Pontus: Hi, Alan.

Alan: Is that you Pontus? I haven’t seen you for awhile. Where have you been?

Pontus: I’m right here waiting for you.

Alan: Okay, okay. You know, sometimes all roads lead to Rome. Well, when I think about Angelina Jordan, I think about her music, but I also think about something which is much, much too important for us not to talk about. And she would be ever so pleased with us talking about this, and this is Universal Love. It’s something we could just speak about and elaborate and explain. And it’s such a rich topic, and it’s something I don’t think many people really understand. Because if you really understand it, it can really have a very deep impact.

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Alan: You know, how we say in the English language, ‘some people, when they look at a glass, the glass is half full and other people look at the glass and it’s half empty.’

Pontus: Yeah, we have that in Sweden, too.

Alan: Yeah, I think it’s a universal. Well people who begin to understand the concept of Universal Love, they will look at that same glass and that glass will be overflowing. So it’s the same glass. It’s not that they have problems with their eyesight. It is a matter of a shift in their perspective. And to extend this image, it means that someone, everyone who they look at, everyone who they meet, they look and they see the goodness in these people. Everyone who you view, you see the goodness in them. And not only do you give them the benefit of the doubt, but you approach them with kindness and you see all of the good aspects of them. And you maximize the positive and you minimize the negative in other people.

Pontus: My wife, she went for the groceries and she came back upset because the cashier, he had been rude to her. And so she said to me, ‘help me to get rid of this negative energy I have. I’m still thinking about him’. And I said, ‘he probably just had a bad day. it’s not you it’s him’. I tend to think about that side of it, that they have their own problems that I know nothing about. So I must not to judge too soon.

Alan: Yep. That’s absolutely what we’re talking about. As a rule, most people should get their own house in order before they understand how it affects other people. So for example, most people need to reinvent themselves with a shift in perspective. It’s not rocket science. You just have to understand, ‘Right, I’m not going to let that affect me. I’m not going to let that, bring me down’. It’s the way, a child will look at someone else. A child will look at someone with innocence and delight and a young child will not understand the nature of evil. It’s simple to say, but it’s very difficult to do.
I recognize that pure evil can exist. Some people are the embodiment, represent pure evil. And I feel very, very sad for them. And I feel great pity that their life has been so unhappy that they have evolved to this type of human being. But it doesn’t fill me with hatred because that would be like filling me with poison. And that would be really negative. It would not be good for me. And it would not be good for how I deal with the world. It would be a type of a psychic burden that I’m giving myself, which I don’t want to. And it is not very healthy.

Pontus: In that way of thinking, like that, it’s almost like you’re helping yourself, really. When you’re thinking like that and just letting go of all the negative stuff and getting involved in the negative side of people, what they say and what they do. I think the world now really needs Universal Love. In that manner, that there is a lot of conflicts and hatred and everything’s, that’s been going on. It’s a great time for somebody like Angelina Jordan to break through, I think in these troubled times we have.

Alan: Absolutely. I don’t think we can leave Universal Love to the politicians because, I don’t think that’s on their agenda or that’s not in their vocabulary. Occasionally you hear something like, in this direction from religious leaders. But a lot of people will either take a religious statement with a pinch of salt, but if we can take the essence of this message and describe it completely on its own, then it can be viewed on its own in a different way. But, a lot of the focus should be on keeping your own house in order and what you do internally it needs to be a series of individual self improvements in order to get on a mass scale.

Pontus: Yeah, did you know that, when you point at somebody there’s actually three fingers pointing back at yourself? If you look at your hand when you’re pointing. And that is a good way to remember that the things that I see in others, I have even more myself because that’s why I see them in others.

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Pontus: I’m coming up now on my first year with Angelina. I discovered her about a year and a one month ago. So I’ve been thinking a little bit about what this past year has meant for me, in regards to self-improvement. We’ve talked about my phobia for spiders that it’s much better now, that I’m not so afraid of spiders anymore. I don’t kill them anymore, because I feel they should live. And also the way I view other people when I communicate with them. It’s much more in an open manner, and the benefit of the doubt. And when I meet somebody I try to incorporate some thing that makes them happy about themselves. Because the way I interpret the message that Angelina has in her artistry, is that you should really try to lift everybody else up a little bit, because that is what we all need.

