“I feel like I was once
Separated twice,
Now I feel like I
Will never know my mind.”
— “Heavy Metal” by The New Tarot
Monika Walker and her band, The New Tarot, are certainly making their way into the public consciousness. Critics say their “hard-rocking brand of Synthpop,” which is “equal parts mystical and danceable,” will “flip alternative rock on its head with the powerful stories found in their irresistible songs.”
But for Walker, the band is more than music: it’s a way for her to understand and connect with the various aspects of her own identity. And now with The New Tarot’s new song, “Heavy Metal,” Walker is continuing to make a powerful statement:
If we connect with both our “spiritual” and “realistic” sides, then we can have the best of both worlds and achieve our best self — our magical consciousness.
The concept of a “magical consciousness” is not so much about “magic,” per se, as it is a recognition of, and an attempt to integrate and understand, various experiential phenomena that people experience. Magical consciousness has been defined as “the way in which the cognitive architecture of a mind engages the emotions and imagination in a pattern of meanings related to childhood experiences, spiritual communications and the environment.”
“There are different ways of looking at the universe. There’s spiritual and atheistic and material and then there’s magical,” Walker explained. “And spiritual is the religious view that we are spiritual beings living this physical consciousness and there’s a higher power. There’s the materialist thinking that all that’s real is what’s in front of us Magical consciousness is taking both of those aspects and sort of charging them in a new way.”
Research is increasingly supporting the notion that spirituality is critical to improved health and well-being. For example, one 10-year longitudinal study of 114 adults found that individuals who identified spirituality or religion as important in their lives were significantly less likely to be depressed over time. This effect was particularly pronounced among adults with a depressed parent, suggesting that spirituality is a protective factor against individuals with a high genetic risk for depression.
Moreover, Walker believes that this consciousness is not only shared across people, but also that it is multidimensional. Carl Jung is considered the first psychologist to label the term “collective unconscious” which is ,in theory, a series of innate, unconscious mental patterns that exist in all people and represent an accumulation of experience from previous generations. The collective unconscious can be understood as organized into several “archetypes” that are experienced by all people — such as “self,” “father” and “mother.”
“I am a combination of materialism and spiritualism and a collection of consciousness that we evoke depending on what we’re doing. This kind of thinking might be regarded as an older type of thinking, but it is much more scientifically backed now,” she said. “And you look at this idea of different processes going on in the brain and different layers of reality that we are focusing on at all times and the different parts of ourselves we all kind of have in common. And those different parts of ourselves you can talk to and have a conversation with and are strengthened or weakened, depending on what you need to do.
Research suggests that we can have “multiple selves” that still cohere into a general personality framework. For example, one longitudinal study of 89 women assessed both general personality style (i.e., positive affect, competence, dependability), as well as multiple roles (e.g., partner, friend). The study found that people can see themselves differently in various roles but still maintain a consistent “general self-concept.”
Walker explained that, from her perspective, having “multiple selves” is not being disingenouous, but is adaptive. “When we connect the dots and fill in the picture, I don’t think that we are one person at any time. It’s very obvious that we’re different, depending on who we are around, but does that make us fake? It doesn’t make us fake, it’s just us presenting a different side of ourselves at different times. That’s the key. It’s that we are all much bigger than one personality.
In the context of Walker’s views on consciousness, it becomes clear that the name “The New Tarot” is not an accident. Tarot refers to a collection of symbols or archetypes that represents the range of human experience. Walker explained, “The original Tarot is a deck of cards and each card represents a kind of particle of the human journey, of human consciousness. And we’re experimenting with an update to it in song form instead of card form.”
And Walker’s creative process is geared towards connecting with this spirit. “The way that my sister (co-founder of The New Tarot, Karen Walker) and I started writing is that we’re calling on a particular spirit to say what it needs to say,” she said.
In this way, Walker is approaching her music the way that, as legend has it, Jim Morrison of The Doors did. Morrison is said to have emulated shamans who were able to connect with their own spiritual side and draw others into a common spiritual experience. “The Doors are the first band that I loved, and they definitely have a lot of influence,” Walker said.
“It’s interesting to me, this shamanic idea, a very old idea, that we are inhabited by different consciousness and different spirits. They would imagine different animals based on what they needed to do. So, if you needed to go talk to someone, you’d imagine yourself as the bear, and you could go and bully them into getting what you wanted. If you needed to do something quiet, you’d think of the crane,” she said.
While there is limited study of the efficacy of shamanism in improving well-being, the healing power of music is well-documented. Evidence shows that listening to or playing music can improve symptoms of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and chronic pain.
Connecting into these different aspects of experience help Walker discover her songs. . “Usually, a melody maybe with some words will kind of come up. It makes itself known. I agree with the idea that the song is there, and you just uncover it. Michelangelo said the same thing about his statues in stone. It is there, somewhere, the parts are all there. There are so many possibilities, it’s nearly infinite, but it’s not really. It does have that feel where you can almost see it in the distance, and you kind of just grasp on to it and keep going with it.”
