#13: Getting the feelings right, but the facts wrong (+ good news!)🧙‍♂️

de Nachtpapegaai welcoming you into the comment section.

Dear dancer!

Two hot news items:

1. Good news! Even though things in the private sphere are not well at all yet, I will be able to play in Utrecht coming Friday, on the 25th of September. Man I have missed Bar Beton. I hope to see you there! I promise: it will be experimental but also same old trusted Nachtpapegaai.

2. The internet, and society in general, would be a better place without comment sections. Still, there is some value in you being able to read each other. Which is why I have opened the comment section! So read on through, hit that button and let the flame wars commence!

To the content:

Getting the feelings right but the facts wrong
Album of the month
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Getting the feelings right, but the facts wrong

So, I like reading. I read essays about geopolitics and technology, and thick but entertaining books about plant consciousness, the history of the organic food movement and other woke stuff. At home we even read an actual news paper, it still lands on our doormat every day. My inner fire burns well on good information (one might say I identify as a wizard 🧙‍♂️ - more on this in a future news letter).

Sometimes, my headiness and love of words gets me a bit in conflict with the world of ecstatic dance. Because, in ecstatic dance, it’s all about ‘getting into your body' instead of 'your mind’, ‘feeling’ instead of ‘ thinking'. This is a mantra in almost all of the white western-european/american neo-spiritual movement. Truth, they say, is found inside our bodies, our hearts, or our guts- any place inside your consciousness that is not your thoughts.

I want to believe this. But I also have a hard time understanding what people mean with ‘feeling’ or ‘thinking’ sometimes. My internal world, to me, seems like a stream of consciousness in which thoughts cause feelings and feelings cause thoughts, interchangeably and never-ending.The stream usually flows pretty fast (is it ADHD or just coffee one might ask?). Even when I used to go to 10-day Vipassana retreats, I would notice that thoughts would never really stop. The thoughts always seemed to connect to some kind of feeling in my body. So the distinction between thinking and feeling does not really make alot of sense to me all the time.

It does make sense on the level of communication and therapy. Our culture and the many generations of Western Europeans before us have had an obsession with finding an intellectual solution to everything. There are many examples of this but here is one: just think of how many times you have tried to express an emotion to someone (“I am feeling sad”), and then the other starts firing solutions (“Work out more!”, “Eat healthier!”, “Break up with that person!”) at you to ‘help’ you never have to feel this emotion ever again. Feelings, in our culture, are a problem to be solved, not a phenomenon to be experienced (I used to do this myself all the time too, my partner had to point this out to me for two years before I realized).

Also, in our culture you often get rewarded for running away from your feelings, which is part of the reason why we are currently well on the way of destroying the earth. We've become so bad at looking at our own destructive habits that we have just stopped seeing them altogether. So, helping humans feel more, and feel better, is a cultural revolution that seems very appropriate during this day and age. This was also one of the things that drew me to ecstatic dance: we shut up for once and just let our bodies express all our inner madness. All the crying and raging I did on a dancefloor must have saved me many trips to costly therapists.

I do feel (pun intended) that sometimes we take the idea of ‘feeling instead of thinking’ a bit too far. Recently someone who I respect as a musician posted something on Facebook about the floods in Nepal, saying something like: "Sure, climate change is a thing but I am very sensitive to vibrations and I feel that someone used vibrations to cause a flood of water to come down from the Himalaya’s". He also went on to explain that the many forest fires in Europe and the rest of the world were also deliberately lit by this great evil power that, creates natural disasters to have power over us normal people.

Now, I don’t pretend to know everything - the world is too big. But I do know that this is not true. I also know why it is not true. I could try to explain. But it wouldn’t matter. I would not be able to help this person with getting their facts right. In fact, I doubt they would care, as their post went on with something like: “please don’t discuss, just let this resonate with you”. Well, I let it resonate, and it did not strike a very harmonious tone in me. In fact, this news letter edition is a coping strategy to transform the bad resonance i got from that post into some constructive output. I can only hope that I got all the micro aggressions out of this text (point out three and dance next time for free 😉).

Anyway, the point is: I feel like people don’t seem to want to know what is up anymore sometimes. They just want to blurt out their uninformed views and get some praise for it. And I am tempted to say something like: “It's fine! Live and let live!”. But I don’t feel that it is fine. I find it very worrying that people are collectively getting dumbed down about how the world works, and are even proud of it. People just don’t seem to understand basic things about general worldly affairs anymore, making them say things like the above. And they seem to care less and less about discussing their ideas too.

