Meet Your Legislators. C’mon, Really.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people say that politicians are all alike, they all just want power and money, etc. etc.  They say this about the ones at the local and state level as much as about those in Washington.  When they go on with generalized, clearly uninformed rants, I ask them, “Have you ever actually met any of them?”

(Skip ahead if you already understand how the New Mexico Legislature is put together.)

In New Mexico, we have what I’m told is a rare degree of access to our state legislators.  They are “citizen legislators,” meaning that they don’t get paid more than a minimal amount to cover the expenses of showing up for legislative sessions and interim committee meetings.  They must either hold other jobs or be retired or otherwise financially cared for.  OK, these offices can lead to lucrative business deals, future lobbying gigs, and higher political positions, and in addition a legislator who’s stuck it out for 10 years or more can later collect a very nice pension.  But while at their labors for their constituents, our senators and representatives are working essentially for free.

This system tends to attract self-employed candidates and those who are older, often a great deal older.  While it’s necessary to have other income, it’s impossible to be a legislator if you can’t leave your job for up to two months at a time.  Younger and poorer people tend to be excluded, meaning that a large portion of the population is not being represented.

In order to keep up this concept of non-professional legislators, we must keep the length of legislative sessions short.  A “long” session, held every other year, is 60 days, and a “short” session, in the alternate years, is 30 days.  During the 30-day sessions, almost nothing except budgetary items can be considered.  So we can only get substantial things done every two years.  Except that we can’t, because everything that’s been saved up for the past two years is far too complex, and there’s far too much of it, to get anywhere near all of it done.  Very little, in fact, does get done, compared to everything that’s needed.

This is NOT working, folks.  Maybe a hundred years ago it was fine, when all we had to discuss was probably water use and a very few industries.  Life is far, far more complicated now.  We need more time to do the business of the state.  The legislators, from what I’ve been hearing, realize this.  But a professional legislature, meeting for much longer periods, would cost a great deal, and I don’t see how it could happen in the foreseeable future.  In addition, if we did have a professional legislature, we’d have all the extremes of big money in politics that we see at the national level, much more than what we’ve already got, that is.  (As soon as I figure out how to combine paying legislators, having longer sessions, and doing it all with public funding, I’ll let you know.)  Nevertheless, I’d like to have a go at imagining this.

One of the things state legislators do on a regular basis is to attend events at which they can interface with the citizens.  A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet Senators Bill O’Neill and Jacob Candelaria and Representative Emily Kane at a town hall meeting at the Pueblo Cultural Center.  Although none of them belong to my own district, I had a special interest in all of them because of helpful (and sadly unsuccessful) bills they’d sponsored in the last session, and because they had been very responsive.  It seems that they’re all new or nearly-new in the job and so I suppose they haven’t had the idealism beaten out of them yet.  The meeting was being held in order to get the perspective of some less-establishment, progressive Democrats about the fiasco with the budget bill that was passed in the last 20 minutes of the session– that is, to get an explanation of how that was allowed to get through.  Which is a whole other story I won’t go into here.

Sen. Candelaria is of special interest because he is the youngest member of the Legislature, age 26, and the first openly gay man.  (I was floored that it’s taken this long to get one of those.)   He is also an immensely charismatic and compelling speaker, and although his colleagues are quite impressive themselves, he stands out as someone who is Going Places.  He described how he’d become fast friends with Sen. Cliff Pirtle, who’s a Republican from a very different area of the state, because Pirtle is 27 and the rest of the legislators are literally decades older.  This means that at least one “mixed-religion” pair are able to talk with each other and focus on what they have in common, and that’s got to be a good thing.  As Swami Beyondananda puts it, “The red tribe and the blue tribe need to talk till they’re purple in the face.”  This is another thing that seems a bit more doable at the state level than in Congress.

So there was a discussion of what has to happen to get younger people involved, including somehow making it more possible for the non-wealthy and working folk to serve as legislators.  I pointed out that many young activists, like my daughter, see the Democratic Party as basically just one of the two corporate parties.  Sen. Candelaria replied that as a gay Hispanic man who grew up poor, the difference between the two is quite clear to him.  Yes, I said, but many of the younger folk are way to the left of even progressive Democrats.  I was told that they might find quite a few who are officially Democrats but are pretty much where they’re at, and that there might still be some motivation for them to work within the party.

I hadn’t realized that this was an event sponsored by progressive Democrats, since I’d found out about it through the League of Women Voters and we’re not allowed to advertise for anything partisan.  It was open to everyone, strictly speaking, not entirely partisan, but ultimately mostly attended by those of a particular political stripe.  There were some Independents, though, and I had the opportunity to hear the point of view of one of them, an older man who has recently moved to New Mexico.  His basic message was that he’s just tired of all the crap and doubletalk, and I doubt anyone can argue too much with that.

Near the end of the meeting a candidate for a local office showed up and spoke.  I won’t name the man, since I’m about to criticize him harshly, but you may figure out who it was.  At another event I’d had a nice, substantial personal conversation with this man, and I’d thought well of him and planned to vote for him.  My estimation of him plummeted as he described how his parents, with their strong immigrant values, had instilled in him an appreciation of hard work, and how we needed Change at City Hall.  Just the most warmed-over campaign boilerplate you could imagine– he said nothing of use whatsoever.  It was very frustrating.  Mr. Independent commented that this was exactly the sort of thing he was objecting to, politicians who seem to love to hear themselves talk but have nothing to say.  I couldn’t disagree with him.

Meanwhile, Sen. Linda Lopez, who is running for governor, got up to say that in order to cut through all the noise, Democrats need to craft a focused, brief message that expresses what we’re all about.  “Short and sweet!” she kept repeating.  Yet it was clear that most of those in the room, and I think a great many elsewhere, were longing for something so much more than soundbites.  Mr. Independent certainly was.

Despite my work with NMSAAM and other groups, I tend to prefer to be left alone, and I definitely prefer to have flexibility and to be dogma-free, so it’s been a little hard for me to understand why parties are needed at all.  If I remember correctly, one of the Founding Fathers predicted that parties would destroy democracy.  Yet, I am coming to realize how much structure and organization is needed to get even the smallest things done.  How can we create more responsive, more flexible, nimbler organizations that can deal effectively with the massively complicated contemporary world?  (Besides reforming campaign financing, I mean.)   I have no idea.  Comments are welcome.

The Wealth of Health: Oriental Medicine as a New Mexico Resource

The following is an updated version of an article I wrote for the April issue of Santa Fe’s Green Fire Times.

 

Although New Mexico is considered a poor state, we have a wealth of options for healthcare that many other parts of the country can hardly imagine. How can we turn this wealth into not only better health outcomes but also a brighter economic future?

There is broad agreement at every level of society that maintaining wellness is better and cheaper than trying to fix things that have already gone wrong. However, the market forces that we allow to rule, more often than not, work against this ideal. For example, if people use at-home methods of preventing influenza, huge profits can’t be reaped from selling millions of flu shots. That’s horribly backwards because healthcare costs are eating our country alive.  There is very little that is healthy about our “healthcare” system, financially or otherwise.

