25:
Much of mankind throughout history has honored alleged communications from “beyond” whether that beyond be from God, Satan, long dead Saints, angels, or other creatures big and small. Although Christians don’t like to fess up to this, the Bible has a lot of channeled material in it. Anything out of the mouth of a prophet alleges someone or thing else using them as a mouthpiece–usually “God.”
It is perhaps no surprise that having come from that Judeo-Christian heritage, that I might at some point ask that question that Miss Peggy Lee asked us: “Is that all there is?” and look for other sources that aren’t 2000 years old. And I did.
Some of the first channeled stuff that attracted me was the complete works of Emmanuel Swedenborg. This dude had long discussions with angels all the time, and transcribed them all. I couldn’t get enough of him. He was even a respected scientist and scholar. But then I read the part where he described Jews as living in the “muddy” part of heaven (or was it hell?) and most of them devoted themselves the the jewelry industry, I closed the book, never to return.
My next heroine was H.P. Blavatsky who seemed to be devoted to esotericism for esotericism’s sake. She had access to several beings that passed through, or channeled “information” that helped her write her magnum opera, ISIS UNVEILED and THE SECRET DOCTRINE. Her successor, Alice Bailey, wrote at a stunning pace and continued promulgating the Theosophical doctrine, whatever that was. I read a whole variety of lesser known channels–The Great White Brotherhood, Elizabeth Claire Prophet (oy!), Edgar Cayce (yawn), the Ultimate Frontier group, and more. The best cosmology and philosophy of them all was The Urantia Book, although the book was “tainted” by an overzealous power hungry leader who allegedly tampered with most of the book. My last gasp of open-minded channel-surfing was the Kryon series, an entity around the size of a large house whose purpose was to adjust the earth’s magnetic poles and our awareness along with it. Wow!
In music there have been some composers associated with mystical traditions: Cyril Scott, Dane Rudhyar, Gustaf Holst, and Alexander Scriabin to name a few. Arthur M. Abell wrote, or made up his book TALKS WITH FAMOUS COMPOSERS and interviewed composers about their spiritual views and compositional habits. I have always loved what Brahms said about his inspiration in this book. The accusation that Abell’s book is pure fiction didn’t tarnish my memory of the book in the way that MADAME BLAVATSKY’S BABOON bruised my respect for theosophy, and how Martin Gardner’s URANTIA: THE GREAT CULT MYSTERY, and the 4-volume set of the SHERMAN DIARIES elucidated the corruption I hadn’t been aware of.
I came away with the realization that power corrupts. People control others through ignorance, power, and fear. Sheer steely will can make you powerful, regardless of how smart you are. We can and do believe anything. I know because I have. Not only that, but we love to persuade others to believe what we do.
Nowadays I keep my bullshit filter on high.
Speaking of which, Rosemary Brown’s lovely LP issued by Phillips came into my hands through some cosmic connection about 25 years ago. My friends and I have giggled over whether this “really” sounded like Schumann or not, or Liszt, or Beethoven, or Chopin. I learned only this year that she died in 2001. This seemed a perfect opportunity to have her return as a bossy manager for stranded composers in purgatory, or fermata-tory. And so now after Hector Berlioz has offered Rufus Wainright composition lessons for the past year, he has turned over the responsibilities of training Rufus to Charles Ives. The two are not getting along terribly well, but stay tuned.
I told Kevin about this new drama on my blog, but admitted that I wasn’t really channeling it. Kevin, who is spiritually open-minded came right back with “how are you so sure that you AREN’T actually channeling those composers?” I wasn’t sure what to say, except “well, I’ve done my homework on these people. I know what they’ve said and done and can extrapolate and imagine their opinions without too much effort.” To which Kevin only folded his arms, nodded his head, smiled and said “mmhmm, see?”
10:
Airlines are required by law to demonstrate all of the life saving devices on the aircraft before take-off, in case of emergency. If you are only flying over land, it is of little consolation that the cushion under my seat can be a flotation device.
I’ve noticed that religions do not espouse an “in case of emergency” option. None of them ever say “in case what we are putting forth as a religion is ultimately not true, here is how you might want to look at the universe.”
I was raised a Christian and the notion of an afterlife was always there, even though my theology changed from year to year. I lived my life “knowing” that there is an afterlife. “Knowing” meaning believing. I never learned how to live life as though there were no afterlife. It seems that a good religion should take a few clues from the airline industry in its “in case of emergency” warnings.
I suppose the difference is that airlines can get sued by survivors of a plane crash, but religions don’t.
11:
BibliOdyssey has a marvelous exhibit of Rosicrucian illustration. I hesitate to call this collection “art,” as it might be more appropriately called visual teaching.
