THE SYNCREATE PODCAST: EMPOWERING CREATIVITY
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, WHERE WE EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CREATIVITY,
PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, WHERE WE EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CREATIVITY,
PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
EPISODE 64: SYNESTHESIA, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CREATIVITY
WITH ZOE MARTELL AND ARCHIE FRINK
listen to the audio podcast here:
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO VERSION HERE:
The phenomenon of synesthesia is defined as a blending or mixing of the senses. It can take many forms, such as tasting colors, seeing visual forms when hearing music, or associating numbers, letters, words or days of the week with specifc colors, tastes, or emotions. It’s said to be experienced by only about 3% of people, but it is highly correlated with creativity. Zoe Martell and Archie Frink are both psychology Ph.D. students at Saybrook University, where Melinda teaches, as well as talented artists, and they both also experience synesthesia.
Zoe is a painter and budding musician. She holds an M.S. in clinical psychology as well as an MFA in painting and an MA in the history and theory of art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She taught psychology courses at San Francisco State University for many years. Archie is an author, an MBA, a consciousness researcher, a clinically trained practitioner of integrative health, and a photographer focusing on extreme environments. Our conversation focuses on the experience of synesthesia, and how it relates to consciousness and creativity.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to pay close attention to your sensory experience and how you experience the world, either through observing your moment-to-moment sensory experience, or through meditation, and see how it informs your creative practice.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in
Episode 3: Creative Polymathy with Musician
Photographer, and Podcaster Michael Walker, Episode 52: Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston
Episode 54: Creativity as a Spiritual Endeavor with Musician and Author Peter Himmelman
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, please reach out to us. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information here on on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes.
Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate, and we’re now on Patreon as well.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
Zoe is a painter and budding musician. She holds an M.S. in clinical psychology as well as an MFA in painting and an MA in the history and theory of art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She taught psychology courses at San Francisco State University for many years. Archie is an author, an MBA, a consciousness researcher, a clinically trained practitioner of integrative health, and a photographer focusing on extreme environments. Our conversation focuses on the experience of synesthesia, and how it relates to consciousness and creativity.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to pay close attention to your sensory experience and how you experience the world, either through observing your moment-to-moment sensory experience, or through meditation, and see how it informs your creative practice.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in
Episode 3: Creative Polymathy with Musician
Photographer, and Podcaster Michael Walker, Episode 52: Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston
Episode 54: Creativity as a Spiritual Endeavor with Musician and Author Peter Himmelman
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, please reach out to us. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information here on on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes.
Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate, and we’re now on Patreon as well.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
EPISODE-SPECIFIC HYPERLINKS
Psychology Today Article on Synesthesia
YouTube Video: What Is It Like To Have Synesthesia?
Archie Frink on LinkedIn
Henri Bergson
YouTube Video: What Is It Like To Have Synesthesia?
Archie Frink on LinkedIn
Henri Bergson
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to create. Our goal is to demystify the process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. We talk with visionaries and changemakers and everyday creatives working in a wide range of fields and mediums, from the arts to science, technology and business.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothouse and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life. So today I have two wonderful guests and we are going to be exploring the connections between synesthesia and creativity. And we'll be defining what synesthesia means momentarily if you've not heard of it. But my guests today are Zoe Martell and Archie Frink, both psychology PhD students at Saybrook University, where I teach.
We were in class together in the spring. And Zoe is a lecturer in psychology at San Francisco State University. She's been teaching for the last 18 years. She also has a master's in clinical psychology, an MFA in painting, and an MA in the history and theory of contemporary art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She's a wonderful visual artist and a budding musician.
And Archie Frink is an author. He's got an MBA, he's a consciousness researcher and a clinically trained practitioner of integrative health. He's also a photographer, focusing on extreme environments. So I'm very excited to have them both on the show today.
Well, welcome Zoe and Archie to the Syncreate podcast. I'm so excited that this is kind of finally coming together. We've been talking about doing an episode together for a while, kind of came up after our class experience together at Saybrook.
So I want to kind of start today with just kind of a definition for people that may not be familiar with the concept of what is synesthesia. And then I'd love to hear more about your experiences of it, but, Zoe, actually, when we were talking initially about this, you gave a definition that I loved, which is kind of a crossing of the senses.
So, for example, when two senses are activated at the same time, such as, you know, tasting color or seeing visual patterns when hearing music, and in my little kind of research on the topic, I learned that only about 3 to 5% of the population experienced this, at least as it's specifically defined, which we can get into. Maybe we all actually experience it in some way.
And that it's often, of course, associated with creativity, which is kind of the topic of our conversation today. And then, I found a nice definition also on Psychology Today, that “synesthesia is a fresh way of experiencing the world through a mixing of the senses that is unique to the individual.” So we know from the research that's out there that people experience this phenomenon in different ways, you know, through a blending of various sense perceptions.
And so, again, we can get into that. But I'm curious, maybe first of all, how do each of you understand and experience this phenomenon that we are referring to as synesthesia? So, Zoe, would you like to start us off there?
Zoe: I have experienced synesthesia my whole life, and I didn't realize that it was something that other people didn’t experience until probably in my 30s, honestly.
And, for me, I believe that it is related to migraine, which I experience on a regular basis. So I'm usually in either the acute attack phase of a migraine, or in a prodrome or postdrome state of migraine, which I have come to embrace actually, as something that allows me to see the world very, very differently than other people.
And I think of it as a gift. And like you said, it for me, it shows up as a crossing of senses. So I taste shapes, I absolutely feel sensations and see visuals when I listen to music. When I make visual art, I'm incorporating sounds and feelings and, I mean emotional feelings, but also physical sensations and tastes into the way that I create visual art. And, it's something that I am learning how to experience more fully as I learn more about it.
Melinda: Wonderful. I love that and definitely want to hear more. And I think it's very interesting actually, that one of the ways, at least in which you experience this is through migraine specifically. So there's, you know, there's painful experience, right, that you have kind of learned how to or are learning how to kind of work with and maybe even transmute through your creative work, which is fascinating.
Zoe: Absolutely. I've come to embrace the entire experience, including the pain and see that as something that actually adds to my creative arsenal, if you will.
Melinda: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. And, Archie, what's your sense of synesthesia and your experience of it?
Archie: Yeah. Well, thank you both. And thank you, Zoe, for sharing what you just shared and your experiences and when I reflect within myself about this subject, I feel that it's important to at first acknowledge a paradigm, whether in awareness or outside of our immediate awareness, because when we talk about something like synesthesia, there is some intellectual and cultural heuristics or baggage associated with that term.