And its not as if their feelings don’t have their proper place. Everyone with an emotional life feels that something is wrong, that we live in an unjust world where the ones in power are cynical boys who never truly made it out of adolescence, wringing every last penny out of mother nature until all that is left is an uninhabitable planet full of obese Americans riding around in carts with big soda mugs consuming unlimited AI generated content (WALL-E is real🤖). And when you start feeling deeply, you'll find that this is painful, because the world is miserable in so many ways.

But the facts do complement the feelings. As the journalist Naomi Klein says, many people ‘get the feelings right, but the facts wrong’. Your feeling is right: floods and fires are terrible and humans (indirectly) caused it. But your facts are wrong: it is not a small group of evil humans deliberately causing the flood in Nepal. What did cause it? Well, the answer is very nuanced and complex, but I would say it is probably habitat destruction caused by a changing climate that is caused by humanity's failing to take care of the earth properly.

The problem is that platforms like Facebook and Instagram don't give space for nuanced things like that. They reward black/white thinking: this good, me happy 🌈! This bad, me angry grrrrr 👿. That means that very clear good vs evil narratives score better than 'well, it is complex...'. So if your media consumption consists of reels and quick bits of people being emotional about things, then you are bound to get narrow-minded (and angry!). It makes me so sad to see so many sensitive people getting thrown sand in their eyes by all this informational clutter.

This is also why, since Covid came, I have made a bit of a compromise as to how I relate to people around ecstatic dance events. And maybe that's ok: there is a place for everything, and the afterglow of an ecstatic dance might just not be the place to discuss politics or news. Earlier this week I read this interview with a woman who loved to go partying and do mdma because everyone was so positive and loving to each other. She said something like: “someone would compliment me on how beautiful my arms were, or how I smiled so nicely, and they don’t say these things in normal life”. It reminded me of ecstatic dance, where people are just so loving and kind to each other after dancing. And maybe the ecstatic dance space might also be for just this: the world’s troubles are hard enough, so let’s just share some ecstacy (without the drugs!) together.

But after the dance, a reality awaits that is not always so kind. And we can’t adopt the “feeling, not thinking” attitude (whatever that means) with every task. I would love it if people who identify with the whole story of ‘being conscious’ or ‘raising consciousness’ to integrate their critical thinking a bit more, and become more conscious of the way they discern fact and fiction. At the same time: there is so much value in deep empathy and intuition in spaces that are overly intellectual (I’ve been in many). So it is good to honor this as well.

But anyway, whatever we do, we should stop getting our news and opinions from Instagram and Facebook. Read a book some time, this cranky wizard recommends the experience! And also, share your views with other people and see how you are never entirely right. For instance, in my hot new comment section!

You can click on comment and then you get a mail with a login code. It's a few clicks (but keeps the spam away). Join me and (dis)agree with me, or just put some feathers up my bum.

Album of the month

Akusmi - Terra Incognita

Note: Some people cannot see the music player(s). If that is you here is the link, or click on the image:

I can be very protective of new discoveries. “Don’t let the other dj’s in on your secrets..”, whispers the scared little voice in my head. But here I am, sharing the album that will define my sets in the months to come.

Akusmi’s new album Terra Incognita is an improvisational kind of composition with so many instruments and layers. Some of it is danceable, others are not, but it is definitely "a hypnotic, utopian expression of spiritual union” as the reviewer on Pitchfork calls it (I never read Pitchfork by the way). People have been calling me 'kunstenaar' again after a set (a compliment to which I am very sensitive because all my life I wanted to be a 'kunstenaar' of some sort), and I'm guessing it is at least partly due to me playing this album.

By the way, here is a dj pro tip: if you want to be a popular dj, then don’t try to have too much of a good taste! I’m kidding. Maybe. Am I? If you want my real secrets, ask me for a dj course some time. If there are enough people interested I can organise a night where I share my experiences on do's and don't of becoming a good dj, getting booked, crate digging, and all things I have (un)learned over the years.

In the meantime, the need to share good music won over my fear of other dj’s playing 'my tracks'. Go ahead colleagues, just play this…if you dare.