Podcast transcription

Pontus: Welcome to Wrapped in a Warm Blanket, a podcast with heart-To-Heart talks about Angelina Jordan’s artistry and how it affects our inner world, co-hosted by Alan Papier and Pontus Osterlin.

Hi, Alan,

Alan: Good evening, Pontus.

Pontus: What shall we talk about today?

Alan: Well, we had such a good conversation the first time. I think we should absolutely just carry on the same way.

Pontus: Do you mean talking about Angelina Jordan?

Alan: Yes, talking about Angelina Jordan and the ripple effect that she has for us and what that completely means.

Pontus: Yeah, let’s do that.

Alan: Now, you said something really, really interesting the first time you said that just before you discovered Angelina, you were feeling a little bit low and you were feeling under the weight of the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera. And then you heard Angelina Jordan and you had an inner transformation. And I think that is a great statement. And I think that is exactly what this podcast is about, exactly what happens in your skin and in your bones.

Pontus: Yes, yes it’s a weird feeling or a weird situation that an artist can really make a difference in one’s life. I haven’t had that feeling before with anyone, I think. And of course, it’s also the power of music. But really, this is something a bit more when it comes to Angelina. It’s not just the music and her singing. It’s also the way she is in a way, the person she is. That affects me in a way.

Alan: Absolutely. And from the comments and from everything we know about the Angelina Jordan community, many, many people have this reaction. And I think we need to keep the focus on the ripple effect in us, as opposed to something specific that Angelina Jordan is doing, because… Let me give you an example.
Science is wonderful, science can put a spaceship on Mars and fly a helicopter on Mars, it is unbelievably rich and advanced, but that is outside of us. What is happening inside of us? Science does not address in the same way. And there is a lot of mystery still within us. I mean, for example, where is the seat of consciousness in our brain? Or when you are reacting to Angelina Jordan, the scientists would say, oh, well, this part of the brain is being stimulated or this chemical is being stimulated in the body.
But that’s exactly what we are not talking about. We’re not having a scientific analysis of what is happening inside of us. We are trying to understand… And I was speaking last time about emotion and emotional reaction, but it’s actually more than that. It’s the relationship between emotion, beauty and benevolence. And that’s where the conversation will get very, very rich and very broad.

Pontus: Yeah, beauty and benevolence. What is benevolence? I mean, I’m not so good at the English language.

Alan: Well, benevolence, it’s just another way of saying kindness and goodness. And so last time we spoke about acts of kindness and it’s the equivalent of Angelina Jordan at age six of giving away her shoes.

Pontus: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is an extraordinary event to be so young and have that kind of power within to do good.

Alan: Yeah, it’s almost like a calling to be able to do that. It’s really very, very evolved. Very, very special to be able to do that.

Pontus: It’s funny, I’m now thinking about things that have changed in my life since I started listening to Angelina, and there are a lot of things that are quite profound, I think. But there are also details that are pretty funny. I mean, I for instance. I can’t stand spiders. I hate spiders. But now the other day, for the first time in my life, I saw a spider in the house and instead of killing it like I always do, I took a glass and I put it inside the glass and I put it outside and released it. And I’m not sure. But I think Angelina has something to do with that, too.

Alan: That’s a great story. I mean, to me, that is a variation of universal love. I mean, Angelina Jordan is always talking about communicating love to the world through her music. And if… In English we have the expression of someone who couldn’t hurt a fly and if you couldn’t hurt a fly, it means that you are you have so much kindness and gentleness inside of you that you extend this to all creatures, great and small. It’s the side which I think is very good to develop because our sensitivity is right there and sometimes it’s in a corner. But, you know, we can enjoy many things in life if we develop our sensitivities.

Pontus: Yes, and I think that is definitely one thing I’ve been thinking about more after discovering, what do you say, Angelina Jordan. After first listening to Angelina Jordan, I feel that I contemplate more about these sort of things to be more open or more… well, loving really.

Alan: Yeah, I was thinking about the first episode that we did and we were talking about acts of kindness and then we were talking about uninterrupted acts of kindness. And I was thinking the stage beyond that is when that mentality of uninterrupted acts of kindness becomes a state of being, a permanent state of being. And that is really when you are getting towards the concept of universal love when you have uninterrupted acts of kindness, then become part of your being and who you are, then that is what Angelina Jordan, as I understand it, what she means when she says communicating love.

Pontus: One thing I… When you said we’re not discussing this scientifically, then I thought of something that I have been doing for a while, even before I discovered Angelina, but I’m now more and more aware of it. And that is smiling because a smile on your face actually just the… Even if you’re not happy and this is because I have I know this because I have what they call SAD. SAD, which stands for… I’m not sure, do you know, what it stands for?

Alan: [Seasonal Affective Disorder].