Right? So, synesthesia tends to be housed in the present within molecular and cellular biology, being neuroscience, psychiatry, which is the medical model imposing itself upon the mind, and then psychology. And so we have this materialist representation of what synesthesia is, but then we also have a whole other paradigm that we can approach it from.
And this is where I live, and this is the consciousness paradigm or the consciousness primacy paradigm, which essentially states that the divide between mind and body, right. This old concept that we've inherited is non factual. And that in fact, if consciousness is primary then everything is an expression of it. Right. So this comes into a really important place in this question of synesthesia.
Because what we're trying to get at is, as Zoe said, this crossing of the senses. Well, we have to ask ourselves first, well, what are the senses? And this is why this is important. Because if we approach it from a hard materialist perspective, a reductionist perspective, then we are confined to these physiological, tactile, and otherwise senses that are related to our physical bodies.
Right. But if we approach this from a consciousness perspective, then, and there's some fringe folks in eco psychology who have made a beautiful model of an expansion of definition of the senses to the 54. I quarrel with it because it's still linearly divides mind and body, but they're getting at something, and that is that the senses are fundamentally mental.
And if they are fundamentally mental, then we are always multisensorily experiencing our world at all times. Now, there are some primary senses that we rely upon, whether behaviorally or otherwise. But but that argument opens up this whole new, this whole new, panoply with synesthesia, because if synesthesia is merely an interaction or interrelation of sensory experience or conscious experience, then we're actually all doing that all the time anyway.
And that's how we move through our world. So that's one thing that comes to mind from a more traditionalist perspective of having a close association and/or a simultaneity of perceptual experience between, say, vision, and smell or etc. then, yeah, you know, that happens.
And I feel that, you know, artists and people who are primarily creative in the ways that they move through the world and in their professions are a lot more keyed into this, meaning they have a greater vocabulary or they live in this greater, entanglement of sensory experience.
And this helps to inform their worldview, inform what they produce, inform their expressions. Right. And I feel this is really important, because from a psychological perspective, you know, if we ask ourselves, well, you know, what is creativity from this perspective of the senses, then it's kind of like a prism, right? Because we're constantly, like the “I”, the “I” that we're constantly perceiving, we’re constantly receiving information from our world, mental and physical.
Which is probably the same. And we have the “I,” which is this point. Right. And then, so we're receiving information and then we express and create. Right. And what we express and create is in relation to what comes in to us. So this is really an experience of awareness too, and one thing, an axiom from Western tradition that I love which ties into this is the idea that different truths are true in different states of consciousness.
And this holds true for perception. What we perceive shifts with our state of consciousness. And so if we are in a very dualistic, action oriented, like waking life, you know, situation, then our perception is going to be diminished. And we're going to only experience these gross representations of perception and perceptual reality.
But if we are more centered, and/or if we are in a state of trauma or ecstasy, we become, shaken or simply more aware of what's really going on through us, around us. And in this subtle liminal realm, this is where we become more acutely aware of this multisensory reality that we exist within. And so from that perspective, it's all synesthetic. Which is beautiful.
Melinda: It is beautiful. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. And I really love this analogy of the prism because it makes so much sense to me. Like we take in information from the senses, we sort of filter it through, and then we, we create and express, you know, send something back out into the world essentially based on that experience.
And as you say, you know, we have all these sense faculties and we're experiencing the world in the present moment with all of our many, maybe many more than 5 or 6, as you say, you know, sense perceptions and it's all together in the present moment. They're not isolated, right, in that way that that kind of, the scientific paradigm might have us believe or that reductive way.
Right. So, and as you say, I think that is a big link between the experience of synesthesia and creativity. And this is something that I often talk about when I'm leading classes and workshops. You know, I teach contemplative arts and photography, and the practice is about being centered, being grounded in the moment and then opening up to all of those sensory experiences and then photographing or creating specifically from that place.
Right. And so we've talked in the past a little bit about how, you know, mindfulness or meditative states can heighten that, just the senses in general, but our sensory experience and of course, other types of, you know, shamanic techniques, psychedelics, you know, those things can also, open up the senses and the sensory experience in that way.
So, you know, you both are psychology PhD students. And so we can, you know, really get into kind of the nitty gritty of this, but I'm also interested in your personal experience. So I'd love to hear just a little bit more about how, you know, your sensory experience or synesthesia, if we're calling it that, figures into your own creative practice.
And so, Zoe, you're a visual artist. Really wonderful one, I will say. I can attest, having seen quite a bit of your work, and a budding musician. And Archie, you're a wonderful photographer. And I know you kind of specialize in extreme environments. You've posted a photo just recently of the aurora borealis. That was just wonderful.
And kind of curious if there was any sort of multisensory aspect of that. I bet there was. But, maybe back to Zoe first. So, in your work as a painter, as a visual artist and as a musician, do you have any examples that come to mind where and how this sensory experience informs your process and your work?
Zoe: Definitely with the visual arts. When I am drawing or painting, I'm depicting a state of multi-sensorial crossed senses. I'm trying to capture that experience. And part of how I learned, actually, that I had synesthesia at all was when I had posted some of the paintings that I did around 2004, 2005, when I was first starting to really paint, and I had posted them on a website, and a person commented to me and said, you have synesthesia, don’t you?
And I said, do I? And then I looked it up and I thought, well, I do. And they could see it in my paintings. So I was doing this without being at all aware of it. Really since starting to think about synesthesia more deeply as sort of the way that I see the world, I've been really leaning into it and recognizing that it is a state I can access in ways I had no idea I could access.
That, I mean, Archie, thank you, because you were part of the impetus for me realizing that, that it becomes very pronounced sometimes as part of the migraine cycle, but it is actually accessible to me all the time. And I didn't notice that until I started opening to it. So that's been marvelous. Melinda, I posted some song lyrics that I had written, in one of your courses.
And it was when I was in a very highly synesthetic state, and I was describing the sounds that happen around dawn, when the light is just coming in here. And I really was very much incorporating that into the lyrics of what I was writing. And that has led then a whole new creative direction with beautiful openings, all kinds of different ways.
So, I want to capture, I want to learn how to capture and replicate some of what I experience in sound, so that I can perhaps allow others to to glimpse that world a bit through soundscapes. And that's part of what I’m hoping to attain musically.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. And then I'm also curious with music specifically like as a receiver, as a perceiver, like when you listen to music or perhaps when you're making music, do you also experience elements of other senses along with that?