Alan: That’s a good point Pontus, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about. One of the things I’ve noticed is many of the fans of Angelina Jordan, might be a little bit shy or a little bit introverted. And I think one of the reasons they gravitate towards Angelina Jordan is, she makes them more emotional. Whereas their emotion might be deep and hidden and they may not have access so readily to emotion. She almost, a little bit brings them out of their shell. She conjures more emotion up towards the surface and that alone can change their personality and how they engage the world. And, that’s a very, very interesting phenomenon, that she is able to.

Pontus: Yeah. And do you think you could say the other way around too, that people that don’t get Angelina, that they are not that emotionally involved people?

Alan: I don’t know. If you sit someone down and say, ‘You’re going to really like this song’, It’s almost a way of daring them not to like it. And so sometimes you get that. If you hand someone a piece of cheese and say, ‘This is the best cheese you’ll ever taste in your life’, it’s a way of making sure that they won’t like the cheese at all.

Pontus: Yeah, I know what you mean. That’s a problem. In one or two weeks I will have a friend over here in my studio and we will sit down, and she has never heard of Angelina. Well, she’s heard of her, but she has never heard a song from her. She knows I have a channel, but she hasn’t seen anything of my videos. So I will introduce her on camera to Angelina Jordan. It will be so much fun to see, what that will be like. And it’s a challenge because of what you just said, I must tone down my own enthusiasm for the songs so that she can sort of discover it herself.

Alan: When you sit down with your friend who knows nothing about Angelina Jordan, show her the list of Angelina’s 130 songs, or 150 songs and say, ‘Look for a song that you really, really like’, and then play her Angelina’s version. That might immediately blow open the whole situation and that immediately might put her into a different place.
Funny you should mention this story because just a couple of hours ago I was zooming with my sister and nine months ago, my sister had never heard of Angelina Jordan, but through me she now knows her and she knows her well and she can appreciate her. And I have jokingly said to my sister, ‘Oh, you should come and do a podcast as a guest with Pontus and I’. Of course, she knows you as well. And she said, ‘Oh yeah, but I’m not a cryer. I don’t cry’. And I said to her, ‘Oh, we can teach you to do that’.

Pontus: What does she think? Does she think that we cry a lot on our podcasts?

Alan: No, she was being tongue in cheek. She was joking.

Pontus: My friend, she said, ‘You must know one thing about me, I’m a very skeptical person. So hit me with something that will really knock my socks off’. So, I’m thinking of course about going with I Put a Spell on You.

Alan: The big three is, I Put a Spell, Bohemian Rhapsody and Gloomy Sunday. It’s a cross section and they’re all really, really powerful, powerful songs.

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Alan: ‘Reinvention with a shift in perspective’. Now let me just talk about those few words because you can reinvent yourself with a shift of perspective, but actually everything can be reinvented with a shift of perspective. Let me give you an example. You go out at night and you look up at the sky and you see the stars. Now, how far away is that star and how big is it? And do you know what you are looking at, at this moment, the light from that star, left that star to travel to your eye when the dinosaurs were on the earth?
So once you shift your perspective you can look at stars in a completely different way.
Bob Dylan has a song called Every Grain of Sand. If you go to the beach and you look at the sand, every grain of sand was part of a rock, but over millions and millions of years ago, the ocean has pounded the rock and grounded down to little grains of sand. So you could look at the sand in a completely, completely different way.
And also did you know that under a microscope, the cell of every single human being is the same as the cell of plant life, of all biology of all plants? So if you think about that, that really completely reinvents your understanding of human beings and of biology and of what life is.
So with just a little bit of a shift, you could really reorient yourself completely in a different direction. And this is what Angelina Jordan does with her music, as I see it. And also this is what Angelina Jordan does in her reaction to people. She does a reinvention by shifting her perspective. Okay, she shifts her perspective musically, but it’s the impact which is so profound on us. She is almost like coming up with a different language. She’s almost coming up with a different way that we see ourselves and our emotions and music and jazz and the world. This is not rocket science, it’s just… It’s great if you have access to reinvention. It’s great If you have access to more than one option.

Pontus: Yeah, of course. I see what you mean. That’s very profound.

Alan: If you enjoy Angelina Jordan, eventually there’s a lot of profound stuff coming out of Angelina Jordan. So we’re just appreciating what she does.