Walker feels that being able to express this connection in a story is a difficult task, and says that she admires the band The Flaming Lips for their storytelling ability. “The Flaming Lips had a big influence on me,” she said. “… Getting into that storytelling mode because that’s what music kind of does, it makes concrete these things that we can’t even talk about or see a picture of, or all of these confusing philosophies that we can’t put into words so well.”
“They fit much better into music.”
For Walker, being able to understand and connect with different aspects of herself has also been important in managing her own anxiety. Walker explained how difficult anxiety can be and how easy it would be to try to avoid it. “I’ve struggled with anxiety all my life. I’ve been diagnosed with general anxiety. A lot of it is childhood things. … I get into these states of anxiety and I can’t really take it, and I get very like ‘Aaah, I don’t want to freak out,’” she said.
But research shows that emotional suppression actually makes negative emotions worse, not better. In contrast, expressing emotions through activities such as writing down one’s feelings through songwriting can improve mood and reduce unhealthy stress responses. Studies also demonstrate that mindfulness therapy programs that help people accept rather than avoid experience have been effective in improving symptoms of depression and anxiety.
By accepting and confronting her fears, Walker says, she has been more effective in coping with anxiety. “Rediscovering the different parts of humans and all our weird idiosyncrasies and a lot of the ugliness we refuse to deal with; I think it’s important to look at directly in the face and talk to,” she said. “It’s easier for me to remember that that’s just a part of me — the part that’s freaking out isn’t the whole me, and I just look at it and say, ‘OK, that’s my anxious part, and it’s still recovering from crazy stuff from childhood.’”
“It makes it a lot easier to compartmentalize yourself and deal with the issues of each part better. Like my anxious side can get comforted by my mothering side. And using your consciousness for itself instead of against itself definitely helps in my daily life — my day-to-day existence — I’m definitely a lot less anxious.”
For Walker, connecting with her spiritual side has been particularly useful. “I was raised Greek Orthodox and then Protestant. A lot of things about church — they told me and all my friends that we’re going to hell — I thought that was completely preposterous. If I’m struggling with something, and I feel like I need more strength to get through something, or I’m being a lazy shit for a week and I’m not doing anything … Instead of praying to a god, I find myself more and more praying to the future version of me. And that’s not the future version of me as human, but in my mind, it’s the future version of me after death.”
“There’s a way that you can direct probabilities in yourself. Like this week, I feel like I haven’t done enough. I need to be doing more work. I’m feeling lazy. I might try to meditate and imagine myself in a few weeks doing things and waking up on time and letting that future version of events manifest. And this shifting of probabilities just helps to have something. If you can pray to the future, it’s not that crazy. It kind of makes sense.”
Walker feels that the band is taking on new concepts of archetypes that are unique to this generation. “A lot of our topics are — we used to have the knight or the idea of the hermit, and now we have these new things that we need to talk about, like the drone pilot, the social worker. These are not just occupations, these are changing the way that we think.”
“The biggest example is probably our song ‘Stella’ and that’s sort of a struggle with the materialism part of us. The part of us that wants things. ‘Stella’ is the ultimate example of that. She’s the crazy cat lady who lives in her house with no one else except for all of the items that she’s collected her whole life. And there are piles and piles and piles,” she explained. “And this kind of imagery is painting a picture of something that is definitely within all of us in this modern age. It’s this idea of never-ending need for things. And I don’t care how spiritual you are, you were indoctrinated into this idea that we need things. We’re all guilty of it at one point in our lives or another. That’s one of the more concrete examples and the easiest to grasp.”
What Walker finds particularly challenging in current times is how technology has disconnected us. “‘Heavy Metal’ is kind of a reaction to this strange way of being that we’ve found ourselves in. It’s kind of like being lost in the shuffle. It is hard to grasp our connection to everyone else around us. We’re connected in terms of the Internet and Twitter, you can talk to anyone in the world at any time by going on a forum, but that all made us more disconnected. It’s almost like we’re all neighbors all of a sudden, and it’s too much, and everybody just shuts the shutters,” she said.
“‘Heavy Metal’ is a little more complicated, in that it’s an exploration of an archetype but it’s also an exploration of our disconnect from our own archetypes. Our thinking that we’re separate from everything else. I think a lot of people experience this feeling when they are younger … that glow that you remember from when you were a kid, that is totally transferable to your life as an adult We are very much the same consciousness looking through different eyes.”
And Walker is looking ahead to taking on the challenge of exploring her own consciousness and helping others do the same. “I would say we are definitely into the idea that we’re picking up the torch and taking them into the science age, where spirituality and science are finally, acknowledging each other, which is incredible.”
“A lot of things that we are experiencing today we have never experienced before, and we’re holding ourselves open to a lot of change. We’re so individualistic. Everyone is required to be individualistic, and yet we’re so lost in what our connection to the outside world is. Have we lost what makes us a whole as humans?” she asked.
“We have a lot more in common than we admit, that’s for sure.”
Listen to “Heavy Metal” here.
Photo credit: Davane Ohira
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Psychology Today on December 16, 2015.