I thought I wanted to become a Rosicrucian at one point in my life. I remember reading one of their publications called “Lemuria” about a great island in the Pacific that had a very evolved people and technology and everyone had ESP. (No, it was not Atlantis.) I remember having one well worn copy of the book about plate techtonics, “Continental Drift,” in one hand, and “Lemuria” in the other. Hmm, it seemed possible that there COULD have been something in the Pacific. Perhaps the North American plate banged into the Pacific plate, and the Pacific plate is where Lemuria was, and the only reminant of Lemuria is everything west of the San Andreas fault line. Wow. I remember visiting Mt Shasta in northern California half-believing that there were Lemurians living in laval tubes in Mt Shasta. Sigh…
I’ve visited the Rosicrucian mother church or whatever it is up in San Jose. Old and dusty. But I bet there is some mysterious room in the basement of that building where all the REAL Rosicrucian stuff happens. Or not.
The notion of sequestered knowledge given out to those who traverse the sacred tests one by one, has driven many young scholars, theologians, and other Indiana Jones-types wild with obsessive fervor. William Butler Yeats found Rosicrucianism at one point in his life. Erik Satie as well, but I truly doubt his sincerity––I think it was a spoof. Since then, I don’t know of any famous Rosicrucianists. Perhaps they were melded into the Theosophical movement.
Pictures bring back memories, and seeing this mini-exhibit brought back rosy cross memories on this cloudy afternoon.
23:
Franz Mesmer practices animal magnetism on a a patient while friends look on.
[Here is the next installment in a continuing series called the spirit highway, about people and concepts found along the way.]
Somewhere along the way, I read that it is a good thing to channel one’s own sexual energy into one’s higher spiritual and/or psychic power. Being terrified of coming out of the closet as an undergraduate I embraced this lofty goal. It also helped with my music studies: avoiding sex does wonders for a whole variety of endeavors.
I discovered a biography on scientist Franz Anton Mesmer who posited a concept of “animal magnetism.” He also theorized that the body had other kinds of fluids in it that would get blocked, and only a person with animal magnetism could help unblock the flow. It had something to do with aura massage. Everyone supposedly has an aura: some are healthier than others and can be used to heal, or mesmerize those with sickly auras.
A ha! Spiritual truth! or is it spiritual science? I must find out whether I have animal magnetism (growls). I need a willing volunteer. [Ding dong; the doorbell rings, and in comes Dave.]
“Dave! old buddy old pal, I have a proposal for you.” I was fairly certain Dave was not gay, but knew he would humor me for my experiment. “I need you to lie down on my bed, arms at your side and close your eyes.” He obliged without question. My animal magnetism was throbbing, er, welling.
“I’m going to try to hypnotize you without touching you” I told him confidently. I got onto the bed, and straddled him. “Uh uh, keep your eyes closed.” Then I got down to work. There was electrical energy shooting out of my finger tips, and with that energy, I began to massage his aura from the top of his head (the crown chakra) to his navel (the navel chakra) without (drat!) touching him. I did this for maybe 15 minutes and then stopped. He cracked one of his eyes and said “Is that it?” I asked: “are you hypnotized?” He said, “no, I don’t think so but that was very relaxing.” I unmounted, thanked him for his help, shared a cigarette and he left.
It turns out Mesmer was very likely a fraud. Louis XVI commissioned a team of experts (including Benjamin Franklin) to investigate Mesmer’s claims — they were found to be false.
I figured this out myself. I had animal magnetism alright: I was just barking up the wrong tree.
22:
(Liberty by Nitin Garg.)
I look back at my childhood as a young music lover and musician, and see that it was peppered with “heros,” “role models” (or so I thought), “cool people,” wayshowers, big brothers. These people ranged from local Green Bay heros like Jim and Lou Seiler who could do Byrd music as though they were the Byrds [and Jim could have been one of the great rock voices--but whatever happened to him?] to various rock stars. Over time, each person I had put up on a pedestal fell off. Why? Oh, because they did something human like drugs, or saying something stupid, or doing something stupid, or any number of things PEOPLE do.
We all go through this with PEOPLE, but it happened to me spiritually as well. (I have a category of posts called “The spirit highway” where I relate the various things I discovered on my spiritual drive.) In many of them, some damned PERSON gets in the way and screws it up.
I watched the new DVD on Gram Parsons last night and watched the fall of an old childhood hero. Such promise. Such beauty. Such profound sadness in his voice, and that coupled with heart wrenching chord progressions, Gram infects our musical minds and lives on in us.
Gram’s father, “Coon Dog” was a heavy drinker who ultimately committed suicide (he left a note: “I love you Gram”), and his mother, Avis, was also a heavy drinker who loved her son deeply. Even Avis’s second husband, Bob Parsons, died of too much drink. Being the heir of the Snively orange juice industry in Florida, Gram had money from a trust fund. Bob supported Gram from an early age. He bought a night club so that Gram could have a performing outlet. Gram was spoiled rotten. Until one day Bob and Gram had a falling out: big time. All his friends said that from that time on he spiralled downward into drink and drugs. Eventhough his career was taking off, and he even believed it so, Gram’s self destructive momentum finally killed him at age 26. Yeah. Right along with Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, et al.
Gram also struck up a hero relationship with Rolling Stone member Keith Richards. He abandoned his band and friends for this new friendship. They learned a great deal from each other, but sadly, around this time, heroin entered the scene. Mick and Keith urged Gram to go home and get to work with his band.