In Oriental medicine we think in terms of keeping patients well through educating them about diet, emotional balance and the like. A famous proverb says that the mediocre physician cures illness, the good physician prevents illness, and the superior physician teaches people how to live so that they stay well. We’re also told that in ancient times doctors were paid when people stayed healthy, not when they got sick– the original HMO plan! Unfortunately, things have changed quite a bit, and despite efforts in that direction, so far our modern system hasn’t figured out how to pay healthcare providers for having patients who don’t need treatment.  But if we can somehow manage this kind of emphasis on wellness instead of sickness, our healthcare costs will surely drop. Many of our most financially draining patients are those with largely preventable chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes. We know we have to get such “lifestyle” illnesses under control. Oriental medicine is an excellent framework for doing that.

To a large extent health insurance has ignored wellness-based care, and our Health “Maintenance” Organizations even specify in their plans that they don’t cover treatment intended for maintenance. We do have a relatively good situation in our state, in which acupuncture and some other aspects of Oriental medicine are covered, albeit sometimes poorly, by insurers based in NM. However, there is no Medicare coverage at all, and Medicaid is limited to a few special circumstances. This means that many of the people who could benefit most are left out.

And then there is the geographic problem. Medical care of all types is scarce and often of poor quality in the less-populated parts of the state, and non-mainstream care is even harder to get.  (I am the only provider of acupuncture in a large swath of western NM, and I’m only there once a week.) This is exacerbated by the fact that those areas tend to have a higher proportion of low-income people.

Could financial incentives help with getting more providers into rural areas? So far, that hasn’t seemed to be enough. MDs are already paid much more in some underserved areas, yet it’s hard to get them to go and live there. Doctors and nurses can get their student loans forgiven if they practice in such places for a certain period of time. While that’s a good idea, it doesn’t encourage practitioners to put down roots in a community. And Doctors of Oriental Medicine aren’t eligible for this help with their loans. Still, there are a great many DOMs, and we do a lot of primary care. In a state that is short on MDs, there must be a way to use us to fill some of the gaps.

The Affordable Care Act mandates that states must have health insurance exchanges in place by 2014 to make coverage available to most of the population. In New Mexico, it looks like acupuncture will be included as an essential health benefit. This should make a real difference in access for our citizens– when it happens, which may not be the date originally prescribed.  At the 11th hour of the 2013 session, our state legislature finally came up with a plan for an exchange.  However, the plan that emerged was a compromise that left out consumer protections that many legislators wanted.

The health insurance exchange plan, alas, will leave the insurance companies in charge no matter what the details are. It will also contribute to high costs by adding even more plans to the mix– the cost of dealing with a multitude of plans is a huge reason why American medicine is so expensive. Analyses done so far say that this approach is unaffordable for our relatively small population. New Mexico does have another option, one that’s homegrown and tailored for us, one that enjoys wide support around the state. The Health Security Act, which was submitted yet again in this year’s legislature, provides a framework that could cover most of us and have a real shot at controlling costs. The exchange could morph into a more efficient model like this if we ever muster the will to do it. This year the HSA did very well early in the legislative process, and looked as if it would at last come to the floor for a vote.  However, political infighting involving some of Health Security’s formerly loyal “friends” (Reps. Stewart and Garcia, you know who you are) prevented the bill from reaching the House floor.

If we in New Mexico and elsewhere continue to destroy our chances to build a workable health care system on the basis of greed or because of petty, short-term concerns, then we deserve what we get.  We can do so much better.

20 Years of Divine Addiction

Lenore, age 8, and I give a recital for Grandma
at our old house with our old upright.
See, playing the piano is fun! Right??

(I started this on March 5, Fryderyk Chopin’s name-day, and continued over the next week, writing in bits for the reasons below.)

As of about February 11, it was 20 years since my association with him began. To my eternal regret, perhaps because I was knocked out of normal daily reality at the time, I didn’t make note of the exact date that I met him.

I haven’t come up with much in the way of suitably profound or brilliant observances for this anniversary. Instead, I’ve been drowned in professional responsibilities, especially the many Crises du Jour of the current state legislative session. The quiet, introspective time I’d planned hasn’t happened. And the man himself hasn’t been around much; no conversations, no revelations. Perhaps we’ll celebrate at a later date. Or perhaps, no longer being chained by time, there is no meaning for him in an anniversary at all. Still, I might as well go along with the human tendency to mark decades as they go by and look back a bit.

I could not have imagined, when that first clear contact occurred on a winter evening in 1993, how overwhelmingly important this event would turn out to be, how utterly my life would change. I had looked for him before, had felt that we had some deep connection I couldn’t fathom, but nothing had ever come of that, at least nothing conscious.

I was finishing up science classes at T-VI (now CNM) at the time that it happened, and then I started acupuncture school a few months later. I was still teaching music a little, and performing occasionally, but couldn’t really concentrate on that. It wasn’t till more than another year had gone by that the piano addiction hit full force. Then I couldn’t avoid music, and Chopin’s music in particular, even though I was still embroiled in school and would be for a couple more years. I started taking piano lessons again, and have kept them up much of the time since. This is all Fryderyk’s fault– isn’t it?

Those who know me well are so used to me playing the piano (or trying to, at any rate) that it probably doesn’t seem as crazy to them as it does to me. I had been at it since age 13, but never showed any great aptitude. It’s slow going for me, and for my long-suffering teachers. Almost on a daily basis, I’ve wondered why I have dedicated so much time, energy, and money to this pursuit. I turned away from the lute, which I was playing reasonably well, and even from my duet partner, in order to play Chopin. I didn’t feel that I had any choice. I thought it would be a phase that I’d pass through, and then I’d go back to my normal life. Apparently it is my normal life.  Although every so often I still play the lute, sing, fool around with flute or recorder, or even have a try at my major instrument, the guitar, the piano has remained central over the years.

I’m not saying that seriously practicing the piano, making it central in one’s life, is crazy in itself– far from it. I’ve just had a hard time understanding why I insist on doing something that is a bit outside my ability to do well, when there are so many other possible choices, and I could be excelling at something else. To be sure, there are some real practical benefits I can point to, if I must be practical. In particular, playing the piano helps me keep up the upper body strength and flexibility I need to do bodywork; if I don’t play for a while, my hands tend to ache and feel stiff. I can always justify it that way if I need to.

My main dance teacher, Michele Diel, pointed out that if playing the piano were easy for me, it wouldn’t make nearly so much sense as a spiritual practice. It is my Zen archery, my Qi Gong, my yoga. It is my Kurukshetra, a battlefield upon which I constantly dodge my own friendly fire. It is a martial art in which I must learn to stop fighting.

My piano teacher since 2008, Stephen Montoya, says it is my soul.