Zoe: Oh absolutely, when I receive music, when I am a perceiver, it's a completely embodied experience. There's a lot of physical sensation that goes on that, it's a very vibrational experience, far above and beyond feeling the vibrations in a concert hall or something like that. The way I've come to realize ordinary people do.
But it is a full body experience. And I get a lot of visuals. I get a lot of visual imagery that comes up. I will see the emotional response as if it is in front of me sometimes, in a way that might be frightening if I were not used to it.
It might appear hallucinatory to someone who is unfamiliar with the state. And it's incredibly beautiful. Sometimes it's incredibly frightening too, I would say it reaches that definition of sublime, where you're so drawn in and terrified that there are no words for the beauty and the terror that one feels. And when music comes to me, that I want to then write and record, it comes to me the same way.
So I'm hoping to master the technology necessary to be able to somehow translate what I experience into sound that someone else can receive who is not in a synesthetic state. So I'm hoping to be able to do, I mean, even just a little.
Melinda: I love that, that's a beautiful aspiration. And it makes me think about, I've been noticing particularly recently, and I think it's because I've, the more you tune into it, the more it happens, right?
That I'll receive music as I'm falling asleep in that ,between that hypnagogic state. Right. And, and usually in that transition state of falling asleep, I'm starting to see images and maybe hear voices, and it's almost feels sometimes like I'm just tuning in to a frequency, like on a radio dial. And I'm just overhearing different conversations or I'm seeing different images.
And sometimes in those moments, a musical idea will come to me. And so I'm trying, when I have the wherewithal to actually, you know, you have to get up and get your phone and do your voice memos or something. But to actually record that when I can to come back to later. So .
Zoe: That happens to me as well. And I will get entire, like symphonies in my head. I mean, all the parts. And so, occasionally that will happen to me in waking life as well. But often it is in that hypnagogic, liminal state. And so I think that the key, at least in part maybe, is to keep a recording device that you can grab very quickly without having to turn the light on and wake up much and just at least get the bare bones down.
So that you can trigger that again in mind, I hope. But I know precisely what you're describing, and, it's something that I really hope to be able to, to grow within myself.
Melinda: Yeah, it's really a gift. Wonderful. So Archie, kind of same same question to you. I am curious, in your photography, which is so much out in nature, often in these kind of extreme environments. What is your sensory experience like, you know, as you're taking these photos and just experiencing the world in that way and maybe other art forms that you practice as well?
Archie: Sure. Yeah. You know, it's interesting to me, I think feeling into questions like these because, again, we have to come back to our assumptions and we have to really question conventional logic.
So I have to ask myself, well, what is art? You know, what is creativity? What is that? And for me, in an applied sense, in the experiential sense, it is having this awareness that is essentially multi-dimensional in nature. Right? And collapsing it into an artifact or.
Well, I mean, through a process, you end up with this artifact, and that's what's called art for me. The actual art is, you know, the living experience of it. But, so, it's this deeply conscious thing, right? Like, say, I'm in the field, with a camera, and, I have an intention, and I'm in this place for this intention, and I'm just being in this moment.
Well, the quality of consciousness, whatever that may be of that moment, is going to inform it and be what comes out, what people see. And it's that process of transmutation or of collapsing into this physical artifact, this process. So it's of, by its very nature, it's entirely synesthetic because, like the creative process from experience to artifact is this process of moving conscious awareness. for me, from the absolute non-dual state of essential reality toward a directed, directional, physical thing.
The entire process is a transmission. And this is where this is where it gets really interesting for me, because if the entire thing is a transmission, like say that you produce a photograph or a piece of music, that's going to be communicated and it's going to be received. And so the question, a secondary question is for me, well, what is going to be that experience for another person?
This transmission right? And Zoe to your point of sensing conscious qualia from what we call art, from a piece of music, particularly for me as well. We might sense things that may or may not be associated with the structural qualities of that piece of music or that piece of art.
But yet something comes through and that corresponds to this idea of transmission, which all communication arguably is. Right. This is what we're doing. Like we get a feeling, we get vibes, we get transmissions of experiences. So there's a psychic component to it, and it's deeply psychic. And the difference between a piece of music or a piece of any kind of art that resonates deeply within you, it cannot be captured, materially or quantitatively, or even verbally through logic.
It's something that's deeper. And there's this deeper psychic resonance that play between the person who created it, the process of transmission being the experience that led to the piece of art and receiving it. So all of that comes into play, right? It's really interesting. And absolutely it comes through in photography.
I mean, that's why I started going out and doing it in the first place. And, you know, it's really therapeutic. But there's also this, there's a psychic essential nature to creativity. And that's what hooked me, you know, that's why I just had to do it.
It provides an outlet that's unique, whereby we can, rarify these experiences and these faculties within us, these faculties of awareness that are deeply psychic. And a turning point for me, and this was just within the past 3 or 4 years, a real turning point for me was, well, this is kind of a conventional, you know, assessment, that, yes, okay, art is a transmission, and we receive it.
But the idea that we live in this singular psychic reality, which is inherently metaphysical, right, in conversation. But I began to question, can this be collapsed into, say, a two-dimensional frame of a photograph?
And it turns out that, well, yes. Actually, people have been doing this for a long time. It's esoteric or it has been, 100 years ago, people photographed auras, which is still done in some places with old technology, as well as, recording impression psychic impressions during seances, you know, back in the late 1800s or in the turn of the century.
But what was really interesting to me was bringing this idea, of a psychic transmission into a piece of, into a representation, and so I began to ask myself, can a psychic experience result in a photograph and answer turned out to be yes.
We absolutely can do this. And for me, that began to come through contact meditation, through the work of Steve Greer, began to receive incredible photographs, of telepathic exchanges, local telepathic exchanges, via this non-local consciousness, interface, and so that really opened me up to, wow, like.
First of all, what are we capable of? And second of all, the power of transmission. We can amplify the power of transmission of our creative pursuits through our psychic agency as conscious beings. And I feel that that is an idea that culturally, we are just beginning to explore, or even accept as possible. But I think it's time. It's time that we do that.
Melinda: That's fascinating. Many aspects of what you just said and I'm curious. So these photographs of these, you know, psychic experiences that you described, like, what do they look like?
Archie: Well, to me, they're beautiful because, they're collapsed representations of events. Right. And so there's a lot of affect, for me, and so I find them to be very beautiful. I find that whenever I share them on meta, they don't go very far. But despite, you know, despite the difficulties with communicating them, yeah, it's absolutely beautiful.
