As you might be aware I have been on an extended sabbatical since fall of 2010. Except for a brief journey to Portland, Oregon in April of 2011 to speak at the naturopathic college (the students wrote and asked, hard to say no), I accepted no other engagements. I am not planning on teaching again for some time. I have accepted an invitation to teach in Hong Kong in October of 2013 (they said I could stay in the cottage Jane Goodall stays in – I couldn’t say no to that) but I don’t plan on anything else at this time. After 30 years of teaching, 15 of them on the road, I just need a lengthy time to attend to some inner work before I begin teaching again.
Some of the deep work I am focusing on now, besides all the writing, is concerned with music.
If you have read Sacred Plant Medicine, you probably remember that there was quite a bit of material in that book on the songs of plants. Related to that is my recognition of the sound dynamics of heart field work.
As I began working more deeply with the heart field, I realized that it was possible, once a state of heart coherence was established, to begin to intentionally shift the personal field in order to communicate deep meaning without the use of language to whomever you were in a state of coherence with. At its most sophisticated, this would create a heart field symphony of meaning that was very complex and would bypass the rational mind entirely. Certain consciousness states could be generated through that mechanism as well as the alteration of normal perceptual frameworks. As I began to get more deeply into it I realized as well that while the heart field is not limited to the range of vibrations that carry the sound range we can perceive, within that range there is a specific sound or groupings of sound that can hold and express the heart field alterations and movements. So, it is possible to blend both the sound range we can hear and the range we cannot into a complex heart field communication. Well . . . if you are so inclined.
That led me, of course, into music as I realized that much of the music we listen to is actually a form of heart field communication. (The good stuff anyway.) Interestingly, this is embedded in many of the ways musicians speak about music. There are actually no words, no linguistic conventions of any sophistication, that can hold the understandings that musicians have about the interior world of music (I actually don’t like that word, music, it is not accurate enough). So, they use metaphor. For instance, if you add another instrument to a group of instruments playing a particular piece, they will speak of the texture of the piece being altered. All the words that are used as metaphor are in fact sensory words that have nothing to do with sound. They are attempting to create a language through metaphor that can capture the meaning/feeling world inside the notes they are shaping – and much of it, not surprisingly, is related to feeling. The best of the musicians we hear are in fact creating meaning complexes through sound and communicating them to the audience. (The words are only a tiny part of it.) In essence, they are working with very sophisticated duende moments (see Ensouling Language). Unfortunately, very few musicians are articulate about it or the territory they are working with but anyone who loves music, and who drops into that magical zone when they listen to it, will have a sense of what I am talking about here. As usual, in this process, I am discovering that there are huge numbers of people who play music to whom it is little more than a technique of sophisticated sound arrangements. Astonishingly boring and definitely not my clan.
I have been spending a great deal of time on this and will continue to do so for the next few years. I will put more material about all this up on the site when I can, hopefully in the next few months. When I do begin teaching again, much of this material will travel with me and be a part of that process. Much of my retreat and inner work has to do with this exploration. I think, as things progress, that you will find it interesting.
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