A former friend once asked my whether doing so many different arts at once was a problem for me, implying that it had to be one and that I was messing up my life. This was an odd question, since she herself, in addition to being a healer, wrote poetry and prose, made sculptures, did calligraphy at a high level, and cooked like a dream. She exhorted me to pick one or two things and stick with only those. But this is simply not possible, and as I explained to her, healing, music, and dance feel like aspects of the same thing to me. It’s hard to articulate exactly why that is; roughly, all of them involve the movement of energy, tension and release. All of them are Qi in motion. (I’m not sure how writing fits in. I’ll have to get back to you on that!)

There is especially little distinction, to me, between playing the piano and dancing, and I don’t feel I could manage without either of those. Back in December, I had a sudden breakthrough in which the two arts came together in a new way. My piano teacher said, “I wish you could use your arms the way you do when you dance.” It was not a new idea, but because it would require me to Break Some Rules, I hadn’t completely followed it through before. I decided to do exactly as he suggested, whether it was “wrong” or not. Nothing else, simply moving my arms the way I do when I dance, with the movements emanating naturally from the center of my body.

Wow.

All of a sudden my tone acquired more depth and beauty, my dynamic range expanded, and I was playing music in a way I don’t think I ever had before. And I had a feeling of joy and physical pleasure at the piano that was beyond anything else I’d experienced, too. Everyone, including my teacher, could hear that something was radically different and better. My dancing, away from the piano I mean, also suddenly deepened and became more ecstatic. I felt like I had been released into the air to fly for the first time.

Crashing back to the ground, which happened all too soon, was pretty painful, and I’ve only been able to take off for very brief flights since. I’ve spent a couple of months trying to integrate the technical issues I must consciously practice and intellectually understand with this other practice of freedom and intuitive movement. For a while I had to insist on hanging on to the joy and to my inner sensations, no matter what, because having found that, I’m not willing to ever let it go. It seems that at last I’m getting back to where I was and where I want to be, beginning to feel the softening and peace in my body again as I work with the piano instead of against it.

Despite this new connection with my innate musicality, a strange phenomenon has continued to plague me, even on some of my better days. At certain times I start into a piece and it’s as if I’ve never seen it before. Sadly, this is most likely to occur early in one of my lessons, during my first try at a piece. I play something like a quarter of the notes wrong, feeling utterly disoriented, and I get stuck over and over, unable to create any kind of flow. It may have to do with the lighting being different or my chair being off center or something else one can detect in the situation, but most of the time there is no known explanation. It isn’t a matter of simple “nerves.”

Then, typically, I try the same piece again, and everything is fine; in fact, I may well play it far better than I’ve been able to at home. I wish I could solve this mystery and get more control over this unfortunate habit of my brain, eyes, and hands. It’s bad enough that it’s embarrassing, but mostly I’m frustrated because I haven’t been able to figure it out or change it. My best understanding is that it is most likely to happen with a piece that I know well enough that a lot of it is “on automatic,” but not well enough that it’s completely memorized or otherwise under the conscious direction of the objective, analytical part of my mind. At my last lesson, a few days ago, on the second try with a nocturne I’d played early in the time of my addiction, it felt like I succeeded in flipping a switch that allowed me to consciously read the notes clearly again and not slip into an inadequate connection with movements I only half remembered. (This is not easy to describe!)  When I fully remember those movements for a given piece, this phenomenon should greatly diminish if it happens at all.  Should.

Since if I try again I can often play pretty well, sometimes even quite beautifully, this may not sound like much of a problem. However, if it keeps happening, I can’t trust myself to perform in even the least stressful situation. This feels very limiting, and now that I’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to be so much less limited, I want even more to let go of it. Suggestions are very welcome!

Meanwhile, in looking to connect with my solidity-challenged friend during this special time, I had a go at relearning how to draw, and in particular to draw his face, which I still can never get a good look at. I used to do pencil portraits when I was a teenager, some of them fairly impressive, though I never drew brilliantly. Julie Brokken’s “QuiArt” classes/mini-retreats/informal tea parties have provided a framework for getting the pencil moving again. Unsurprisingly, I used to draw on a tiny scale, at my best when there were a bajillion picky details– the same tendency I’m dealing with in music and dance. I would erase over and over and spend days on a piece just a few centimeters across.

The other night I brought Chopin’s death mask to Julie’s studio, and while she showed me pictures of her family, pointing out the similarities between faces, and gave me a helpful hint now and then, I sketched his profile. I concentrated on the tea and chatting, trying not to pay too much attention to the fact that I was making marks on paper. I stayed away from detail and attempted to produce lines with flow and movement, life-sized (death-sized?) instead of tiny and cramped. The result would allow a person to recognize its subject on the street, I’d say.  I feel like I’m beginning to recapture an important part of myself, so I’m inordinately pleased with this piece, stripped-down though it is.

In order to share this with you, I photographed it and processed it so that the tentative, faint lines were dark enough to show up well. The white paper now looks like some sort of grey stone, matching my blog background.  I hope to be able to portray him alive and awake in not too long.  As Julie points out, I need to practice seeing what’s really there, rather than what I expect to see.  Then I need to move freely and confidently to project that clear perception.  Not so different from the process of bringing music through one’s hands.

Heartfelt thanks to all my teachers in the arts in these past two decades, including:
Piano– Jane Viemeister, Suzanne Dawson, Stephen Montoya, and of course Fryderyk Chopin, whose music gives me profound daily lessons whether he is present or not
Harpsichord– Susan Patrick
Dance– Michele Diel, Michelle Morrison, Flo Bargar, Erin Damour, and so many others
Visual art– Julie Brokken

For a few more thoughts on why a person might want to do this crazy music thing: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/imagine/201003/einstein-creative-thinking-music-and-the-intuitive-art-scientific-imagination

Parallel in No Time

Eckhart Tolle declared, “Suffering needs time.”  This pithy statement implies that any event in time is subject to suffering, because time is an illusion and we are bigger than it.  He goes on to say, “it [suffering] cannot survive in the now.”  Tolle has mined gold here.  Why make a big deal about events in time?  Why not dive into the eternal now moment and let time take care of itself?  As Ram Dass said in his classic book Be Here Now, “If you can be here now, when ‘then’ becomes ‘now,’ you will have superconsciousness and superawareness and know exactly what to do.”  – Alan Cohen, in his December 2012 newsletter

Christine visited the other day, and at one point she tried to help me get unstuck from a vexing issue by means of the Matrix Energetics techniques she’d been practicing.  She simply sat drumming her fingers on the table and doing apparently nothing else.  A wave of warmth washed over me, and suddenly the air began to shimmer and appear to move.  It was as if the very molecules were trying to shift.  And yes, my problem shifted too.

You’ve been reading my blog and similar stuff, so you know, don’t you.  You know that the world we perceive is only that, the world we perceive.  No more, no less.

One of the most obvious and all-encompassing features of this world is linear time.  The cusp of the new year, right now as I write, is one of the moments in which time, marking its passage, putting a dot at a certain spot, seems particularly significant.  But there is no absolute, one-way time that is running at the same rate and in the same order for all observers, no matter what we think we see from our limited vantage point.