I mean, just being able to have this conscious exchange and have it be represented through a creative medium, through a creative technology, and have an output that is representative of this deeply numinous, psychic exchange, in this case, telepathic in nature.
But the reality is, is that we're always doing this all the time. It's not that, you know. Well, this is a psychic experience, and this isn't. Everything is, right. And so this goes into synesthesia too. It's like, it's not, well, I'm experiencing, you know, two interrelated senses now, but not other times.
No, we always are. It's our awareness that's shifting. So it's a matter of filter, right? It’s a matter of awareness. Robert John at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies research lab, near the end of his life, related to perception in the same way, perception as our filter of awareness and this, for him in his work, this was, directly important for the quantitative analysis of what we call a PSI or ESP, this type of human experience as consciousness directed.
But it's really important. And so if it's all here all the time and all that shifts our awareness, then perhaps our understanding from a reductionistic perspective should be inverted to better accommodate our experiences.
Melinda: Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, just to take it more to like a mundane level. I had an experience recently where I met a professional photographer on retreat, and I was just in New York last week. So I stopped by his studio and it wasn't intended beforehand, but he ended up taking some photographs.
And there's something about that experience of the interaction between the photographer and the person being photographed. And there is always a communication going on. Right? And you're connecting. And then the camera is kind of the vessel for that. And then, you know, some of them ended up being really, really lovely. And, you know, we talk about sometimes the camera like capturing the essence of a person or whatever.
And then of course, in many cultures, people are wary of having their photographs taken because they feel it could, you know, capture their spirit or, you know, take something away from their essence. Right. And so there's something going on there about that communication, about that exchange. And I think that certainly translates to many different, you know, creative and artistic media as well.
Zoe: Can I say something just in response to what Archie was saying? I was thinking about your photographs. I mean, they're just breathtaking at the ones that I've seen. I mean, you capture something in photography that I have very rarely seen done, if ever. Honestly. But you were saying that the ones that are intentionally kind of depicting telepathic exchange, depicting this kind of consciousness experience in a collapsed format perhaps just aren't resonating with people on meta when they look at them.
And I was thinking about the type of music that really, like, lights me completely on fire, the stuff that I feel in every fiber of my being is not for a broad audience. If it's complex, it's dissonant, you have to have a very specific type of ear and type of appreciation to really take it in, and maybe some of what you're doing with photography is similar to what some of the artists that I most admire musically are also doing, which is creating something that is too complicated for the average listener or the average viewer to take in. It's just a thought.
Melinda: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I just think about like pop radio, right? Like it's very consumable, it's very digestible.
But then there's more complex types of music that do require much more attention, right? In the listening experience. Yeah.
Archie: Yeah, I can absolutely hear that. And, literally, it reminds me of when I was, when I was young, when I was growing up, there were certain pieces of music that came to me when I was 14, 15.
I was of a poor socioeconomic background and in the country didn't have a very wide environment. And so, there were these pieces of music that came to me at that time that I just simply did not have the vocabulary for mentally. And, but I knew that something was there.
And so they stuck with me. And, I guess, an example would be, Saint Stephen by the Grateful Dead. I didn't understand it when I heard it, but there was something that was to me, an extremely eloquent, elegant and beautiful, there. And it stuck with me and it, you know, over time, you know, we develop, acuities of perception and we begin to be able to create our own maps of meaning-making, and appreciation and, you know, and reception, for these transmissions and that's a dialectic, too.
Right. And so, you know, as we develop these subtleties of these dialectics, which is part of the transmission of art, then that informs how we view the world. They are blueprints of conscious discernment that map outward, and inform how we see the world.
The, say, for example, in simple terms, the music that we listen to has an impact consciously on how we interpret our world. And it goes both ways. So it's very beautiful information, filter of the experience.
Melinda: Yeah. I love that. That's actually been always one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs as well. So appreciate that. But yeah, you're speaking of this dialectic makes me think about also, you know, the more we study art or the more we study music, the more deeply we can often appreciate it. It's not required, of course, but, you know, if you take an art history class and then you go to an art museum and you have some understanding of the different, you know, artists and the different schools and the different movements, then, you know, sometimes it can make for a deeper experience. Right?
Archie: Yeah. And it's also a double-edged sword, too. You know, I'd much rather receive something from someone who, you know, is working from his heart or her heart. And that's what sticks with me, I think.
Melinda: Yeah, it's interesting because sometimes you'll hear, like, really stripped down, just like demo recordings or whatever of a song that maybe later got produced and became really popular.
And sometimes that just really raw, very simple recording has more power to it. So yeah. Well, believe it or not, we are just about at time and this has flown by. But, I usually like to end each episode with a Creativity Pro Tip, something that people can kind of, you know, run with on their own and experiment and try out related to creativity.
So I feel like what's, you know, really been a theme of our conversation today is, you know, opening up to the senses whether we, you know, feel that we experience synesthesia specifically or not. We all can open up to our senses more fully and experience them. And, you know, just kind of see what arises from that place, both as a creator and a receiver of art.
So I don't know, is there anything that the two of you might add to that as far as like a practical tip for doing that?
Zoe: The practice of paying closer attention to things like the street sweeper when it goes by or the sound of the subway on the tracks, the sound of running water, I mean, just paying more attention and focusing in on that has kind of a, almost like a little microcosm and then becomes this macrocosm of, well, I could make an entire piece just around my experience of what this very mundane experience of washing the dishes sounds like.
And so that for me, is where I've found something very applicable.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. And I love that you mentioned sounds that we might normally kind of want to push away, like the street sweeper or the subway. Right. Like sounds that we might find like from a Buddhist perspective. Right? We talk about passion, aggression and indifference, essentially.
Right. And there are certain sounds, certain experiences that we kind of just don't want to experience. But if we actually just lean into that a bit and those sounds or the equivalent, you know, of other sensory experiences and what that might open up for us creatively, I think is really interesting. Yeah. Great. And Archie, anything to add there?
Archie: Yeah. When I think about like, when you think about art and creativity, for me, it’s fundamentally inseparable from art, from life itself. Right. And this is an idea. It's not new at all. It's very basic. Henri Bergson wrote a beautiful book called The Art of Life [L’Art de Vivre] . And it's a collection of his writings that advocate for the artist being the, you know, the conscious, intelligent being, to live a life of art, to immerse one's awareness, one's consciousness into the realm that we associate to be art.
