Manifesto Part III: Spirit-led Innovation - John Oestmann Music

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Manifesto Part III: Spirit-led Innovation

(Part I here)<br>(Part II here)

For decades we saw technology as "solving" the future. Through the internet, through artificial intelligence, through grand rocket ships, we were meant to reach an assured path towards some kind of world peace.<br>Here in the future, today: we have the internet, we have artificial intelligence, and we have lots of money going into rocket ships – and large sections of society feel spiritually unhealthier than they did 30 years ago. It turns out that technology was a helpful support, but it was never the answer.

This part of the manifesto may be the most vague, because "Spirit" will likely mean something different to each person, and many of us come to the word with a long history of assumptions and potential baggage. For this part, the best explanation I can give is from my own lived experience:

For me, "Spirit" comes down to a kind of intuition that (with time getting to know it) I have worked out comes from around the lower-middle of my chest. I "check in" with it, seeking if it resonates in a certain direction when making decisions. It is important to note that Spirit is different to emotion. I can feel confused, or scared, or sad about a potential direction, but it feels right to my Spirit. This is where it has become increasingly integrated into my creative workflow. I will often feel to transform audio in ways that don’t immediately sound good (and can often seem bad on a technical level), but by trusting the process, I will often end up in really interesting creative places.

What makes it hard to talk about, in our current culture of Scientism, is that it doesn’t offer any guarantees. This has been my own biggest struggle with it, as I have wanted to know that my process would be beneficial to society. Unfortunately, there is often no clear plan you can approve up front. Though, I have been doing this for enough years now to say that it is a more robust and resilient process than any other I have come across.

And this is one of the key points – following Spirit keeps you feeling creatively charged, even when things aren’t going in your favour. Some days you feel it more or less clearly, but you know that even if the world is falling around you, you can check in and get the slightest tug what your next step should be. And then the next step. And then the next. It keeps you moving in a healthy direction.

One other key part of the process for me is to keep my eyes open. By this I mean to trust the process of Following Spirit, but to also stay aware of the world around you. There is potential danger in letting yourself become detached if the only information you are taking in is that of "Spiritual direction". It is quite possible that Spirit, as I am calling it, is an intuitive sense and relies on information to stay up to date. It likely can access far more information that is consciously accessible through pure rationality, but it still needs to be exposed to the up-to-date world in the first place.

All-in-all, the process of getting to know and practice following Spirit has been a decades-long journey for me. I always wanted to somehow prove that is was the best approach before sharing it. But after thirty-something years trying and testing different approaches to innovation, studying the real histories behind innovations, and watching society’s blind faith in techno-optimism fall away, I have found that "Following Spirit with Your Eyes Open" is actually the the most resilient approach left standing.

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