With the falling out with his stepfather and a go-away from Keith, Gram lost his heroes.
The moment when one realizes that all heroes are human is a difficult one. The truth can be too much to bear. Spiritual beliefs are like heroes in that we embue in them the answers to our ultimate questions; we put them on a pedestal. When one realises that a long held spiritual belief is likely untrue, the transition from a faith-based belief to empirically-based belief is a painful one. The existential pain of this transition to one of “no-heroes” is palpable.
- Santa Claus doesn’t exist
- My parents are just regular people
- I understand the value of the phrase “question authority”
- I question government
- I question my religion
- I question my society’s wisdom
- My hero [fill in the blank] has fecal matter whose olfactoric quality is no different from the general populations’.
- My hero is not a god or God. S/he is a human.
To survive this transition requires, it seems to me, courage, renewed self-belief, and a blind optimism tempered with a world-wise wariness. Gram’s spirit wanted to get to this place. Gram’s body made the decision to go to Joshua Tree national monument for a one last “cleansing” so that he could clean himself up and move on. It didn’t happen. The booze and whatever drugs he was on killed him in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn. (I stayed in that room some years back as a kind of pilgrimage.) One of the interviewees on the film said: “if Gram were alive today, he’d be dead. He seemed to really have a death wish.”
Astrologers tell us that their charts indicate the potential of people and situations. I hold more stock in the genetic horoscope, and Gram’s sun was in whiskey, and his moon in heroin, with two parents that had double shots of the blood of Dionysus.
WARNING: Be careful taking heroes down from pedestals. The withdrawal period can cause severe anxiety.
14:
I remember a little room in the back of my father’s church that was filled with old books. No one ever went in there. It had the smell of burning books (from high acid content, not fire). I loved to sneak into this room and look through them. These seemed peculiar to be in a church as they were about all kinds of peculiar things. Perhaps they were donated to the church’s library and ferreted out because they weren’t religious. One I found was a book on Harry Houdini, his life, as well as the secrets behind his magic. The last chapter showed how he picked locks. It had pictures of all kinds of old skeleton keys as well as well as instructions on how to pick skeleton key locks. I learned how to pick skeleton key locks and practiced on the various rooms in the church. I actually got pretty good at it.
Around the same time, two spy shows were on TV that captured my imagination: “I Spy” with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” with Robert Vaughn and David McCallum. These “spies” and this old magician piqued my interest in the mysterious; the unknown; the secret; and maybe the spiritual, or the para-spiritual. Not just the same old stuff from the bible, cool mysterious stuff.
As I look back on my life and try to figure out where my obsession with so-called metaphysical reality (or surreality) came from, it seems to have started here. Both were fakes, well, a magician fools us, and the so-called spies were well-paid actors. But the way it felt was very real. And I liked the way it felt.
09:
Whether it is that my father and great-grandfather were both ministers, I seemed to be drawn to the spirit highway from an early age. My earliest memory of odd spiritual inclinations was when I lived in Oklahoma, I was 9 or 10, my sister was three years younger. I remember we made an altar out in the forest behind our house. We put things we found in the forest on the altar, held them up to our God and gave thanks. Yes, we were likely imitating our dear old Dad who did that every Sunday, but ours was nature based, I don’t recall saying “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
My Dad was invited to the FCA one summer in the 60s (The Fellowship of Christian Athletes). This was a gathering of a huge number of Christian jocks, er athletes who, well, I’m not exactly sure what they did. But we were in the mountains of North Carolina, and it was beautiful. The spiritual/musical moment that stuck out for me was the final ceremony or service. It ended with ever-repeating verses of “Just as I Am.” Over and over and over. When I got back home to Green Bay, I sat down at the piano and figured it out. From that moment on I realised I had a gift to transcribe music. When I started composing my own music, and then learning how to notate music, it was a matter of notating what I heard in my head. Mind you, this is not spiritual, but it was a musical enlightenment afforded by a spiritual state.
As I advanced through my teens, I kept wondering : is that all there is?
My dad used to scold me for being so obsessed with death and what happens after it. I was hell-bound to experience astral projection. I was certain UFOs existed. Christianity couldn’t be everything, what else is there? Being a PK (preacher’s kid), the element of paternal rebellion was likely not too far beneath the surface. But it wasn’t just that. He would say “you can’t always explain everything, some things are a mystery, and that’s just fine.” This is not what I wanted to hear.
Bubbling beneath this burning spiritual curiosity was a little queer boy trying to come out. I fought it. I prayed constantly for it to go away. I searched every religion trying to find whether one of them might not condemn homos. And instead of going out dating and sleeping around in the 70s, I studied music and in my dark nights of the soul, I’d go to the theosophy section of the library and get lost in rare articles about thought patterns or the various nectar and mumbo jumbo that group churned up. When I wasn’t doing that, I would be in another part of the library composing music in the ultra-silent map room.
It was a great time in some ways. I got a lot of work and studying done, a lot of metaphysical research on the spirit highway. No sex.
[to be continued]
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