Recently, in his blog at White Crow Books, Michael Tymn presented an interview with Julia Assante, PhD, author of The Last Frontier.  Dr. Assante made this striking comment:  “Individual reincarnations co-exist in the afterlife.  And they can co-exist in this life too.  I know a woman who is a reincarnation of me.  We both have the same past-life memories and share one future-life memory, even the name of the man we are going to be, a man named Bernerd, who lives about 200 years from now.*  Our other-life memories were already known to us before we ever met.  She and I simply split up into two bodies.”

Dr. Assante answered another question with this:  “You might already have guessed that I’m not much of a supporter of spiritual evolution in which we progress sequentially.  I know I have had past incarnations in which I was more advanced than I am now.  And nearly everyone is more ‘spiritually evolved’ as children than as adults.”

And the audience went nuts.  Even some folks who have read and written extremely widely on spiritual matters got quite upset at the idea that the spirit might not develop steadily in a forward direction through linear time.

All I can figure is that although they might have read spiritual classics, they’ve completely ignored the past century of physics. I don’t think they’ve consumed a lot of science fiction, either; if they had, time travel, realistic or not, would be part of their normal mental wallpaper.  I don’t mean to be too hard on these folks.  This is difficult stuff, and our brains are not built well for contemplating it.

Why is it that the illusion of linear time keeps us so entirely in its thrall, even though it’s a partial truth at best?  The best explanation I’ve seen is in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  It is simply that the apparent arrow of time exists because of entropy.  Spilled coffee doesn’t jump back into the cup.  Rocks don’t fall upward.  Disorder inevitably increases.  Our physical brains follow this law, so our thoughts go along.

On the other hand, I can play pieces that I couldn’t in the past, implying some sort of progress through time.  On the third hand (which sure would be useful at the keyboard), if what appear to be past-life memories really are, “I” used to play far better than I do now.  But if we can add a fourth hand (and now try duets), that doesn’t matter because the larger entity can push itself into any part of the time/space continuum, so that a “more advanced” model could appear in an earlier era.

A terrific pop-physics program on PBS, The Elegant Universe, hosted by physicist Brian Greene, used the metaphor of a gigantic loaf of bread to represent an Einsteinian view of spacetime.  The angle at which you slice across the loaf determines whether a given event appears to happen before or after another.  Cause and effect goes out the window.  All of the bread is “already” there, waiting for the observer to taste one slice or another.  (You should watch that series.  Seriously.  Even if you aren’t into the science, the visuals are trippy and incredible.)

And as if that weren’t enough, there may be infinitely many other loaves.  In the views of not only Hugh Everett’s venerable Many-Worlds Interpretation but also some modern formulations of string theory, everything that can happen does, somewhere or somewhen.  Some physicists postulate that there could be infinitely many of each of us, almost the same but just slightly different, because in an infinite number of universes, there are infinite possibilities for similar events and beings to be repeated.

The trouble is that even if this is true we can never test for it or prove it; all those universes are hopelessly divided and closed off from each other, forever and ever.  But that hasn’t stopped some mystics from exploiting the idea– mere physical characteristics of the universe(s) are no barrier to the mind.  As Lucy Gillis put it, “The laboratory of parallel universe experimentation may not lie in a mechanical time machine, à la Jules Verne, but could exist between our ears.”  She quoted physicist Fred Alan Wolf: “. . . the possibility exists that parallel universes may be extremely close to us, perhaps only atomic dimensions away but perhaps in a higher dimension of space – an extension into what physicists call superspace. Modern neuroscience, through the study of altered states of awareness, schizophrenia, and lucid dreaming, could be indicating the closeness of parallel worlds to our own.”

A self-improvement teacher in his 80s, Burt Goldman, has based his entire system on this concept.  When he wants to learn to do something new, he imagines a parallel self that already has that skill.  In his mind, he goes to visit that self and minutely observes how he does what he does, then returns to normal reality able to do the same.  In this way he has taught himself to paint in various styles, to play the piano, and more.  He just immediately knows how to do it.  I’m afraid that so far I haven’t had any success trying this.  I’m intrigued, though, and willing to believe that all human capabilities are somehow “out there” in the Field and that we can capture them if we understand how.

I was introduced to the concept of parallel lives many years ago in the Seth material, so it’s been part of my mental background for much of my life.  Seth postulates something very much like Everett’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, that whenever there is more than one possible way an event can to occur (as when a particle “decides” to go through one slit or another during an experiment), all the possible outcomes do in fact occur.  The difference with Seth’s way of looking at things is that he says we choose, consciously or unconsciously, which reality is going to manifest for us, rather than the whole thing being random and all options being equal.  “You create your reality” in this view means that you pick out what you want from among all the probable realities.  Other versions of you are doing the same, making different choices.  It’s an empowering, liberating way of seeing your life, and I think it’s very likely to be the literal truth, but it can make you a bit dizzy and perhaps distressed if you think about it for very long.  All That Is, as Seth calls it, the multiverse, is awfully large.

Seth also concurs that there is no linear time, that everything happens “all at once.”  He says that events are organized in our larger consciousness according to their intensities rather than according to which happened when.  I think we can get a taste of this even in our mundane minds, when we say we remember some long-past but crucial event “as if it was yesterday.”

Most of this discussion has been about advancement in skills and knowledge rather than about fundamental spiritual development.  I am willing to accept Dr. Assante’s assertion that we may be more spiritually evolved as children than as adults, because as we go through our temporal lives more and more junk gets into our heads and obscures what’s important.  But I also would like to think that many people transcend that accretion of junk and come to greater awareness as they age.  At any rate, it seems to me that spiritual development, whatever we may make of that term, is more a matter of opening to the awareness of what we already are than about adding anything new to ourselves.  We can forget temporal things we’ve learned– for example, a couple of years ago I could speak a little Polish, and now I can’t– but I would like to think that what we gain in awareness and understanding in the core or our being stays with us, even if we lose aspects of brain function.

When I described this post-in-progress to my mentor Mendy Lou Blackburn on New Year’s Eve, she said that what the spirit does in its “evolution” is to expand, rather than to progress in linear time.  That matches what I’ve been shown in my own visions.  The concept of expansion still implies a movement through time, but it also suggests a constantly growing network of connections, like a fractal tree in multiple dimensions, ramifying into more and more strands throughout the universe as entities become more aware and more complex and richer with experience.  Not a line, but a web, no beginning or end.

Is that woman who shared memories and future impressions with Julia Assante truly the other half of her, housed in another body?  I don’t know.  There are so many ways two human beings could conceivably share such connections.  Since all of us are essentially the same Mind manifesting in multiple bodies, the question may be moot, and I’m not worrying too much about the exact answer.

*It’s comforting to think that humans may still be here in 200 years!

