Music and Consciousness

Rift Valley Children’s Orphanage, Tuesday, December 4, 2006, 9:31pm

“Sometimes we live no particular way but our own.
Sometimes we visit your country and live in your home.
Sometimes we ride on your horses, sometimes we walk along.
Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.

Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
The heart has its beaches, its homeland, and thoughts of its own.
Wake now discover that you are the song that the morning brings.
The heart has its seasons, its evenings, and songs of its own…”
-Eyes of the World, The Grateful Dead

(Good Lord – this one is all over the road but there is just not enough time to truly think it through and rewrite. There is also about six lines of thought running through here and I think I contradict myself several times as well. Oh well…maybe something will make sense…)

As we were driving to the farmhouse this morning to teach the kids swimming, I put on what is probably my favorite song of all time; Eyes of the World, by the Grateful Dead.

In high school I made a 90-minute mixed tape with different live versions of Eyes of the World from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Each version was different and I would listen to it over and over on my 50-minute drive to school each day. There is something about that song for me that encapsulates the wondering beauty of youth, the joy and innocence of the search, the pain and disappointment it brings with it, and all thee while on the quest for truth, understanding, and good times.

When I listen to Eyes of the World, I see an ambitious, curious kid and his copilot (which could have been Eric Runz, John Rodrigues, Frazier Curry, or any other number of friends) driving around the back roads of Tewksbury Township in New Jersey, getting stoned and laughing, sharing our experiences, hopes, and dreams, while trying to get lost and consequently trying to find our way home – and always searching, searching, searching.

The Grateful Dead will forever be tied to the freedom of the road and the exploration of adolescents for not only me, but thousands of other kids across the United States. To be a Dead-Head meant you were a part of something and there were symbols to identify us as well. The “Steal Your Face” logo was probably the first and most successful branding of any band in history.

The Grateful Dead definitely played a role in forming who I am and it was that first mushroom trip at Nassau Coliseum at a spring tour show in 1991 that changed my life forever. The searching seed had always lay dormant within me, but this incident started me on a path of exploration that I would follow for the rest of my life. I can remember the guy who sold my experimenting-drug-buddy, John, the shrooms saying, “These are Colorado Blue-Stem and me they’re pretty strong so go easy on them.” Oh yeah sure,” we said, acting like we were old hats at the drug game. And with that we split the contents of the bag in two and wolfed down the dry, nauseating fungi.

But in fact this was our first venture into the unknown world of the mind and psychedelics. It was my first taste of the mania that can be a mushroom trip; the steep and sometimes manic climb to the peak, followed by the infinite and peaceful views from the top.

This will be a very foreign concept to some, but that first trip was the first time that I can remember moving my conscious out of my mind. The only way I can explain it to someone who has never done it before, is that it can be as if you are looking out at yourself and the world from a third-person point of view. It opened my mind up to new horizons and spaces within myself that made the world a much larger and staggeringly complex place, and yet at the same time, like reducing a sauce, I was able to boil life down to its most basic element; the one source that gives life meaning.

I don’t think you necessarily have to do drugs to experience this. I think it can be experienced in many different ways like overcoming some great obstacle in life such as cancer or having a near death experience,, or challenging yourself and achieving that which at one time you thought was impossible or unachievable. Basically, the type of experience I am trying to explain is about gaining a new perspective on life that is so powerful, that once you experience it you are forever altered.

I can remember having a near emotional breakdown in the beginning of this trip. I was so overwhelmed by this new perspective I was gaining and the unfolding of life that was occurring within me. That flood of emotion later evolved into the realization that all that matters in life is love; giving it, sharing it, making it, and receiving it. I wanted to call my sister and tell her I understood what she was talking about and I wanted to call my parents and tell them I loved them, and that I was on a powerful drug right now, but I have a good head on my shoulders and that every thing is going to be fine.

Thank fucking-God someone talked me out making that call. Drunk-dialing is one thing, but ASF-dialing (ass-faced-tripping-dialing) to your parents is another. I am grateful I did not make that call because;

a.) my parents thought I was at Meg Rutter’s sweet sixteen, and
b.) I would not have been able to leave the house until I was 29.