Because guess what? There is no difference between life and art. They're the same thing. And so from that perspective, this comes back to this paradigm of consciousness. If what we're really talking about is this absolute consciousness and our awareness of it, moving through us, then the most basic thing that I could possibly attempt to offer is to meditate.
Just meditate. I mean, that, you know, when we really go into a non-dual state of awareness, when we go in, where we have access to this totality and it's the act of discernment through awareness whereby, you know, we function, move through the world and create and so, yeah, from a practical standpoint, just go meditate and see what happens.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. Beautiful. And what a great kind of place to conclude. So thank you both so much. And if people do want to connect with you or find out more about your work, what is the best way for them to do that?
Archie: Well, I'm available on LinkedIn. Please feel free to reach out to me there. I believe my email is also on my LinkedIn page.
Melinda: And, Zoe, I think you said if people want to find you, they can reach out to me and connect with you that way? Okay, great.
Zoe: That is the best way. I'm in the process, actually, of constructing a website, but it is not ready. So right now the best way is through you.
Melinda: Okay. And stay tuned for a future website, and can't wait to see what happens with your your musical work as well. So thank you both so much for taking the time today. I know you're very busy with your studies and other efforts.
At Syncreate,we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or new venture, and you're not quite sure how to get it off the ground, please reach out to us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals.
We also offer resources, creative process tools and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. And specifically, we'll be offering a monthly coaching group starting in January of 2025 so you can learn more about that at syncreate.org.
Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate and we're now on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review! We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, with Zoe joining us from California and Archie, I believe, in Colorado. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us, and see you next time.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothouse and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life. So today I have two wonderful guests and we are going to be exploring the connections between synesthesia and creativity. And we'll be defining what synesthesia means momentarily if you've not heard of it. But my guests today are Zoe Martell and Archie Frink, both psychology PhD students at Saybrook University, where I teach.
We were in class together in the spring. And Zoe is a lecturer in psychology at San Francisco State University. She's been teaching for the last 18 years. She also has a master's in clinical psychology, an MFA in painting, and an MA in the history and theory of contemporary art from the San Francisco Art Institute. She's a wonderful visual artist and a budding musician.
And Archie Frink is an author. He's got an MBA, he's a consciousness researcher and a clinically trained practitioner of integrative health. He's also a photographer, focusing on extreme environments. So I'm very excited to have them both on the show today.
Well, welcome Zoe and Archie to the Syncreate podcast. I'm so excited that this is kind of finally coming together. We've been talking about doing an episode together for a while, kind of came up after our class experience together at Saybrook.
So I want to kind of start today with just kind of a definition for people that may not be familiar with the concept of what is synesthesia. And then I'd love to hear more about your experiences of it, but, Zoe, actually, when we were talking initially about this, you gave a definition that I loved, which is kind of a crossing of the senses.
So, for example, when two senses are activated at the same time, such as, you know, tasting color or seeing visual patterns when hearing music, and in my little kind of research on the topic, I learned that only about 3 to 5% of the population experienced this, at least as it's specifically defined, which we can get into. Maybe we all actually experience it in some way.
And that it's often, of course, associated with creativity, which is kind of the topic of our conversation today. And then, I found a nice definition also on Psychology Today, that “synesthesia is a fresh way of experiencing the world through a mixing of the senses that is unique to the individual.” So we know from the research that's out there that people experience this phenomenon in different ways, you know, through a blending of various sense perceptions.
And so, again, we can get into that. But I'm curious, maybe first of all, how do each of you understand and experience this phenomenon that we are referring to as synesthesia? So, Zoe, would you like to start us off there?
Zoe: I have experienced synesthesia my whole life, and I didn't realize that it was something that other people didn’t experience until probably in my 30s, honestly.
And, for me, I believe that it is related to migraine, which I experience on a regular basis. So I'm usually in either the acute attack phase of a migraine, or in a prodrome or postdrome state of migraine, which I have come to embrace actually, as something that allows me to see the world very, very differently than other people.
And I think of it as a gift. And like you said, it for me, it shows up as a crossing of senses. So I taste shapes, I absolutely feel sensations and see visuals when I listen to music. When I make visual art, I'm incorporating sounds and feelings and, I mean emotional feelings, but also physical sensations and tastes into the way that I create visual art. And, it's something that I am learning how to experience more fully as I learn more about it.
Melinda: Wonderful. I love that and definitely want to hear more. And I think it's very interesting actually, that one of the ways, at least in which you experience this is through migraine specifically. So there's, you know, there's painful experience, right, that you have kind of learned how to or are learning how to kind of work with and maybe even transmute through your creative work, which is fascinating.
Zoe: Absolutely. I've come to embrace the entire experience, including the pain and see that as something that actually adds to my creative arsenal, if you will.
Melinda: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. And, Archie, what's your sense of synesthesia and your experience of it?
Archie: Yeah. Well, thank you both. And thank you, Zoe, for sharing what you just shared and your experiences and when I reflect within myself about this subject, I feel that it's important to at first acknowledge a paradigm, whether in awareness or outside of our immediate awareness, because when we talk about something like synesthesia, there is some intellectual and cultural heuristics or baggage associated with that term.
Right? So, synesthesia tends to be housed in the present within molecular and cellular biology, being neuroscience, psychiatry, which is the medical model imposing itself upon the mind, and then psychology. And so we have this materialist representation of what synesthesia is, but then we also have a whole other paradigm that we can approach it from.
And this is where I live, and this is the consciousness paradigm or the consciousness primacy paradigm, which essentially states that the divide between mind and body, right. This old concept that we've inherited is non factual. And that in fact, if consciousness is primary then everything is an expression of it. Right. So this comes into a really important place in this question of synesthesia.
Because what we're trying to get at is, as Zoe said, this crossing of the senses. Well, we have to ask ourselves first, well, what are the senses? And this is why this is important. Because if we approach it from a hard materialist perspective, a reductionist perspective, then we are confined to these physiological, tactile, and otherwise senses that are related to our physical bodies.
Right. But if we approach this from a consciousness perspective, then, and there's some fringe folks in eco psychology who have made a beautiful model of an expansion of definition of the senses to the 54. I quarrel with it because it's still linearly divides mind and body, but they're getting at something, and that is that the senses are fundamentally mental.
And if they are fundamentally mental, then we are always multisensorily experiencing our world at all times. Now, there are some primary senses that we rely upon, whether behaviorally or otherwise. But but that argument opens up this whole new, this whole new, panoply with synesthesia, because if synesthesia is merely an interaction or interrelation of sensory experience or conscious experience, then we're actually all doing that all the time anyway.