Mike Tymn’s post:  http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/entry/the_last_frontier_an_interview_with_author_julia_assante_ph.d/

Lucy Gillis, who I found while looking for Seth references, is at www.dreaminglucid.com

NOVA’s The Elegant Universe:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/elegant-universe.html

Burt Goldman’s website:  http://www.quantumjumping.com/articles/parallel-universe/parallel-universes-theory/

Jane Roberts’ Seth material fills a number of worthwhile books.  I reread parts of  The Nature of Personal Reality while preparing to write this post.  Nowadays “you create your reality” is old hat, but when this was written it was fresh, even shocking, and it’s still great food for thought today.

Where Does Music Really Come From? Part 2

In my last post, I mentioned some recordings of Rosemary Brown pieces made by the young Brazilian pianist Érico Bomfim.  I first heard him a few months ago, playing two nocturnes attributed to Chopin.  My immediate reaction was that these were pleasant pieces, but in no way could I say they had been composed by my dear friend.  Dang.  I was a little uncomfortable about this, but I was involved with other projects at the time, and didn’t think much further about it until I received the recent shipment of Brown sheet music I told you about, sent by Guilherme Tavares, which included both of the nocturnes.  Now I’ve had a chance to play them both and hang out with them for a while.  My impression is still the same.  The C# minor nocturne, constructed of block chords like the “chorale” section of some Chopin nocturnes rather than the stereotypical lyrical melody plus arpeggiated accompaniment, is very enjoyable, but I hear it as a well-crafted Brown piece with little resemblance to the work of the named composer.  The nocturne in F minor is built on a typical nocturne plan, with a sinuous and rhythmically complex melody very much like what we would expect of Chopin, but somehow still not sounding like his voice.  I was surprised that these nocturnes would sound so not-Chopin, since the A flat nocturne I already knew has so many of his characteristics, resembles known pieces of his, and completely convinces me.  (Well, 99%.)  While it’s possible, even likely, that a composer’s style would change over time, these sound more like the work of another competent composer of the same era than like Chopin himself.  Still, I can’t rule out his being involved with their creation.

The F minor nocturne has been bugging me today.  It’s an attractive piece, and I’ve gotten interested in it enough to want to learn it thoroughly.  Why is it that although it’s constructed exactly like a Chopin nocturne, with similar turns of phrase, it doesn’t sound like him?  What does Chopin sound like that’s different from this?  If anyone should be able to answer, it’s me, but so far I can’t.  Earlier today I was playing the nocturne and asking myself these questions, and I called out to my mother, “Does this sound like Chopin to you?”  Without hesitating, she called back, “No!” from the next room, adding, “It doesn’t make me think of him.”  Poor thing, she has to listen to me practicing Chopin day in and day out, so she knows very well what he sounds like.  Later I played it some more, and got to thinking that measures 8-10 did in fact have a strong Chopinesque flavor, and felt physically like something he’d do.  I asked my husband the same question I’d asked my mother, and he immediately shook his head, not even needing time to think about it.

Both of these nocturnes were published as being written by Rosemary Brown and “inspired by” Chopin.  That seems about right to me, and perhaps as close as we can get to describing the truth.

Years ago I’d played, or tried to play, a set of six mazurkas that were included in the Brown sheet music I had in hard copies, and I’d felt that they were weak as examples of Chopin’s work.  Six more came with the new collection, and I tried those right away.  On a first reading, they seemed as unconvincing as the two nocturnes.  Then I heard Leslie Howard playing all 12 of the mazurkas on the “Listen Beyond Today” album.  They sure sounded a lot better than they did when I tried them!  In fact, they sounded quite respectable, Chopinesque enough and very Polish– played with the proper rhythmic fluidity, too.  And when I heard the last of the 12, in G# minor, I nearly wept for joy, because I felt I was truly hearing my friend’s voice again.  That one is lovely, and it has a simple but sophisticated left hand part that I can easily relate to Chopin.  I’m enjoying learning it, and as happens with good music, I’m finding more in it as I practice.  Listen to it here:  https://www.box.com/s/5dhe0hslmbpd81ej8zvl

As I reported last time, “paramusicologist” Melvyn Willin said that there were “the odd one or two” pieces in Mrs. Brown’s opus that he couldn’t explain as “pastiche.”  There are a lot more than one or two, but I know what he meant.  That 12th mazurka is one of them, as is the A flat nocturne, Rachmaninov’s “Sleigh Ride,” “Grübelei” of course, and some others I’ve noticed.  We can all agree that they are good music, wherever they came from.

No matter what one thinks “really” happened, the Rosemary Brown phenomenon is intriguing and, I believe, well worth studying.  What do we know for sure?
– Fraud is not a plausible explanation, for reasons I have outlined in the past and will not bother to repeat.
– The pieces are written in a variety of styles that are recognizably those of the composers named.
– There are a great many pieces; one must say that no matter how they were produced, the output is impressive.
– Quality varies among the pieces.

It is necessary to conclude that one of three things must be true:
1. Mrs. Brown was never in contact with any spirit entity, but got all of the music through somehow tapping into an ability that was beyond the ordinary but still hers alone, or
2. Mrs. Brown was given the music directly by the deceased composers, just as she said, and the clarity of the transmission was variable, with some or all of the pieces unintentionally including input of her own, or
3. Mrs. Brown was given the music by spirit entities only pretending to be those deceased composers, thus explaining the uneven quality.  (These entities would still have to be excellent musicians, and very familiar with the styles of the composers.)

It’s that third possibility that gives me the willies.  My friend Fryderyk has repeatedly indicated, assuming I’ve understood correctly, that he was personally involved in the Brown project, and in fact, as I’ve played and listened to these new pieces in the past week or so, he has shown up a number of times– unfortunately not clearly enough that I could ask questions.  If Mrs. Brown was visited by deceiving entities, that could mean the same thing is happening to me.  I do think this is highly unlikely, for reasons I’ve explained in previous posts, but I keep it in the back of my mind as a possibility, being a proper scientist and never believing that I have possession of all conceivable information.

Regarding possibility #1, I must say, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when people insist that the composers weren’t present and didn’t even exist.  I mean, from Mrs. Brown’s point of view, Liszt and the others were right there in the room and totally obvious!  (For my friends who can actually see Fryderyk when he is near me, it’s just as obvious.)  If only I could have met Mrs. Brown and seen her in action, surely I could have gotten some idea whether a given composer was hanging about near her, or at least, whether someone was there.  Any even slightly able psychic could have done that.  Didn’t anyone try?  Most likely they did, but no matter how many subjective perceptions there were, they wouldn’t have been enough to convince those who were determined to believe the whole thing was a crock.  And what if the hypothetical competent psychic determined that no one was there except Mrs. Brown herself?  Again, the phenomenon would still be fascinating and deserving of study.  However, at least once, something happened to show even the non-psychic that an invisible someone was in the room.  As described in Look Beyond Today, Mrs. Brown’s 1986 book:

“On one occasion, Liszt even came up with a ‘party trick’ to help me get through a very difficult encounter.  I was going to be interviewed on television in Birmingham by a lady called Wendy Cooper.  One of my previous books had just been published and the television people were calling in a computer expert who was going to use his professional knowledge to analyse my music and say whether it was genuine or not. 