The fact of the matter was I was sixteen or seventeen at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, far from the safe little world I was used to, and everything that came before that moment, my entire life, was packaged into five hours of a really intense mushroom trip. There is a reason after all that the shamans of many cultures use substances such as mushrooms and peyote in rituals and ceremonies. I think God put everything on the earth for a reason and before man there was perfect balance. Perhaps these organic substances of the earth when used correctly, allow a person to enter new spaces of the mind, meaning new spaces within consciousness, and maybe just for a moment view into the mind of God and the mystery He created. I think God, the universe, the creative energy – whatever you want to call it is a living, conscious entity that was never born and will never die, and it is evolving and recreating itself at all times.

In life we are constantly moving and traveling through physical spaces and I have found that it is the people, music, and spaces we move through that opens or closes the mental, emotional, and spiritual doors within us. This will sound strange to people who were in Math club while my friends and myself were getting stoned after school and listening Phish and the Grateful Dead; but traveling through those spaces, both the journey to and from the shows, and where they took your mind during it, were some of the most vast spaces I have traveled through.

As adolescents, our individuality is not formed yet, so we attach ourselves to something greater than us, something that we can be a part of, generally institutions that gives us an identity such as being a soccer player or a Dead-head (or both), and within the security of these structures or institutions we search for our individuality.

I think of a Dead Show very much like the experience of life on a macro scale. When you were at a Dead Show, you were a part of something greater than yourself. There were all of these consciousnesses floating and drifting in this and that direction, and at certain moments we were all tuned into something. When you were “in the flow” at a Dead show, you as well as everyone around you was locked into a rhythm and vibe, and expressing that flow in your own way through dance. You were consumed and enveloped by the music, so in the moment in fact, that you were transcending it.

You followed a song in its structure, and then the musicians go into improvisational interludes, and in these improvisational spaces, when it seems the music is going in all different directions, you tend to lock into one musician and enter their space. While you are there, their space becomes yours and all of your experiences come to that moment. As an example I’ll use Scarlet > Fire (if you traded Grateful Dead bootlegs like so many of my friends, that is how you would write Scarlet Begonias segueing into Fire On the Mountain). I think a lot of life is very similar to these improvisational moments when you are traveling in your own mind and in your own space.

Now this is going to get very granular here, but bare with me. I was thinking about these thoughts coming home from the Farmhouse this morning while listening to Scarlet > Fire from the second set of a Cornell University show on May 5th, 1977. Depending on whom you talk to, this could be considered one of the Dead’s finest performances.

In between Fire On the Mountain and Scarlet Begonias, to connect the songs without stopping the play, there is an improvisational interlude that is occurring, and each musician is doing his own thing, noodling around the chords and melodies that their souls are giving life to. They all are moving forward towards something yet each in their own swirling, circular directions; six musicians doing their own thing, contained within a structure, feeding off each other while listening in on each other…

Keith Goudchax, the piano player makes his move for the other musicians to follow him and he begins to ride on a chord…Phil Lesh picks it up and drops in with a bass line. Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman, drummers who are always playing off each other, feel Phil’s bass line and bring the percussion in line with where they are all moving. Bob Weir stays steady on the rhythm and the melody of Jerry Garcia, who will probably go down in history as the most uncharismatic, charismatic leader, is guiding the song the whole way home as an air traffic controller guides a plane to a safe landing. From the formless, six musicians give form to the formless which becomes Fire On the Mountain. (I will so hear it from Jon Simmons if Keith was not the piano player at the time, but damn – they had so many overdoses, how can you keep up?)

It is consciousness that gives rise to meaning in life and I think consciousness, both on the individual and universal level works very much in the way that I described the song above. Consciousness sometimes moves on its own, but it is always a part of something greater, and when it taps into the greater whole, that from what it is a part of, it moves in the direction of the collective consciousness. When consciousness is interacting in tandem with others is when we are at our most powerful, whether moving towards the good or evil, Ghandi being an example of leading people towards the good, Hitler towards evil. Consciousness is why certain movements happen at certain times in history.

When enough people are tuned into the universal consciousness, or the Weltanschauung as the Germans call it (which means more or less world movement), consciousness becomes a matter of critical mass. I think the current Weltanschauung is moving towards a universal spirituality, but to call it spirituality is to simplify it. It is a movement inwards, whereby we begin to discover the universality and the oneness of all of creation and act in line with what that discovery means.

The final frontier is not the far reaches of the universe, but the far reaches of the interior spaces of self. We have to move in this direction; otherwise humans will destroy each other in the name of religion, power, and greed.

Consciousness is a living, interacting thing; it is organically evolving at all times. Due to the mass amount of information that is available to us, and the speed at which this information is available, consciousness is evolving at its fastest pace in human history. There are either two things that can happen; we take a giant leap forward or we take a giant step back and nuke ourselves into the stoneage.

