Energy, Intention, and Authenticity in Doing Creative Work.

Message from Jeff, September 2024

Greetings! Jeff’s here again. This month I don’t have any significant update regarding activities from both Kekal and K432 (Boooo! 😝). I’m in a kind of “summer break” (an excuse term for procrastination) from working on K432 project, and while I have at least 6 new lyrics written for the upcoming Kekal material, I think it’s better to hold off from sharing them right now (I did share about a couple of them on Kekal’s Facebook & Instagram though). It has been six months already since Kekal began using Substack platform for the monthly eNewsletter. Writing on Substack is necessary, especially when it comes to sharing thoughts and messages outside the regular band updates. Kekal has been put under shadow-ban on both FB & IG and they regularly remove posts they considered as “against community standards” without further explanation (their own “term” for doing authoritarian censorship to any posts with content that challenge their agenda), as well as limiting/suppressing the reach or visibility of such posts. 🤷 I now use Substack instead of social media to share thoughts and messages because I still can exercise freedom of thought and freedom of speech here (so far). Please keep yourself subscribed and if you haven’t already, feel free to subscribe by entering your email address below. Also don’t forget to share any post to your friends and beyond if you found it to be worth sharing. The previous posts can be accessed from the archive page here.

---

Energy Transfer through Sharing Creative Outputs

Some of the listeners wonder why Kekal would normally post old videos or photos about old albums or past shows every year as part of the band’s “anniversary commemoration”. The first reason is because the band has more old material than new material to share! And the other reason, which sounds a bit philosophical but actually is more important, is in order to revisit those experiences as I realized they have some kind of positive impact to what I do for the band right now, and hopefully also to the listeners as well. I know this may sound crazy and woo-woo, but I believe in energy. Energy is what creates matter, in other words we live in the sea or waveform of energy and we also create our reality using such energy. Everything that we perceive is a manifestation of energy, but some energy would remain “unopened” if we let every experience to pass without putting the meaning and intention into our lives. We are not “zombies” or robots working in autopilot. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience. As human, we are also creator beings, and our ability to create is what differentiate us humans with animals. Birds can sing but they can’t do what singer-songwriters do (composing songs and writing lyrics). Any dog can growl but you can’t hire a dog to become a vocalist of your death metal band.

Back to Kekal, the band encountered bad experiences in the past of course, multiple times not just a few, but we never wanted to focus on those unpleasant experiences and share them over and over again because those things carry what I call as negative energy. For me, remembering past experiences that are “not good” would affect my mood because it triggers energy from those moments and pull it into my energy field, and thus it might affect my present day in a negative way. We may recall certain experiences that contain both positive and negative energy imprints, but as we focus more on the good ones that carry the positive energy, we don’t spoil the mood of our listeners and those who were involved including myself. There are positive energy imprints from past events that can be shared every year, even it may look redundant. Yes, it’s commonly called “nostalgia”, but the difference with the traditional understanding of nostalgia is that in traditional use, a form of nostalgia is a way to soothe the sorrow or loneliness of the present moment by remembering the past. For example, elderly senior persons most of the times would show their old photos to people who visit them and tell the stories in the photos that refer to the good moments in the old days when they were young. By looking at the old photos it triggers good memories that contain an energy signature which then creates the good feeling of the one who recalls it. The good feeling is formed because of the energy captured from the memory of events related to even a single photo. Without that photo, most of the time we would forget because we’ve had countless of experiences throughout our journey. In Kekal, we share some old videos or photos as means to communicate the events or other things that may affect us in a positive way. In other word, to inspire and motivate both the musicians that contribute to the band as well as the listeners. This is the main point of sharing old videos and photos. Even though there are not much new information that can be pulled from those videos or photos, they are far from being dead or meaningless. For example, below is the recent post on Kekal’s Instagram with video footage taken from the band’s 2004 European Tour (the final performance of the tour in Zwolle, The Netherlands, March 14, 2004).

kekalofficial

A post shared by @kekalofficial

From my own experience as a musician and songwriter since I began writing songs in 1990, I’ve found that good/positive energy is very much needed for doing any creative work, whatever kind of work you do. You can’t create good stuff when you’re in a negative state emotionally, unless you use that creative process as a channel to let go or let out such emotion. In other words let’s say you would write a song that reflects what you feel at that moment, like anger or sorrow, you would use the song as a catharsis, a way to let go of that emotion through music. It can carry a positive, healing energy because the intention is to let out or to disown such negative energy trapped within your psyche. You may have heard the word “transmutation” that is being used more often now, and music is one of the most effective tools to transmute negative energy (waveform with lower vibrational frequency) into a positive (higher vibrational) one. In this case, the creative process is connected to the intention of letting go of the negative stuff in order to heal, and the music will no longer carry such negative energy even though it’s not a happy music to begin with and the general mood or atmosphere is still somewhat dark. This is the “alchemical magic” of music: the ability to transmute energy just based on the intention of the creator (the artist(s) behind it). But on the other hand, if you keep or even try to “own” such negative emotions as part of yourself, and use music merely as a mirror-reflection or display of such emotions you want to keep as you would merge with those emotions, your song would still be carrying the negative energy within it, because it is not getting transmuted by intention. That is the main difference.