I felt very uncomfortable but Liszt said to me, ‘Don’t worry.  Everything will be all right.’  Just before we went on the air, the studio was very busy with technicians everywhere.  I hadn’t even seen a copy of my new book yet myself so I picked up the review copy which was to be flashed on screen.  I looked at it, then Wendy took it back and placed it on the piano stool — they had brought in a piano because they wanted me to play some of my pieces from the composers.  After putting down the book, we went and sat some distance away.  There was no one near the piano at all, but I saw Liszt walk over to it and then pick up the book to have a look at the jacket.  He was curious, too.  He had a good look then put it down.  Everyone saw the book move but they could not see Liszt lifting it up.  All they saw was the book rising up from the stool, hovering in mid-air, and then sinking down again.  Everyone about me was thunderstruck.  I said, ‘That’s Liszt.  He just wanted to look at the book.’  From that moment on, my credibility rocketed.  Everyone was looking at me in a different light, and even the computer genius declared my music genuine!

Wendy subsequently wrote an article about this in the Birmingham Post in which she said: ‘In the past I have certainly been sceptical where the supernatural is concerned, and none of the mediums or clairvoyants I have met and interviewed has done anything to change my mind.  Rosemary Brown has — or at the very least she has forced my mind open to the fact that there is something about her story and her music that defies rational explanation.’”

Well, an invisible being may be able to pick up a book, but a nonexistent being definitely can’t.*

Possibility #2 continues to look like the probable truth to me, especially after listening to the BBC broadcast of the obviously puzzled Mrs. Brown trying to get “Grübelei” straight.  But what exactly was going on?  The details, the nuts and bolts of how it worked?  I’m not sure that can be answered completely, but as my own experiences have piled up over the years, perhaps I have a little better understanding.

I’ve never channeled written music, nor found myself improvising brilliantly (or at all, I’m afraid) under Fryderyk’s influence.  However, over the past nearly 20 years I’ve received quite a bit of guidance about piano technique and musical interpretation from that master.  I’ve only posted a small amount of that here, because I’m having considerable trouble organizing it all, and because more keeps coming in and my understanding of it keeps changing– not to mention a certain embarrassment at telling you that Chopin is sometimes my piano teacher.  A few weeks ago, on September 10, I had an experience with him that I thought elucidated some of the issues about musical channeling, and it seems like time to come out with this.

Way back in the late ‘90s, I had one of the biggest thrills of my life, Chopin using my hands to play.  I was an even less advanced player then, and I was pretty limited material for him to work with, but we accomplished something amazing nonetheless.  It was as if he slid his arms and hands inside my own and used them himself, very directly.  I still couldn’t play anything that would have been impossible for me the rest of the time, but musically the result was far beyond what I could produce on my own.  He also was able to cause me to do some things quite differently from the way I had practiced them– I wasn’t simply channeling a more able version of myself (which I’ve also done at times), but rather someone whose thoughts were distinct from mine.  Not long after that, I read Mrs. Brown’s description of Liszt “putting her hands on like gloves,” and I immediately believed her, because exactly that had happened to me.

A healer friend tried to convince me that allowing someone to make use of my body in that way was dangerous, and although I didn’t entirely accept her view, sadly, it never happened again.  (An “evil” entity wouldn’t have cared if he was harming me, but Fryderyk stopped as soon as I expressed concern.)  Years went by before there was any apparent attempt to play with me again, though I longed for it and often asked, and when it finally happened, it seemed he was using a new method.  I didn’t feel anything specifically inside my hands, but there was a sense of being surrounded energetically, all over, and then there was a clear influence that one could hear and see in my playing– influence but not exactly control.  I couldn’t begin to tell you how he was doing it, only that a great deal of the effort was being taken up by someone other than myself, and that I sounded quite different.  That was what happened last month.

I had been struggling mightily with the Fantaisie-Impromptu, which does not respond at all well to struggle of any kind.  My right arm was painful and felt locked up and heavy, unable to move fluidly enough to get anywhere with that piece.  Practicing harpsichord had confused my usual piano habits and increased my difficulties, and I was badly stuck.  Feeling that my invisible teacher was around, I asked for help, hoping it might be one of those all-too-rare times when I could get a clear message.

I could feel a warm energy surrounding me, and there was a strong sensation around my hands, but nothing like the “glove” effect.  It was more a sense of being buoyed up, having support under me.  I tried to put aside any thought of not being able to keep up with him, and I began the piece.  Suddenly I went from stuck in the mud to playing it up to tempo for the first time ever, that is, something like 20% faster than my usual best speed, and with a sense of great freedom and ease, and no pain at all.  The trouble was that every few measures I’d notice the impossible thing I was doing and that would stop me for a moment and break the flow.  It was by no means a fine performance.  Still, it was decidedly more than I’d been able to do just a few minutes earlier.  My mother heard all this– if you don’t believe it, she can vouch for me!

While trying to hang on to this piece that’s at the far edge of my ability, I also had to observe what was happening and figure out why it seemed so much easier.  This is the advantage of not going into trances; although I can’t let go and be completely controlled, which limits how much information can come through me, I can learn directly from what happens.  This was happening awfully fast and for only a few minutes, though, and I was only able to perceive and remember certain aspects of it.  The main thing I got out of it was that I should employ a much larger circular movement of my right arm, initiated from the shoulder; I think before that I was overusing just my forearm, and that was causing the pain.  At any rate, as soon as I did this, the pain stopped.

The next day it turned out that I could do the same, but then I started to lose what I had gained under Fryderyk’s influence.  And as I continued to practice and push toward greater speed, I found new ways to hurt myself, and had to analyze my movements yet again.  At this writing, I feel that I’ve worked through most of the issues that have been holding me back on this piece, and that I’m doing at least most of what Fryderyk was trying to get me to do, as well as what my Earth-based teacher advises.  We’ll see….

Who was playing the Fantaisie-Impromptu that day?  We were, I suppose.  I can’t exactly say that I was channeling Fryderyk’s playing; it was my own playing, but with a lot of help.  My experiences of playing with him, as best I can describe them, have been like two minds using one body, like pilot and copilot.  Most of the time I couldn’t have said where one ended and the other began.  If Mrs. Brown’s experience was anything like mine, perhaps sometimes she was getting a clearer signal from the composers, recording their exact transmission, and other times she was getting more of the music from within herself, and maybe not always sure which was which, because they blended together.  That’s my best guess at this point.

