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?”