How Tears for Fears prepared me for A Course in Miracles

In a recent workshop I attended by Robert Perry and Emily Bennington, two of my beloved Course in Miracles teachers, they presented a fantastic diagram which touched all of the attendees. It showed the way through our physical lives: we are born, grow up, go to school, work, marry, have children, grow old and die. How we fill in this life is what it is all about, how well you climb the ladder of life. A good life seems to depend on achieving success and collecting things. But is this really our life’s journey? Luckily the diagram also showed another life line, below the one I just mentioned, and it showed a totally different way of going through life: it was our spiritual growth, our spiritual journey. And this way of living is what A Course in Miracles * would define as the real way of going through life. With totally different steps! Did I help a brother in need? Did I assist that old lady across the street? Did I give that little child his missing few cents at the bakery? Did I smile at that total stranger just because I really felt like doing so? But also: have I taken time to be still in my heart and look at what a life purpose could be that goes beyond material things and actually investigates what is beneath all that? And have I looked at my demons or have I swept them under the rug? So the most important thing of thís life line seems to be: what have I done for love? Not romantic love, but egoless love. Love that extends to everyone and not only stays with me and my chosen one. A love that seems hard to have and hold, but as I progress along the spiritual path, I learn exactly how to do this. I learn by cooperation, not by collecting things for myself alone.

In my youth I was drawn to music, art, psychology and from my teenage years also to spirituality. My interest for psychology was sparked largely by my love for the music of Tears for Fears, a British band I discovered in the eighties, when I was around 15/16 years old. I would later become a musicology student at the University of Amsterdam because music was my world at that time (from pop to opera and all styles in between). But Tears for Fears….they were more for me. They educated me! All songs on the albums of The Hurting, Songs from the Big Chair and Sowing the Seeds of Love, helped me in so many ways in the eighties and nineties. This band also told me that it is possible that boys opened up about their feelings and expressed them. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith did not shy away from expressing their childhood trauma’s and feelings openly in their music, they really looked their demons in the eye. That was something new at that time. And like I said, they opened for me a lifelong fascination for psychology and spirituality. But my return to a specific book called "A Course of Miracles", - which I first read in the late nineties -was bound to happen. I had put it away on my bookshelf for years, because at that time I didn't understand it. But when I was totally ready for it, I discovered that, after so many years of searching, this was the absolute best spiritual path for me and that it is full of psychological issues! But Tears for Fears had a lot to do with preparing me for the Course.

Why did TFF prepare me for this? The lyrics of their fantastic songs are, like I said, filled with psychology (in the beginning highly influenced by the Primal Therapy by Arthur Janov) but also with politics and even spirituality. The combination of very good music and lyrics with depth, has always touched me to the bone. The large part of the songs are textually written by Roland Orzabal, and he is a master of phrases that stay with you.

It has been just recently that I realized how much Roland Orzabal has influenced my way of thinking. Politically it was very clear. Many of the TFF songs are about socio-political issues. I came from a left wing family, was involved in anti-nuclear war protests, and was very conscious of environmental issues, poverty and inequality. And songs like “Shout”, “Sowing the Seeds of love”, “Woman in Chains”, “Mad World”, “Standing On The Corner of the Third World”,  formed me in my thinking about things, apart from what my parents, school, family, friends and society at large taught me. 

But what is particularly great about the lyrics of Roland, is how he depicts human nature. He can describe the human ego like no other! In A Course in Miracles, the story of the ego is told very extensively, and how we all made this ego ourselves. And how many ego’s together hold up a collective ego which has "made" this world as we know it. How Roland describes in the songs his own ego and the collective human ego, is so striking. So in that way he prepared me for A Course in Miracles. And in hindsight I now see how well the lyrics fit the explanations of the ego of the Course, it is just so good!

When Roland Orzabal sings “Me and my big ideas” (in the song with the same title) he actually describes in five words and very accurately what the ego is: it is me having big ideas. The ego needs to have the biggest of ideas to keep itself alive, it has to blow itself up, because it is actually nothing at all. We already have our worth, because that was established by God, the Course says, so we do not need big ideas to be above one another. Roland also has enough self mockery to admit, with these lyrics, that it is he himself that has these big ideas. So in this song the ego is described in its essence. The song describes a relationship crisis and crises like that are exactly what the ego likes.

In the song “Falling Down” Roland Orzabal tells in short the story of the fall of Richard Nixon, which is a perfect ego-story in itself: