It is an “intimate” place, which means small, but frankly it also does create a sense of being close. I talked afterwards with all four people, and got some sense of them as individuals.
A variety of styles were on display, with some very quiet and contemplative, some loud, and some funny. I laughed a lot. One of the singers, Mark Narmore, had a very funny song about how Neil Young got placed on the prayer list of his 70 member church in the middle of nowhere, Alabama. He did impressions of Bob Dylan, and Neil Diamond, and others.
Paul Sikes was my favorite. I got his autograph and CD for my kids. Here is him playing one of his beautiful songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yov6Ne2KoDE
And being me, I was both participating, and analyzing. In such a lowlit room, filled with art designed to evoke emotion, I felt like I was in a temple of sorts. This temple is devoted to making us more complete as human beings, but only if we REACT.
Now, I have a booming laugh. This likely does not come across in my posts, but I have a very lively sense of humor and love to laugh. I laugh without reservation, and not being a small person, it is quite loud. And I laughed a lot.
But I cry too. It embarrasses my kids, so I held it in, but much of what I heard, of heartbreak, of sacrifice, of deep suffering, moved me. Paul’s songs, and a few of Mark’s, really moved me. Mark cowrote this beautiful song, recorded by Tracy Lawrence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfHM4IX1uM
He said the third verse more or less came to him in a dream, from God.
Courage is a beautiful thing. Stubborn persistence in what is right is beautiful.
And I felt: this place is dedicated to the evocation of I have seen therapeutically reduced to NOSC, or Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness.
Do we not all need to “escape” to our deeper selves, regularly? If life is a river, does not much get caught in circling eddies next to the shore, perhaps trying to escape the water, but unable to?
We live in water, but does not it usually seem safer for many to remain dry? But can we? Not without losing life, not without creating gaps, lacunae, that are not life. Life is about emotion. It is about feeling. What I think many miss, and what is central to my own embrace of what gets called “Tantra” in spiritual traditions, is that the path to deeper emotions, deeper connections, deeper experiences BEGINS with being present here, with all the apparatus God gifted us with. Yes, it sometimes seems a curse, but it is not.
This led to some contemplation. What is an “ordinary” state of consciousness? Is it not the FEELING that we are in control, that we are engaged in a purposive activity we direct?
What then is a non-“ordinary” state of consciousness? Is it not a feeling that feelings are coming to us, that we are being “moved”, that the contents of our consciousness are being directed, by our deeper self, by something oceanic?
What is creativity? I have said before that it is uncovering some small section of the infinite possibilities that are already immanent in the universe. It is discovery. But I would say that most creative people–and rightly or wrongly I like to place myself relatively in that category–often find that their best stuff comes to them spontaneously, and that the role of craftsmanship, of art, is placing them into a communicable media in an effective way.
The juice, the essence: this comes to us, unbidden. But what some people do better than others is ask for it, and listen to the answer. Inherently, this implies an ability to place aside what we call the “ego”, but which is really the habit of stability, of being unmoved, unchanged (we think, wrongly), of always being in control.
And what artists do is both listen to this voice, and very importantly, spend ordinary time, conscious time, directed time, developing the capacity to translate inspiration into communicable form.
Now, I know that usually NOSC refers to things like LSD experience, shamanic trance, deep hypnosis. But do these things not exist on a continuum, one which BEGINS with the capacity to channel experience?
I am a conservative hippy. I see our modern, mechanical world, and see a NEED, a deep, unprocessed NEED, for something like drum circles, for smoke in the air, for yelling and screaming, and emoting.
This makes us more human. Or, more accurately, it makes us more available to our own experience, more able to be present when important things present themselves. It allows us to hear what was already there, to see what was already there, to feel what was already there.
And experientially, phenonomenologically, do we not alternate all day long between ordinary and non-ordinary states of consciousness? One can deny this, but one cannot escape it.
Is Scientism not an effort to escape from this, which is to say an effort to escape from madness, as seen from a mathematical perspective?
We have anchor points now, do we not, in “absolute” truths like F=MA? A squared plus b squared equals c squared? E=MCsquared? These truths connect us to our visible world. They allow us to predict and thus control experience. They put a man on the moon, and food on our table.
But we can’t live in this world. It is precisely the effort to do so which, in the modern world, had led us astray from the paradises we might have built.
There is nothing wrong with math. It, too, is beautiful. I intend one day soon to teach myself the Calculus which eluded me in college. I have a Teaching Company lecture series on it. It, too, is a creative blessing.
But the curse of Socialism is precisely this: it is an effort to reduce human experience, human life, human emotion, to formulas, and to paper over the resulting horrors with lies–mathematical lies, to be sure, carefully created, carefully deployed, carefully orchestrated, as if lies could also be beautiful.
What is a lie, though? It is a subtraction from experience; it is something that makes us less human, less evolved, less loving, less happy.
I will leave you with a song about life, another song cowritten (he would certainly want to share the credit) by Mark Narmore: What I love about Sunday.
In my considered view–and I am historically quite literate, and quite capable of extended abstraction–this song contains the kernel of the success–thus far–of the American Experiment.