What might the composers have experienced of this?  Can we assume that they came in with a finished composition in mind, and Mrs. Brown simply wrote it down?  If so, did some get transmitted with great accuracy, while others had holes filled, consciously or not, by Mrs. Brown’s own ideas?  Were there as many frustrations for the composers as for their scribe?  If there were errors or omissions, did they always try to go back and fill in the gaps, or did they sometimes decide to leave well enough alone– and could they even perceive those errors while they worked?  Were there times when the music was written in collaboration with Mrs. Brown, using her own (perhaps unconscious) input, rather like my experience of “playing with” rather than being “played through”?  And in cases like that C# minor nocturne, the one that sounds so little like Chopin, did a composer just give Mrs. Brown a little push, then leave her to compose more or less on her own?

It seems to me that fairly often in Brown works, the hand moves to nearby keys that feel intuitively obvious, that is, the way one might naturally do it when improvising.  There’s nothing unusual about that in an “authentic” piece, especially with Chopin.  However, it’s occurred to me that the composers might have found it easier, when pushing Mrs. Brown’s hand to find the next notes, to take the path of least resistance.  The mechanical process of moving her hands may thus have influenced some of the compositions.  This would not have been relevant when the music was being transmitted by dictating note names, but Mrs. Brown has also described both Liszt and Chopin directly placing her hands on the piano keys, leaving her to notate what she had just played.  I can imagine advantages and disadvantages of both methods, and differing effects on the final compositions.  This is an area where I’d so much appreciate some details, and I hope I can get some enlightenment from my composer friend eventually.

So who composed the works of Rosemary Brown?  Her name is on the pages, and I’m comfortable with that, even if the composers who “inspired” the pieces did all the composing.  She still had to do the work of bringing the notes through and putting them on paper– a gigantic amount of work, producing hundreds of pieces over many years.  Perhaps not so different, as she pointed out in the BBC radio program, from the many “real” composers who have felt they were simply downloading the music directly from the heavens.  Although it’s not quite the same thing, I’m reminded of an episode of classic Star Trek, in which a patient in a mental hospital recites a bit of Shakespeare and announces that she has just written it.  Another patient points out that it was written by Shakespeare a long time ago.  “That doesn’t change the fact that I wrote it again myself this morning!” she retorts.

Even more online material about Rosemary Brown has shown up since I wrote the last post a few days ago:

In this video, The Amazing Kreskin interviews Mrs. Brown on his TV show in 1973, and she plays a polonaise attributed to Chopin– a simple but definitely Chopinesque one.  The Brown segment starts at about 8:50.  Although Kreskin was a magician, not a psychic, he was respectful toward his guest.  Later in the program, he shows off his own piano chops with an impressive music-based trick.  I always liked that guy, and now that I know he plays the piano, I like him all the better.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcraiFro0x8

Here is a collection of additional articles about Rosemary Brown, and others regarding mediums and psychics, as well as UFO experiencers:  http://metaphysicalarticles.blogspot.com/  The quote above from Look Beyond Today came from this site.

*A couple of years ago, I wrote about Fryderyk possibly moving a CD from one place to another on a shelf, but that wasn’t witnessed, and remains only an intriguing mystery. 

Where Does Music Really Come From? More on Rosemary Brown

Rosemary Brown at work on the mazurka in D flat

The music of Rosemary Brown is the subject that has brought people to my blog more than any other.  My writing about her has put me in touch with some fascinating people in faraway places, and just recently that has led to my being given another album of Brown pieces as .mp3s, plus a collection of Brown sheet music I hadn’t seen before.  I’ve put all of it up for you in one place, along with the material I already had; the URL is at the bottom of this post.

Through a series of e-mails begun with, if I remember correctly, a reprint of my original article on Mrs. Brown in The Ground of Faith, I’ve had the good fortune to become acquainted with a Brazilian musician and composer, Guilherme Tavares, who has supplied me with a lot of these materials, and also did me a tremendous favor by editing my own recording of “Grübelei.”  A circular sort of Web process brought some of the recordings to Guilherme, involving other people with strong interests in the Brown phenomenon:  Ademir Xavier left a comment on my blog about Érico Bomfim, who is trying to record all of Mrs. Brown’s work, then Guilherme contacted Érico, who sent recordings to him, which he passed on to me, and I am now making available to you.

Guilherme also found a BBC radio program about musical mediumship, from three years ago, and recorded the section about Mrs. Brown.  He asked me to transcribe it, and I am posting it here.  It includes the moment when ”Grübelei” came into the world– a fascinating moment in which the most hardened skeptic would be hard pressed to believe Mrs. Brown was faking.  I’m going to save further comments on the new material and on Mrs. Brown in general for the next post, but for now, I’ll say that I’m especially intrigued by what she said about all composers perhaps getting music from a central source beyond themselves, possibly transmitted to them by intermediaries, just as the composers themselves were transmitting music to her.  This has been my meta-question about Mrs. Brown’s work all along– where does music really come from?  If Liszt or Beethoven or whoever give music to Mrs. Brown, where are they getting it?

I remember one of my piano teachers, Jane Viemeister, who’s a competent composer herself, saying that music is like an endless waterfall; all you have to do is take your bucket and scoop some up, and there’s always more where that came from.  Arlo Guthrie once said that music was like a stream going by, and it was his job to dip out the good stuff before Bob Dylan could get it!  Many composers have reported feeling that they were simply writing down music that was being dictated to them by some higher Source, perhaps even God.  Yet, every composer has a recognizable, individual style.  I still find this all mysterious– especially when a poem pops unbidden and fully formed into my head.  I can’t write music, but my best work does tend to happen in much the way those composers describe.

The conclusions, or rather non-conclusions, reached during this radio program are pretty close to my view of the subject.  Except that, having lived with a spirit close by much of the time, getting mixed up in my daily life, I don’t have any problem believing that Liszt could advise Mrs. Brown on the price of bananas in the supermarket.

“Music from Beyond the Veil,” hosted by Professor Paul Robertson on BBC Radio 4, first aired July 14, 2009.

[A rather rough recording of “Grübelei” plays in the background.]

Mrs. Brown:  It really began when I was a child.  I had a vision of Liszt, but at that time I was not aware that this was Liszt, because I was too young to have seen pictures or photographs of him.  And he told me that when he was on the earth, he was a famous composer and pianist, and that when I grew up he would give me music.  After Liszt had established a link with me, he first brought Chopin, but then he began to bring others, and there is now quite a group communicating fairly regularly.

Robertson:  A group which included many of the greats, Brahms, Debussy, Schumann, Schubert, even Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.  This piece of music, recorded in 1969, is attributed to Franz Liszt, yet it was recorded nearly 80 years after his death.  He chose as his musical intermediary, if we are to believe her account, a quietly-spoken, unassuming housewife from Balham.  Her name was Rosemary Brown, and she created a stir in the late ‘60s, when her musical mediumship added dozens, and eventually hundreds, of new compositions to the musical canon of Liszt and his group of famous friends from beyond this earthly veil.  As a musician myself, a violinist who spent most of his career leading a string quartet, you could say that I too am a medium, but when I aim to express some long-dead composer’s intentions and emotions, I believe I’m working from a musical score.  Yet, I’m fascinated by the mysterious connection between music and our spiritual lives, not least the question of where seemingly transcendent musical inspiration comes from.