And that's how we move through our world. So that's one thing that comes to mind from a more traditionalist perspective of having a close association and/or a simultaneity of perceptual experience between, say, vision, and smell or etc. then, yeah, you know, that happens.
And I feel that, you know, artists and people who are primarily creative in the ways that they move through the world and in their professions are a lot more keyed into this, meaning they have a greater vocabulary or they live in this greater, entanglement of sensory experience.
And this helps to inform their worldview, inform what they produce, inform their expressions. Right. And I feel this is really important, because from a psychological perspective, you know, if we ask ourselves, well, you know, what is creativity from this perspective of the senses, then it's kind of like a prism, right? Because we're constantly, like the “I”, the “I” that we're constantly perceiving, we’re constantly receiving information from our world, mental and physical.
Which is probably the same. And we have the “I,” which is this point. Right. And then, so we're receiving information and then we express and create. Right. And what we express and create is in relation to what comes in to us. So this is really an experience of awareness too, and one thing, an axiom from Western tradition that I love which ties into this is the idea that different truths are true in different states of consciousness.
And this holds true for perception. What we perceive shifts with our state of consciousness. And so if we are in a very dualistic, action oriented, like waking life, you know, situation, then our perception is going to be diminished. And we're going to only experience these gross representations of perception and perceptual reality.
But if we are more centered, and/or if we are in a state of trauma or ecstasy, we become, shaken or simply more aware of what's really going on through us, around us. And in this subtle liminal realm, this is where we become more acutely aware of this multisensory reality that we exist within. And so from that perspective, it's all synesthetic. Which is beautiful.
Melinda: It is beautiful. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. And I really love this analogy of the prism because it makes so much sense to me. Like we take in information from the senses, we sort of filter it through, and then we, we create and express, you know, send something back out into the world essentially based on that experience.
And as you say, you know, we have all these sense faculties and we're experiencing the world in the present moment with all of our many, maybe many more than 5 or 6, as you say, you know, sense perceptions and it's all together in the present moment. They're not isolated, right, in that way that that kind of, the scientific paradigm might have us believe or that reductive way.
Right. So, and as you say, I think that is a big link between the experience of synesthesia and creativity. And this is something that I often talk about when I'm leading classes and workshops. You know, I teach contemplative arts and photography, and the practice is about being centered, being grounded in the moment and then opening up to all of those sensory experiences and then photographing or creating specifically from that place.
Right. And so we've talked in the past a little bit about how, you know, mindfulness or meditative states can heighten that, just the senses in general, but our sensory experience and of course, other types of, you know, shamanic techniques, psychedelics, you know, those things can also, open up the senses and the sensory experience in that way.
So, you know, you both are psychology PhD students. And so we can, you know, really get into kind of the nitty gritty of this, but I'm also interested in your personal experience. So I'd love to hear just a little bit more about how, you know, your sensory experience or synesthesia, if we're calling it that, figures into your own creative practice.
And so, Zoe, you're a visual artist. Really wonderful one, I will say. I can attest, having seen quite a bit of your work, and a budding musician. And Archie, you're a wonderful photographer. And I know you kind of specialize in extreme environments. You've posted a photo just recently of the aurora borealis. That was just wonderful.
And kind of curious if there was any sort of multisensory aspect of that. I bet there was. But, maybe back to Zoe first. So, in your work as a painter, as a visual artist and as a musician, do you have any examples that come to mind where and how this sensory experience informs your process and your work?
Zoe: Definitely with the visual arts. When I am drawing or painting, I'm depicting a state of multi-sensorial crossed senses. I'm trying to capture that experience. And part of how I learned, actually, that I had synesthesia at all was when I had posted some of the paintings that I did around 2004, 2005, when I was first starting to really paint, and I had posted them on a website, and a person commented to me and said, you have synesthesia, don’t you?
And I said, do I? And then I looked it up and I thought, well, I do. And they could see it in my paintings. So I was doing this without being at all aware of it. Really since starting to think about synesthesia more deeply as sort of the way that I see the world, I've been really leaning into it and recognizing that it is a state I can access in ways I had no idea I could access.
That, I mean, Archie, thank you, because you were part of the impetus for me realizing that, that it becomes very pronounced sometimes as part of the migraine cycle, but it is actually accessible to me all the time. And I didn't notice that until I started opening to it. So that's been marvelous. Melinda, I posted some song lyrics that I had written, in one of your courses.
And it was when I was in a very highly synesthetic state, and I was describing the sounds that happen around dawn, when the light is just coming in here. And I really was very much incorporating that into the lyrics of what I was writing. And that has led then a whole new creative direction with beautiful openings, all kinds of different ways.
So, I want to capture, I want to learn how to capture and replicate some of what I experience in sound, so that I can perhaps allow others to to glimpse that world a bit through soundscapes. And that's part of what I’m hoping to attain musically.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. And then I'm also curious with music specifically like as a receiver, as a perceiver, like when you listen to music or perhaps when you're making music, do you also experience elements of other senses along with that?
Zoe: Oh absolutely, when I receive music, when I am a perceiver, it's a completely embodied experience. There's a lot of physical sensation that goes on that, it's a very vibrational experience, far above and beyond feeling the vibrations in a concert hall or something like that. The way I've come to realize ordinary people do.
But it is a full body experience. And I get a lot of visuals. I get a lot of visual imagery that comes up. I will see the emotional response as if it is in front of me sometimes, in a way that might be frightening if I were not used to it.
It might appear hallucinatory to someone who is unfamiliar with the state. And it's incredibly beautiful. Sometimes it's incredibly frightening too, I would say it reaches that definition of sublime, where you're so drawn in and terrified that there are no words for the beauty and the terror that one feels. And when music comes to me, that I want to then write and record, it comes to me the same way.
So I'm hoping to master the technology necessary to be able to somehow translate what I experience into sound that someone else can receive who is not in a synesthetic state. So I'm hoping to be able to do, I mean, even just a little.
Melinda: I love that, that's a beautiful aspiration. And it makes me think about, I've been noticing particularly recently, and I think it's because I've, the more you tune into it, the more it happens, right?
That I'll receive music as I'm falling asleep in that ,between that hypnagogic state. Right. And, and usually in that transition state of falling asleep, I'm starting to see images and maybe hear voices, and it's almost feels sometimes like I'm just tuning in to a frequency, like on a radio dial. And I'm just overhearing different conversations or I'm seeing different images.