What if the entire world, the whole of the universal consciousness, moved in one direction toward what Plato called “The Good?”

Storm Windows…

Rift Valley Children’s Orphanage, Monday, December 3, 2006, 9:02pm

The past two nights it has sounded like a party down in Campi Nairobi, the village below the orphanage; whistles blowing, drums banging, singing, and chanting. As I write this, I can hear the whistles and uniquely African sounds rising up from the valley. I was wondering what the celebration was or if it was a holiday, but it turns out they are just trying to scare the elephants away. It is a full moon tonight and except for the single glow of a campfire up in the mountains, the moon has painted the landscape in lunar shadows.

Yesterday, Lisa, Sue, and I went for a late afternoon walk because an elephant was sighted in the coffee fields and we have yet to see one except from a great distance. When we didn’t find one, Sue had to return home to receive a call from her son, so Lisa and I continued our walk in the reverse direction of what we normally do. Because of the elephants and other recently reported animals in the area we were paying a little more attention to our surroundings than normal.

We started down a cutback on a trail that opens up to a gradual descending field. I was following Lisa, chatting about who knows what, when she stopped dead in her tracks. “What is that she said?”

Down the hill a brown figure was stretched out across the path we were following. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until I saw a head pop up from the soft edges (I didn’t have my glasses on). We immediately ruled out a Cape Buffalo (that is an animal that you do not want to encounter unless you are in a Safari vehicle) because of its size, but rather it seemed more like the size of maybe a hyena, a large jackal, or a wild dog. As we sat there debating for some time whether or not to turn around, a local man came up behind us. Lisa asked the man in Swahili, “What is that in the path?” She pointed it out and he started to run towards it; brazen, if not foolish young fellow, I thought. He ran right up to the damn thing and it looked like he was stepping on it. The figure then sat up. It turned out to be a local drunk who decided to pass out on this path, which incidentally was quite a fair distance back from the village. I wonder what he was doing out here? I’m sure the man who alerted us of the figure’s homo-sapien status thought this was no place for city-slicker mazungus.

We made our way down the hill and he slurred some gibberish at us as we stepped over him. Must have been a particularly good batch of “pombe,” which, as I mentioned before, is homemade bathtub gin with a little fertilizer or battery acid thrown in to give it a kick. This guy was spun. Pombe I have learned is incredibly addicted and once you are hooked, you are done. It fries your brain as you might imagine battery acid or fertilizer would do and there defiantly are no rehab or support programs out here.

Sunday morning around ten we headed off to the Ngorongoro Farm House as Sunday is the volunteer’s day off. On our way home that night, at the hour of the evening when shadows grow long and the countryside explodes with every shade of green you can imagine, Ashley, Lisa, and I stood in silence in the open air of the Land Cruiser truck, each locked up in our own thoughts. I listened to John Prine’s “Storm Windows” over and over for the entire half-hour, 8-kilometer trek home, trying desperately to take in the vastness of the green rolling plains; a vastness broken only by dirt roads winding towards the mountains on the horizon. During the day, it looks as if there is only one mountain range far off in the distance. It is only at this hour of the evening, when the setting sun paints the mountains in a monochromic color scheme, that you can truly gauge just how many mountains there are and how far they recede into the distance.

Driving in the open air reminded me of the opening scene in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when the author speaks of riding a motor cycle as being a part of the scene; not separate and out of touch with it like you would be in a car (incidentally, I never made it much further in that book).

As we made our way back up the hills towards the orphanage, with the tail end of the Land Cruiser swinging to and fro and the driver working hard to correct what the mud and rocks wanted us to do, I thought to myself; the driver’s here are truly artists. It is an art form the way they masterfully negotiate ruts, rivets, rocks, mud, and mini-lakes, and the way they read the sometimes seemingly impassable roads like a ship’s captain reads the currents, winds, and tides of the sea.

A new addition to the daily schedule, since school is out is out for the month of December, is to take the kids, four at a time, down to the farmhouse to teach them how to swim. One of my favorite things to do is just drive on open roads listening to music so I look forward to the daily escape and throw my iPod on random, turning up the volume as loud as it can go to drown out the Land Rover’s straining workhorse engine. This morning Phish came on and immediately it put me in a different time and a place.

They say music is the soundtrack of your life, and Phish and the Grateful Dead definitely have a powerful way of allowing me to look back through the lens of time and once again peer out at the world through the eyes of seventeen-year-old.

