that is beautiful to me.
You can read more about Rauhala’s theory of consciousness and how it fits together with Viktor Frankl’s philosophy, the psychology of Internal Family Systems, and the neuroscience of Polyvagal Theory in my new book, A Good Life Despite Everything, available in online bookstores.
Arctic Search for Meaning 