And sometimes in those moments, a musical idea will come to me. And so I'm trying, when I have the wherewithal to actually, you know, you have to get up and get your phone and do your voice memos or something. But to actually record that when I can to come back to later. So .
Zoe: That happens to me as well. And I will get entire, like symphonies in my head. I mean, all the parts. And so, occasionally that will happen to me in waking life as well. But often it is in that hypnagogic, liminal state. And so I think that the key, at least in part maybe, is to keep a recording device that you can grab very quickly without having to turn the light on and wake up much and just at least get the bare bones down.
So that you can trigger that again in mind, I hope. But I know precisely what you're describing, and, it's something that I really hope to be able to, to grow within myself.
Melinda: Yeah, it's really a gift. Wonderful. So Archie, kind of same same question to you. I am curious, in your photography, which is so much out in nature, often in these kind of extreme environments. What is your sensory experience like, you know, as you're taking these photos and just experiencing the world in that way and maybe other art forms that you practice as well?
Archie: Sure. Yeah. You know, it's interesting to me, I think feeling into questions like these because, again, we have to come back to our assumptions and we have to really question conventional logic.
So I have to ask myself, well, what is art? You know, what is creativity? What is that? And for me, in an applied sense, in the experiential sense, it is having this awareness that is essentially multi-dimensional in nature. Right? And collapsing it into an artifact or.
Well, I mean, through a process, you end up with this artifact, and that's what's called art for me. The actual art is, you know, the living experience of it. But, so, it's this deeply conscious thing, right? Like, say, I'm in the field, with a camera, and, I have an intention, and I'm in this place for this intention, and I'm just being in this moment.
Well, the quality of consciousness, whatever that may be of that moment, is going to inform it and be what comes out, what people see. And it's that process of transmutation or of collapsing into this physical artifact, this process. So it's of, by its very nature, it's entirely synesthetic because, like the creative process from experience to artifact is this process of moving conscious awareness. for me, from the absolute non-dual state of essential reality toward a directed, directional, physical thing.
The entire process is a transmission. And this is where this is where it gets really interesting for me, because if the entire thing is a transmission, like say that you produce a photograph or a piece of music, that's going to be communicated and it's going to be received. And so the question, a secondary question is for me, well, what is going to be that experience for another person?
This transmission right? And Zoe to your point of sensing conscious qualia from what we call art, from a piece of music, particularly for me as well. We might sense things that may or may not be associated with the structural qualities of that piece of music or that piece of art.
But yet something comes through and that corresponds to this idea of transmission, which all communication arguably is. Right. This is what we're doing. Like we get a feeling, we get vibes, we get transmissions of experiences. So there's a psychic component to it, and it's deeply psychic. And the difference between a piece of music or a piece of any kind of art that resonates deeply within you, it cannot be captured, materially or quantitatively, or even verbally through logic.
It's something that's deeper. And there's this deeper psychic resonance that play between the person who created it, the process of transmission being the experience that led to the piece of art and receiving it. So all of that comes into play, right? It's really interesting. And absolutely it comes through in photography.
I mean, that's why I started going out and doing it in the first place. And, you know, it's really therapeutic. But there's also this, there's a psychic essential nature to creativity. And that's what hooked me, you know, that's why I just had to do it.
It provides an outlet that's unique, whereby we can, rarify these experiences and these faculties within us, these faculties of awareness that are deeply psychic. And a turning point for me, and this was just within the past 3 or 4 years, a real turning point for me was, well, this is kind of a conventional, you know, assessment, that, yes, okay, art is a transmission, and we receive it.
But the idea that we live in this singular psychic reality, which is inherently metaphysical, right, in conversation. But I began to question, can this be collapsed into, say, a two-dimensional frame of a photograph?
And it turns out that, well, yes. Actually, people have been doing this for a long time. It's esoteric or it has been, 100 years ago, people photographed auras, which is still done in some places with old technology, as well as, recording impression psychic impressions during seances, you know, back in the late 1800s or in the turn of the century.
But what was really interesting to me was bringing this idea, of a psychic transmission into a piece of, into a representation, and so I began to ask myself, can a psychic experience result in a photograph and answer turned out to be yes.
We absolutely can do this. And for me, that began to come through contact meditation, through the work of Steve Greer, began to receive incredible photographs, of telepathic exchanges, local telepathic exchanges, via this non-local consciousness, interface, and so that really opened me up to, wow, like.
First of all, what are we capable of? And second of all, the power of transmission. We can amplify the power of transmission of our creative pursuits through our psychic agency as conscious beings. And I feel that that is an idea that culturally, we are just beginning to explore, or even accept as possible. But I think it's time. It's time that we do that.
Melinda: That's fascinating. Many aspects of what you just said and I'm curious. So these photographs of these, you know, psychic experiences that you described, like, what do they look like?
Archie: Well, to me, they're beautiful because, they're collapsed representations of events. Right. And so there's a lot of affect, for me, and so I find them to be very beautiful. I find that whenever I share them on meta, they don't go very far. But despite, you know, despite the difficulties with communicating them, yeah, it's absolutely beautiful.
I mean, just being able to have this conscious exchange and have it be represented through a creative medium, through a creative technology, and have an output that is representative of this deeply numinous, psychic exchange, in this case, telepathic in nature.
But the reality is, is that we're always doing this all the time. It's not that, you know. Well, this is a psychic experience, and this isn't. Everything is, right. And so this goes into synesthesia too. It's like, it's not, well, I'm experiencing, you know, two interrelated senses now, but not other times.
No, we always are. It's our awareness that's shifting. So it's a matter of filter, right? It’s a matter of awareness. Robert John at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies research lab, near the end of his life, related to perception in the same way, perception as our filter of awareness and this, for him in his work, this was, directly important for the quantitative analysis of what we call a PSI or ESP, this type of human experience as consciousness directed.
But it's really important. And so if it's all here all the time and all that shifts our awareness, then perhaps our understanding from a reductionistic perspective should be inverted to better accommodate our experiences.
Melinda: Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, just to take it more to like a mundane level. I had an experience recently where I met a professional photographer on retreat, and I was just in New York last week. So I stopped by his studio and it wasn't intended beforehand, but he ended up taking some photographs.
And there's something about that experience of the interaction between the photographer and the person being photographed. And there is always a communication going on. Right? And you're connecting. And then the camera is kind of the vessel for that. And then, you know, some of them ended up being really, really lovely. And, you know, we talk about sometimes the camera like capturing the essence of a person or whatever.