---

The Importance of Being Authentic

The word “expression” is synonymous to the act in bringing forth what is within us. It is more connected to the work of the heart instead of the brain. So, if we choose to create something based on honest or authentic expression whether through music, poetry or art as the platform, we just need to go within and to tune into our heart instead of using our brain in a theoretical or mechanical way. An AI (artificial intelligence) is now able do things such as composing music, doing digital artwork, writing lyrics/poetry, etc. and its capability is developing exponentially. But what an AI does isn’t creative work the way organic human do. You can still feel the difference in the energy signature of the outputs. Outputs of music and artwork generated by AI even though they look “skillful” and “sophisticated” they all seem to lack the “human feel” and the “breathing space”. Everything looks or sounds mechanistic, dead and sterile, because their outputs don’t carry the living energy signature unlike artwork or music made by us organic human (if expressed authentically). They “create” stuffs through “knowledge” from machine-learning, based on the amount of data they acquired, without creative imagination nor intention. Now, if we as human tend to deny, dismiss or disregard our strength in relation to our creative abilities, and opt to follow the mechanistic or robotic way of doing things, there will be no such difference between what we do and AI, and AI can do much quicker as well as more “precise”. It’s not that difficult to notice the difference between mechanically-inclined output based on motoric or obtained technical skills (like for example, playing super fast shredder-styled guitar solos only based on knowledge of music scales and amount of practice) and the heart-based or soulful output (quoting Ritchie Blackmore’s term in guitar soloing as “always searching for notes”), but creating any heart-based output is more difficult because it requires authenticity in how we express it. By being authentic it means we need to go within and to tune into our core of being, which is the heart or the soul. Being authentic also means we need to disregard any pressure from the external, like following current trend or things that are “in” for the sake of conformity, or following the majority (known as the herd mentality).

If we do things authentically especially in our creative works, it literally expands our energy field because the heart (which generates a huge amount of electromagnetic energy, much much more than the brain does) would drive our expression instead of our brain. In other terms, it’s the soul that initiates the expression instead of our ego-mind. I personally didn’t understand this first, but I’ve experienced both sides myself. As I choose to become more authentic in my creative process and use the heart instead of brain to initiate the expression, the output of my work feels stronger in terms of energy, despite it becomes somewhat less appealing to the general audience. As music (and art in general) has been seen as a mere commodity with a price-tag put into it, we may lose ourselves and move away from authenticity and the sacredness of the heart. This is the reason why much of the music released in the mainstream market, even before AI, sound lifeless/soulless and without substance.

---

The High Vibration of Authenticity

If we choose to become authentic, one thing we need to understand is that we can no longer expect that what we do will please the masses or appeal to a broad audience. First of all, because we can never please everyone, all expectations regarding what others see us should not become our concerns. Expectation only leads to disappointment. Being authentic is staying true to oneself without trying to conform with any norms or standards within the collective. Regarding creative expressions such as art or music, being authentic is all about expressing fully from the inside instead of adjusting the inside based on things that happen on the outside, or approvals we would get from the external. The journey of embodying authenticity can be lonely at times, like your music may not be understood by the general audience. It’s not an easy path to walk because it’s not a path to popularity. Many artists struggle to overcome rejections and may fall into depression (because we always long to be loved and accepted), but I can assure that staying true to oneself is worth it because authenticity has a high vibrational frequency in its energy signature that can literally heal and transform people. Sacrificing public approval or acceptance for a much greater purpose is an honorable act.

Every vibration makes a resonance. By being authentic, our heart generates a higher frequency vibration and it will ripple out or make a resonance to anyone whose soul vibrates within the similar frequency range. Authentic music can become a magnet to attract, touch and inspire others who then also opt to embody authenticity, even it’s only one person at a time. In regard to this, it also means the more artists that embody authenticity within their works and share them, it will generate a strong ripple effect as the resonance gets transferred further and further. There are valuable lessons we can learn in embracing authenticity and putting positive intentions into our creative work, and through sharing, we let our work to become a blessing (positive energy transfers) for the collective. The phrase “sharing is caring” is very much true! It will make a positive impact within the collective at the grassroots level.

Feel free to share this post to your friends as you see fit (no pun intended). You can also read past months’ messages posted on Substack if you haven’t yet. Please keep yourself subscribed to this newsletter and stay tuned. Thank you and see you again soon!

Kekal

www.kekal.org

Follow Kekal on Facebook / Instagram / YouTube / Bandcamp

New Merchandise Available at www.kekal.org/merchandise