Music as Soul Mate

As happens when one gets old, there is time, to look back into the life one has lived. This can often reveal some surprises, eras enjoyed, jobs that prepared one for something else, the luck of timing, and in this case, the role music has played throughout my life. I discovered an internal disc jockey who made sure I always had a soundtrack to live within, a musical addict, that felt beyond the sound, to the feelings behind the music. Rhythm played inside me constantly.

I first became aware of music when I heard “que sera, sera.”at 6. After that I was taken. The radio became a fixture in my early life. I think music gave me some ability to process my inchoate youthful feelings. As a young teenager, I began to collect records, first albums, then later 45’s. Music made me do it then; and it’s still making me do it now. I bounce to a rhythm —and would dance if I could — like I have done throughout my life.

I used to have a paper route. From age 10 to 15, I delivered papers to the same houses, at the same time, every day. It didn’t turn into a boring chore, because my father gave me a transistor radio, that I carried with me. The music of the late 50’s, and the early 60’s, transported me, despite the weather, from house to house. I didn’t know it, but I was developing a life-long love of music, a life-long pattern of being sensitive to the provocative nature of sound.

When I was a teenager I was moody. I used to go into my room, and listen to music for hours. It was my way of processing too many complex feelings. The music calmed me, and helped me feel connected to something beyond me. There were voices, lyrics, or musical sequences, that would reassure me. Somehow, the anguish and uncertainty of teendom seeped deeper into me, and became more bearable, because the music touched me. The world seemed —though it wasn’t — a more harmonious place.

Now, over 70 years later, I am still trying to make the world harmonious, by playing the music that elevates my being. Now its playlists, but I have followed a host of sound technologies, in my constant quest for the music that calmed down, and reduced the scary tensions I felt. Looking back, I see the many times music has accompanied me into the depths. I faltered all along the way, but the music never did. It always provided the soothing medicinal balm needed. I came to rely upon it, to help me come to terms with this sacred baffling existence.

Looking again — as this prolonged life allows me to do — I can see that my relationship with music has been one of the guiding elements of my life. If I believed in soul mates, which I don’t, I would consider music such a partner.

Certainly, it has always inspired me. Helping me feel the streak of goodness in our kind, the playfulness of Life, and my own uneasy journey through it all. It has brought many forms of pathos too. Enough so — I never suffer from a Pollyannish perspective of Life. I have felt the music of Life, and know some of its varied moods. I am constantly resonating along.

Music will, no doubt, be with me when I finally go home. It has soothed and provoked me all along the way. These final days it will help, as it already has, integrate the compelling nature of the mystery. The vitality of music has enlivened me, and carried me through this place of unknowing. I am surprised, and pleased, to re-recognize this old friend. My life is more harmonious, because of the rhythmic throb brought to my soul.

 

 

 

  

A Religion of No Religion

I’m an ad hoc monk. I don’t have a monastery, order, abbot or creed. I may be the only one of my kind. (I doubt it.)   My sole vow, is to live as spiritually and emotionally alive as possible. I have been coming to this calling for some time. I am an old man now, who has finally arrived at a solitudinal homeplace, he didn’t even know he was seeking. At the age of 76, I am at last finished with the things of this world, and now find myself, concerned mainly with the things that dwell in the margins.

It is a wonder to me that my life has carried me here, that my spirituality is intact, and that I’m still drawn to mystery. My life didn’t start that way. In fact, one of my fondest memories is of escaping the Catholic Church at age 13. Somehow, I got away, with my awe intact. Whatever moved me then, stayed hidden in my dreams, until it awakened again, at age sixteen, by the radio broadcasts of Alan Watts. Unknowingly, those meditations on Life, set me on a life-long quest I couldn’t have anticipated.

I spent my youth avoiding being drafted, and fighting the Vietnam war in America.  I didn’t know it, but living in California, during the 60’s and 70’s, meant that I got to be exposed to the most contemporary and wildest spiritual impulses on the planet. I absorbed the gestalt of the period, looking to the east, feeling weighed down and inspired by tradition, exposed to crazy wisdom, loving the Earth, and being shaped by a host of creative and sensitive souls. It was a spiritual education that benefited by the aspirations of a generation driven by idealism, wonder, and awe. Even drugs were briefly sacred.

The turmoil of those times also misdirected me. I spent years wandering, not knowing myself, trying to fulfill a vague, and often contradictory, sense of belonging. I was a home-grown immigrant. I kept moving, but I went nowhere. I had many potential careers, but none of them stuck, and I felt more and more like an alien.

Luckily, along the way, I got some good therapy, and my therapist could see me better than I could. So, she persuaded me to try grad school. Oddly enough, I attended the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, a school that was oriented towards developing the spiritual nature. To make a long story short, I ended up as a psychotherapist, who basically believed that each of us has a spiritual dimension, that needs to be adequately integrated into our lives, for optimal health. Many client-lives later, I believed this even more fervently. Also, all those people, made it more evident to me, that spirituality took many forms; religious, spirit-based, natural, scientific rapture, synchronism, and many others. I was inculcated into the depths.

The stroke and its aftermath finished the job. Since then, mystery has had its way with me. Looking, as I am prone to do now, at it all, makes me realize, how much I owe to the intrepid seekers, who gave birth to what I now think of a kind of indigenous spirituality, that emerged here in California. I call it the Religion of No Religion.

Thank Esalen, The Human Potential Movement, Gestalt and Fritz Perls, Humanistic Psychology, Micheal Murphy, Barry Stevens, Transpersonalism, Abe Maslow, Joe Campbell, and many others!

This is what I owe my monkish tendencies to.  The spirit of an age. Misunderstood, and perhaps antiquated, now, there are still a few of us captive of an awesomeness that goes beyond all names, and which keeps calling to us.

 Some of us are monks, responding as best we can. We don’t wear robes, have a creed, a book, or a begging bowl. We are novices. All of us.  Set adrift by the tides of illumined fate — we are monks — praying the liveliest prayers — in the cells of our hearts.