And then of course, in many cultures, people are wary of having their photographs taken because they feel it could, you know, capture their spirit or, you know, take something away from their essence. Right. And so there's something going on there about that communication, about that exchange. And I think that certainly translates to many different, you know, creative and artistic media as well.
Zoe: Can I say something just in response to what Archie was saying? I was thinking about your photographs. I mean, they're just breathtaking at the ones that I've seen. I mean, you capture something in photography that I have very rarely seen done, if ever. Honestly. But you were saying that the ones that are intentionally kind of depicting telepathic exchange, depicting this kind of consciousness experience in a collapsed format perhaps just aren't resonating with people on meta when they look at them.
And I was thinking about the type of music that really, like, lights me completely on fire, the stuff that I feel in every fiber of my being is not for a broad audience. If it's complex, it's dissonant, you have to have a very specific type of ear and type of appreciation to really take it in, and maybe some of what you're doing with photography is similar to what some of the artists that I most admire musically are also doing, which is creating something that is too complicated for the average listener or the average viewer to take in. It's just a thought.
Melinda: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I just think about like pop radio, right? Like it's very consumable, it's very digestible.
But then there's more complex types of music that do require much more attention, right? In the listening experience. Yeah.
Archie: Yeah, I can absolutely hear that. And, literally, it reminds me of when I was, when I was young, when I was growing up, there were certain pieces of music that came to me when I was 14, 15.
I was of a poor socioeconomic background and in the country didn't have a very wide environment. And so, there were these pieces of music that came to me at that time that I just simply did not have the vocabulary for mentally. And, but I knew that something was there.
And so they stuck with me. And, I guess, an example would be, Saint Stephen by the Grateful Dead. I didn't understand it when I heard it, but there was something that was to me, an extremely eloquent, elegant and beautiful, there. And it stuck with me and it, you know, over time, you know, we develop, acuities of perception and we begin to be able to create our own maps of meaning-making, and appreciation and, you know, and reception, for these transmissions and that's a dialectic, too.
Right. And so, you know, as we develop these subtleties of these dialectics, which is part of the transmission of art, then that informs how we view the world. They are blueprints of conscious discernment that map outward, and inform how we see the world.
The, say, for example, in simple terms, the music that we listen to has an impact consciously on how we interpret our world. And it goes both ways. So it's very beautiful information, filter of the experience.
Melinda: Yeah. I love that. That's actually been always one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs as well. So appreciate that. But yeah, you're speaking of this dialectic makes me think about also, you know, the more we study art or the more we study music, the more deeply we can often appreciate it. It's not required, of course, but, you know, if you take an art history class and then you go to an art museum and you have some understanding of the different, you know, artists and the different schools and the different movements, then, you know, sometimes it can make for a deeper experience. Right?
Archie: Yeah. And it's also a double-edged sword, too. You know, I'd much rather receive something from someone who, you know, is working from his heart or her heart. And that's what sticks with me, I think.
Melinda: Yeah, it's interesting because sometimes you'll hear, like, really stripped down, just like demo recordings or whatever of a song that maybe later got produced and became really popular.
And sometimes that just really raw, very simple recording has more power to it. So yeah. Well, believe it or not, we are just about at time and this has flown by. But, I usually like to end each episode with a Creativity Pro Tip, something that people can kind of, you know, run with on their own and experiment and try out related to creativity.
So I feel like what's, you know, really been a theme of our conversation today is, you know, opening up to the senses whether we, you know, feel that we experience synesthesia specifically or not. We all can open up to our senses more fully and experience them. And, you know, just kind of see what arises from that place, both as a creator and a receiver of art.
So I don't know, is there anything that the two of you might add to that as far as like a practical tip for doing that?
Zoe: The practice of paying closer attention to things like the street sweeper when it goes by or the sound of the subway on the tracks, the sound of running water, I mean, just paying more attention and focusing in on that has kind of a, almost like a little microcosm and then becomes this macrocosm of, well, I could make an entire piece just around my experience of what this very mundane experience of washing the dishes sounds like.
And so that for me, is where I've found something very applicable.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. And I love that you mentioned sounds that we might normally kind of want to push away, like the street sweeper or the subway. Right. Like sounds that we might find like from a Buddhist perspective. Right? We talk about passion, aggression and indifference, essentially.
Right. And there are certain sounds, certain experiences that we kind of just don't want to experience. But if we actually just lean into that a bit and those sounds or the equivalent, you know, of other sensory experiences and what that might open up for us creatively, I think is really interesting. Yeah. Great. And Archie, anything to add there?
Archie: Yeah. When I think about like, when you think about art and creativity, for me, it’s fundamentally inseparable from art, from life itself. Right. And this is an idea. It's not new at all. It's very basic. Henri Bergson wrote a beautiful book called The Art of Life [L’Art de Vivre] . And it's a collection of his writings that advocate for the artist being the, you know, the conscious, intelligent being, to live a life of art, to immerse one's awareness, one's consciousness into the realm that we associate to be art.
Because guess what? There is no difference between life and art. They're the same thing. And so from that perspective, this comes back to this paradigm of consciousness. If what we're really talking about is this absolute consciousness and our awareness of it, moving through us, then the most basic thing that I could possibly attempt to offer is to meditate.
Just meditate. I mean, that, you know, when we really go into a non-dual state of awareness, when we go in, where we have access to this totality and it's the act of discernment through awareness whereby, you know, we function, move through the world and create and so, yeah, from a practical standpoint, just go meditate and see what happens.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. Beautiful. And what a great kind of place to conclude. So thank you both so much. And if people do want to connect with you or find out more about your work, what is the best way for them to do that?
Archie: Well, I'm available on LinkedIn. Please feel free to reach out to me there. I believe my email is also on my LinkedIn page.
Melinda: And, Zoe, I think you said if people want to find you, they can reach out to me and connect with you that way? Okay, great.
Zoe: That is the best way. I'm in the process, actually, of constructing a website, but it is not ready. So right now the best way is through you.
Melinda: Okay. And stay tuned for a future website, and can't wait to see what happens with your your musical work as well. So thank you both so much for taking the time today. I know you're very busy with your studies and other efforts.
At Syncreate,we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or new venture, and you're not quite sure how to get it off the ground, please reach out to us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals.
We also offer resources, creative process tools and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. And specifically, we'll be offering a monthly coaching group starting in January of 2025 so you can learn more about that at syncreate.org.
Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate and we're now on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review! We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, with Zoe joining us from California and Archie, I believe, in Colorado. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us, and see you next time.