Those late adolescence and teen days were some of the most carefree days of my life. I did not have a care in the world – at least I should not have had a care in the world – as life was simply about freedom and exploration. But of course I had a way of making life heavy and serious, and wondering and worrying about what tomorrow might hold or how I fit into the world. If I had a dollar for every time I wrote in my journal things such as; why am I here? Why am I born into this family at this time in history? Why am I, as a consciousness, a part of this body, this person who is called Tim Shields? I think questions of such nature can be a very slippery slope for a young mind, and someone who has a mind of such nature needs to be shepherded and guided, for a mind of this nature can get one into some very dark places.

No one really knew the thoughts and questions that consumed me day in and day out, mostly because I didn’t know how to express them, so I turned inward. I think I was also an angry child, and only recently have I been able to see where that anger stems from. There is no one source; rather it is a series of external events as well as an incredibly complex concept and institution called family. But I don’t think there is anyway to make it through childhood and adolescence unscathed and without some scars, no matter who you are or how perfect the environment you grew up in was. The scars are just a natural part of growing up. It is ironic that I am writing about that from my bed in the middle of an orphanage in Tanzania.

My way to express my anger when I was a child was with a sharp tongue or fists. I was always playing with older kids so I was actually pretty tough, didn’t take shit from anyone, and got into a lot of fights. I’m sure my friends would get a laugh out of that these days. But as puberty came around, like what often happens at the Division of Motor Vehicles, I got stuck with a high number so I was waiting around for my growth spurt while kids outgrew me and my scrappy fighting style was simply outgunned by height and weight.

I remember one incident that brought this message home. Freshman year of high school, I was in the schoolyard pecking away at a kid named Phil, using whit and sarcasm to make him feel very small. He was not the brightest bulb on the tree so he was an easy target. I was probably showing off to a circle of kids, being a cocky little bastard and making them all laugh at his expense. Phil was a big kid and rumor had it he was even doing steroids. In my memory, I can’t see his face anymore, but I can see the expression on it and how uncomfortable and awkward he was in his own skin. He finally snapped and grabbed me around the neck in a chokehold until the point of nearly making me pass out. None of the kids did anything, but rather just stood there and watched.

That was one of my earliest lessons that the world outside of Pottersville, New Jersey, the sheltered white-bread country town I grew up in, was a dangerous and unpredictable place. I can see a string of those instances, a line running through my past that reinforced those lessons and ever so slowly I began to shut down on certain levels. These incidents shut down my ability to express anger because I was learning from my surroundings that it was not safe to express anger, so I turned that outwards anger in on myself. I think over time, bottled up anger slowly transforms itself into gripping depression and since late adolescence I have been in and out of its chokehold.

For all intensive purposes I was doing the same things as any other adolescent; going to school, playing soccer, getting stoned and experimenting with drugs and alcohol, listening to music, and trying to lose my virginity. But of course I was particularly adroit at finding ways to complicate my life, as I desperately searched for meaning and my place in the world. I often felt like a child who has not quite yet learned how to swim, struggling with desperation to stay a float.

I don’t know if I will ever be able to completely shake that part of me, that part of me that is forever seeking. Sadly enough, I think there was a while where I did not want to be happy, because I thought of my sadness and depression as a wellspring of content and inspiration. But the fact of the matter is, depression fuckin’ sucks, and whether you are writing music or the written word, painting, or creating any other art form, the art is generally stronger when it is coming from a good place, at least that has been my own experience in writing. In hindsight though, I can see how depression has been a necessary experience to create who I am, an invaluable learning tool that I would not trade in.

The last few years I have thought of the concept of depression almost like a shadow; it is always there behind you, and sometimes when the sun is shining it is at its strongest. I think of the feeling of depression as if you are falling down an endless hole, and as you are falling, you are looking up at that hole receding in the distance, and as you fall deeper, the hole you are looking up at becomes smaller and smaller and the light grows weaker and weaker and the surrounding darkness grows ever more consuming.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to recognize the approaching storm and the weather patterns that create these tempests. I am also learning how to give this formless mass form, and in doing so, transforming it into something of light. I think by learning how to express it and bring light and life to that darkness, it becomes weaker and weaker until it is something that is very manageable. The writer Eknath Easwaran does a good job of expressing this concept, however he talks of managing it through meditation.

Now how do talk about this shit at the lunch table in your high school cafeteria?