Sunday, September 16, 2012

Musical Gnosis: A Love Supreme/Music For Airports

Musical Intelligence....information and directives in and out through street singers.
Musical broadcasts, jukeboxes and records, High School bands, whistling boys, cabaret performers, singing waiters, transistor radios.
Red sails on the sunset way out on the sea.

- from  the Western Land by William S..Burroughs read by him in the song Ineffect from the album Seven Souls produced by Bill Laswell.

Anyone who has worked with music, creating it, listening to it or both, knows  it communicate a great deal of information.  So much so that a particular piece may still yield new insights after many listens.  Music can also act like a guide and suggest  evolutionary directives if one is open to it.  It can serve as a vehicle or medium for some sort of contact with Higher Intelligence. Led Zeppelin emphasizes this idea in the song Houses of the Holy: "Let the music be your master, can you hear the master's call?"  

The Burroughs quote implies that Musical Intelligence radiates abundantly.  My experience concurs.  We can even say that all good music, all genuine musical expression has an Intelligence behind it that can potentially communicate useful information when unlocked and accessed.  Music can be looked at as an artifact to be psychometrized.  Psychometry is the psychic ability to unlock information stored in artifacts.  I maintain that the musical form makes a very good container for storing alchemical, magical,  and evolutionary information.  Music communicates mood which means that it also communicates states of consciousness.  Gnosis responds to particular moods or emotional postures.  Getting into the right mood seems to unlock the gnosis or Intelligence transmitted musically.

Related to music's esoteric function of communicating mood, I suggest, based literally on thousands of experiments, that the mood of the space the music gets recorded, mixed or mastered in ends up in the final product.  In my experience, states of consciousness can and do get recorded and transmitted.  This doesn't require belief, it can be determined for oneself.  I'll give a couple of suggestions for experiments to find out for oneself a little later. 

I began to entertain the notion that the mood of a space can recorded onto a reproducible medium from cleaning up and mastering hundreds of talk tapes in E. J. Gold's archive recordings which date from the '60's.  Sometimes the intense mood given off had a much stronger effect than the words being said.  I've heard Robert Anton Wilson talk tapes that also have this quality.  The atmosphere around these talks communicates something as well.

The Beatles, at the height of their creativity, invoked powerful energies into their music.  For instance, the song they wrote for the first ever world-wide satellite broadcast was All You Need Is Love.  This deceptively simple, but  encompassing Zen koan prayer states a basic truth.  Visionary design science advocate Buckminster Fuller elaborated this truth in a different way when he said that we have everything we need to make the world work, the resources, technology, and intelligence.  We just need to take the emphasis away from the technological development of weaponry and direct toward what he called "livingry."  Livingry is defined by Fuller as that which supports Life.  The world  doesn't actually need war, violence and  the disadvantaging of one part of humanity to advantage another.  It may have seemed necessary at one time, but no longer rings true according to Fuller and other Comprehensivists.  It's a new day. 

We also see evidence of The Beatles magick in the Philip K. Dick gnostic reception discussed earlier.  PKD was listening to Strawberry Fields Forever when he got information beamed into him that saved his son'slife,  I found out more about this incident from the book What If Our World Is Their Heaven?  The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick.  The information that saved the life of his son was communicated through the music.

... first there was this flash of light, hit me right in the face and blinded me.  It did.  And it came out and all I could see was this pink and I was listening to this Beatles tune on the stereo and all of a sudden the words rearranged themselves.  And there was something outside me.  But what I heard was The Beatles' words rearranged.  It told me that my little boy had this, you know, undiagnosed birth defect, and it told me what the birth defect was.  And when I told Tess and I said you must take him to the doctor  immediately, it's urgent, she went right to the hospital to the doctor and it was true.  He did have that defect and he scheduled surgery for as soon as possible.

Something about Strawberry Fields Forever allowed it to get used as a vehicle for gnostic transmission.

Perhaps if we know something about the artist's intention behind a piece we can more easily access the headspace they were in when they composed and performed it.  Maybe that can aid to unlock the Musical Intelligence contained within?  Here's a couple of classic examples for experimentation:

John Coltrane's liner notes for A Love Supreme clearly state his intention behind the piece.  Here's an excerpt.  I would call it devotional or Bhakti yoga:


I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace.
There is none other.
God is. It is so beautiful.
Thank you God. God is all.
Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses.
Thank you God.
In You all things are possible.
We know. God made us so.
Keep your eye on God.
God is. He always was. He always will be.
No matter what...it is God.
He is gracious and merciful.
It is most important that I know Thee.
Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,
fears and emotions – time – all related ...
all made from one ... all made in one.
Blessed be His name.
Thought waves – heat waves-all vibrations –
all paths lead to God. Thank you God. 


The complete liner notes are HERE.

Now find a copy of A Love Supreme and listen to it trying to get into 'Trane's headspace.  This experiment doesn't require any belief. Atheists and agnostics ( of which I am one) should have no problem with this.   God can be whatever you want it to be including nothing at all.

Here's the You Tube version if you don't have a better fidelity copy. It will still work:


And/or try this out: Brian Eno stated his intention behind composing the initial Ambient Music release, Music for Airports  was to write for someone who might be concerned and worried about or who might actually die in a plane crash.  It was music designed for those particular transit spaces called airports and Eno did use it to communicate something about fear of death.  With this in mind, listen to Music for Airports and see what, if any, of his communication comes through.




1 comment:

  1. I agree with your points about music and Gnosis-- although I have never quite articulated it that way.

    There is a link between PKD and Brian Eno, "mini-min' in "Valis". I don't know if he ever heard "Music for Airports" ( a real classic) but "Discreet Music" was of course an obsession of his.

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