Pontus: Yes. Yes. So I’ve been looking for ways to feel better about myself and one of those things is if I’m feeling low, I pretend to smile or I smile, even though I’m not happy. So you can do this by putting a pencil in your mouth and then you must use the muscles in your face that you use when you smile. And this actually releases endorphins in your body. So there’s a scientific reason behind that the smile in itself is valuable.
And one other thing is that when I smile towards somebody that I don’t know, I’m just perhaps I’m walking on the street and I meet somebody, they pass me, some stranger and I smile to them and they smile back at me. Then I have actually helped them and I have induced endorphins in their body because they smiled towards me. If you see what I mean. So by smiling at someone, you can make them feel better.

Alan: It takes so little effort to be warm and kind and to exhibit goodness in the direction of someone. I heard someone once say, your mind can make you happy or your mind can make you unhappy. And so it is just a matter of how you wish to orient yourself. It’s interesting because, again, this goes back to the L-word love and Angelina Jordan uses it to… She talks about what she wishes to communicate. That is such an important word. It is so fundamental. And a lot of people…
For example, if you went into prison and you were speaking to hardened criminals, so many of them would not only come from a broken home, but they may never have felt that they had any love in their life and it actually profoundly damages them. As a person, you need to have the experience of receiving love to be able to feel it and to be able to give it and extend it back to another human being. It is so fundamental and it’s not scientific the way it is to fly to the moon. But this is the type of level of what Angelina Jordan wishes to communicate.

Pontus: I think that is an excellent message to convey to people. This is what we need now.

Alan: Yeah, because that’s something that we crave, which is very, very profound. You know, the other thing I was thinking, Pontus this is that the nature of the conversation we’re having is very, very unusual because it’s in the cracks. It’s in the boundary between psychology and personal philosophy and between spirituality and between morality. And if you will allow me to say it, we are going out of our way, not to mention the R-word religion. A couple of reasons. One, because a lot of people have a very clear view of religion already. And if you thought to mention religion, they will have an automatic reaction because they have that experience.
And the other thing, which is really, really important, what you and I are trying to do, we’re trying to forge a new language to describe something so that people can hear it for the first time. So, of course, the nature of morality, which we’re talking about and benevolence may overlap with some religion, but if we’re able to forge new words to describe it, then people can hear it more for the first time. And that, I think, can make our conversation really quite special.

Pontus: I’ve read some comments about how can she sing about so grown-up things and how can she communicate those feelings so accurately when she has no experience of her own? But then this commentator, he said, I was like that when I was a child because I was born with a sensitive mind and a sensitive heart. And I read a lot of books and saw a lot of movies and through the books and movies, because he was a sensitive person, he experienced those kinds of feelings. And of course, he could also articulate them. I think this man was a writer so that it comes really close to mind when you think about how Angelina… How it is possible. I mean, that is the question most people say or have in their mind when they listen to her for the first time. How? How can she do this?

Alan: That’s a very good example. There’s a slight nuance of a difference, because the writer is more cognitive and more intellectual as opposed to the music, which is… It’s a different experience. A two or three-year-old child can hear music and feel it and react to it even when their vocabulary and their understanding isn’t that good. And also the extraordinarily young age where Angelina was exposing herself to music. She was on YouTube already looking at jazz at the age of three. So she grew into Jazz the same way she grew her arm. It became almost organic at such a young age. And that is something which… It cannot be taught. She was just… All the stars aligned for her when her life unfolded in front of her.

Pontus: Yeah. It’s amazing when she goes onto the stage at America’s Got Talent with Bohemian Rhapsody and she tells them that, of course, she’s 13, they say. And then she goes on to tell them that she has wanted to perform for Simon for ten years. And if you do the math, she was three when she wanted to perform for Simon. So that says a lot about how quickly she found her calling in life, really.

Alan: I mean, three is extraordinarily young because, you know, a child, when they’re seven or eight, you know, they want to be a fireman or something. And, you know, but at the age of three, you know, even the whole level of your consciousness is different. You know, you and I cannot imagine what it’s like to be three years old and to be focused on that.

Pontus: No, that is really the part that the prodigy part comes in that one must take into account as well, that some people are just wired to have some abilities that other people don’t. So once in a while, one of those individuals come into the focus of the public, like I think that it may be once in 100 years or even once in a thousand years, that these things sort of come together like it has with Angelina.

Alan: Really, just before we finish Pontus, I want to say one more thing.

Pontus: Yeah.

Alan: I want to describe the difference between the weather and the climate. The weather in any country is something that changes every few minutes or every hour and every day can be different than any other day. But the climate is the overall weather, the accumulation of the weather over a long period of time. You know, you have in Sweden, you have cold weather generally in the winter. But, you know, you may have a warm day in the winter. So the weather can vary from day to day or hour from you generally have the climate.
And the reason I describe this is because the emotions can change every few minutes or every hour. But then you have the equipment of the climate, which is your temperament, which is the outlook on the world, which is the nature of your benevolence and kindness, even though your emotions may vary within that. And so, although there’s some overlap between the two, the overall sum of the individual weather moments make up the climate, the overall, sum of the emotion that you experience, make up your temperament. And this is what we really long term, I think, can and will be talking about in our podcast, the nature of the climate that we have inside of us.