Pontus: I have never felt, like a spiritual person at all. And I come from a various sort of more of a scientific background. But this past year after listening to Angelina so much every day, I’ve started to be curious about those things. I’ve started to investigate a little bit about the philosophical side of Buddhism, for instance. If somebody told me I would do that, like two years ago, I would have laughed in their face. But now it’s like, yeah, I’m open to stuff like that. I’m not saying that I’ve been like a religious salvation or anything like that. Even if we don’t know what’s happening in the universe to us and what is life and everything, we can still use those kind of,philosophies to our own benefit, like to grow as a human. That is Angelina’s doing right there, I think.

Alan: That’s a really good point. And that’s very clear and well said, Pontus. if you will allow me to quote Shakespeare, he said, ‘there is more between heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our imagination’. it is just a matter of stretching our imagination to realize what more there lies between heaven and earth.

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Alan: Even 14,000 years ago, man realized there was more than to what he could just only see.

Pontus: Yeah, and that is exactly right. Even if you go the scientific route, we know that we don’t know a lot of things. I’m curious about that, really. How much do we know? How much is there more to find out that we don’t know? Is it like, we know 80% of everything that there is to know or is it, we know 1% of everything there is to know? Where are we on the scale of things?

Alan: This is the exact reason why I would like to live to be 500 years. I’m absolutely fascinated, science can put a man on the moon, but they cannot find the exact place inside of human consciousness. Where is human consciousness? And that for me is a paradox.
Everything has its, I’m going to say counterparts, so the huge, wonderful mystery in the universe with lightyears and galaxies, the awe and wonder, the intellectual curiosity, that vast expense, we have inside of us. 
Inside of us we also have a vast universe with many unanswered questions and huge areas that we can explore. And this is what Angelina Jordan helps us with. She helps us explore different, Universes and different roles and different dimensions and different feelings. And it’s not just a type of personal evolution. It is a reinvention. It is a wonderful reinvention.

Pontus: Yeah, yeah. Do you think she’s aware of that herself?

Alan: Yes, I do, but one of the wonderful, wonderful things about Angelina Jordan is she’s such a pure artist. I don’t believe she has any self-consciousness as an artist. She doesn’t think about all these things. She just emotes and she just creates art so spontaneously. It’s the same as you and I breathe in and breathing out.

Pontus: Yeah, I think she even said that music for her is like breathing.

Alan: She doesn’t show off. She’s not self-absorbed with herself. Her modesty is part of her strength and delight.

Pontus: I think you’re onto something when you emphasize that she brings out the emotion in us. Emotions are almost frowned upon. Certain emotions are like, you should be a cool cucumber.

Alan: Many people are other scientific or their analysts. And, a lot of people, live their life with and through facts. And, a fact is almost the opposite end of the spectrum of emotion. There is, Freedom of Speech and there is Freedom of Thoughts, but there’s also Freedom to Feel. It’s perfectly fine to feel something. But the question is, where and how, and what filter do you use? What type of filter is between you and that feeling, and the expression of that feeling? In other words, we have Freedom of Speech, but that implies, hopefully, a little bit of a filter of not saying everything that comes to your head all the time.

Pontus: Yeah, some people should have that filter turned on, I think.

Alan: Yeah, but the nature of the Freedom to Feel that should be spontaneous and continual. What you do with that feeling is a different issue.

Pontus: One of the feelings that is sort of dangerous, that we as a society tend to go to all the time is fear. I think fear in us as humans, that’s the most sort of inhibitant factor in us as humans, to do stuff. We’re afraid of everything. And I think that is so important for us, to witness somebody that is not afraid. And that is Angelina. I mean, she has no fear. And people comment on this over and over again when she’s on stage and she’s in front of a lot of people, she’s not nervous, she has no fear. And I’m wondering what that comes from. That is extraordinary in such a young person.

Alan: It’s interesting you should mention fear because, one of the ways I look at fear is that, it is a very, very necessary, not just emotion, but it’s also even deeper. If anything it’s almost like an instinct. And in terms of, Fight, Flight and Fright, it’s common to almost every single species. You need the emotion of fear for your survival, to know when to run away when there’s danger.
So it’s a very, very primal and basic emotion, which is part of our survival instinct. But, how you’re describing her lack of fear, this actually brings our conversation to full circle. Because the love that she received, from the very, very beginning of her life meant, she never had any fear that she was being criticized or that she had done something wrong or that she was rejected. The Universal Love focused into her, did not allow the natural occurrence of fear as you and I and most people know it. And so I think it’s wonderful, Pontus that we can begin the conversation talking about Universal Love and end the conversation on Universal Love, because that brings the conversation full circle.