In 1969, BBC Radio 3 broadcast “Music From the Dead Composers,” an hour-long program which took a close look at Rosemary Brown’s claims.  During the program, Rosemary described how she received new compositions from beyond the grave.

Mrs. Brown:  Liszt, who was the first one to give music to me, has a way of controlling my hands.  I think quite a few people will have heard of something called automatic writing, where a spirit controls the hand of a person here, and writes through them.  Well, in this case, Liszt somehow contrives to control both my hands, so that he can make them play the music, and he plays the same phrases over several times, while I watch and try to memorize the notes, and then I’ll write it out afterwards to the best of my ability.

Robertson:  In May 1969, during the making of “Music From the Dead Composers,” presenter Geoffrey Skelton and his producer Daniel Snowman visited Rosemary’s home, a small end-of-terrace house in Lakewood Road, Balham, to record with her as she received her music.  Forty years later, Daniel Snowman can still remember how Rosemary sat at the piano waiting for inspiration to strike.

Snowman:  It was a very emotionally low-beat occasion; there was no sense of a séance or of magic or tables moving or all those things.  We simply turned the machine on and sat there, with her obvious agreement– she gave us a cup of tea and all that– and we sat.  And she would, every now and then, mumble various things– not sure whether they were to us or for us, or to somebody [chuckles] from the dead.

Mrs. Brown:  I’m becoming aware of their… they’re present.  At least they’re here, see.  They’re going to transmit.  I can see Liszt quite clearly.

Snowman:  And then she said, “Oh, yes, Liszt, Liszt is here now.”  And Liszt apparently dictated to her a difficult piece called “Grübelei.”  And she was mumbling back and forth with him, in English, “What? Five-four in the right… and a different… and the key signature, how many sharps?  And three-two in the left?”  You know, kind of, “If you say so, Maestro.”

Mrs. Brown:  [slowly picking out notes, scratching on paper]  I don’t know what I’ve left out.  What have I left out… left out… left out?  Oh, yes, you said repeat that, that goes there, yeah.  No….

Snowman:  And then gradually the thing seemed to come together.  She tried to play it, couldn’t, Geoffrey had a go, and it came together as an interesting piece.

The most extraordinary thing to me about that piece she produced in our presence, “Grübelei” by Liszt (supposedly), was that somebody of the ability and authority of Humphrey Searle, a great Liszt expert at the time, you know, looked at this piece and said, “Yeah, it’s very much like the kind of piece he was experimenting with towards the end of his life.”  It’s an extraordinary piece for somebody to simply do a pastiche of Liszt, to come up with something like that.

Willin:  Well, I had quite a lot of correspondence with Rosemary when she was alive, um, and I’ve looked at a lot of her music and I’ve done a lot of tests on it, and I’ve discussed it with possibly thousands and certainly hundreds of people.

Robertson:  Dr. Melvyn Willin describes himself as being a paramusicologist.  As well as being a music teacher and performer, he researches cases where music apparently meets the paranormal.

Willin:  And what do I have to say?  Um, I think that she was genuine, I think she was tapping into something.

Robertson:  So when you say genuine….

Willin:  She wasn’t fraudulent.

Robertson:  She was sincere.

Willin:  Sincere, yes.

Robertson:  OK.  But do you think she was, in your terms, a genuine medium for something she couldn’t otherwise have achieved?

Willin:  I think she believed that she was genuinely in touch with the composers that she said she was in touch with.  Um, and hey, perhaps she was.  I would be happier to think that she was in touch perhaps with something that was within her, that she was perhaps getting some help from externally.  But I don’t believe that Beethoven or Liszt was telling her the price of bananas in the supermarket, etc.

As to her music, it’s always come across to me, and to others, as a rather good pastiche of the actual composers.  But having said that, I wouldn’t say always, and that’s the frustrating thing, because I can’t say that no, I think all her pieces were pastiche.  I have to say that I think an awful lot were, but there was the odd one or two, that I just think, I don’t know how she did that.

Robertson:  So where does that leave us with the intriguing case of Rosemary Brown?  Not even her most ardent critics accused her of being fraudulent, or of somehow deceiving the public, and she was clearly sincere in her belief about where her talents came from.  It’s interesting, though, to hear her in an interview of 1967, describing her composer friends from the other side as themselves intermediaries for something greater.

Mrs. Brown:  Well, it seems to me to come from a central source of inspiration, as if there were spheres of music, and I think it is channeled down to me, as perhaps it is channeled down to other composers, by various intermediary beings, spirits, whatever you like to call them.  And in this instance, I think there are people who have been composers upon the earth, trying to channel the music to me.

[Background music: a tenor singing “O Sole Mio.”]

Robertson:  I’ll leave the last word to Leo May, who is as certain in his conviction as Rosemary Brown was in hers that he’s channeling the spirits of dead musicians, in his case, those of Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza.

[An interview begins]  So in a way, it’s not a million miles different to having a talent and then having a duty to serve that talent.

May:  I’m a servant, yes.

Robertson:  And is that quite important, to feel that?

May:  It is indeed important, yes.  Indeed it is, to serve it.  I want to serve the spirit world, which I know, if anybody says to me, “do you believe in the spirit world?” I say, “No.  I know it.”  And there’s the difference between knowing it and surmising that it might be there.  I know it.  Without a doubt.

***********************************************************************************

https://www.box.com/s/vhk9npc8ikzm2bef3ohq
My collection of Rosemary Brown PDFs and .mp3s, including the transcript above and the recording of the original radio show excerpt.  While going through it all, I realized that I still have a few more pieces that need to be scanned in.  I’ll try to get that done soon…

http://www.youtube.com/user/xavnet2
Ademir Xavier’s YouTube Channel, where you will find Érico Bomfim playing some Brown works, as well as a couple of interviews with Mrs. Brown.  Xavier has a blog, Era do Espírito, at http://eradoespirito.blogspot.com.

http://elenedom.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/the-music-of-rosemary-brown-from-a-pianists-perspective/

My earlier post, “The Music of Rosemary Brown from a Pianist’s Perspective.”

Here Be Dragons

Told ya there were dragons in my office.

James’ eyes were wide. “It was all around you!” he told me, in an awed tone. He’d just finished doing a set of adjustments for me, and I was unnerved to think he might have discovered some unsavory entity around me– as you know, I’ve had my share of those.

“What was all around me?”

“It was so beautiful,” he continued, explaining that “it” was wrapped around my entire body in a spiral, protecting me– a large, gold with red, Chinese-style Dragon. The exact image of the wonderful Dragon friend I already knew and loved, but had never once mentioned to James. He had seen it in a way I never had.

If more than one person sees the same thing independently, without preconceived notions, I tend to think that what they see is real. But what kind of “real” is this Dragon? Does it have its own existence in some other plane of All That Is, as individual and self-aware as any other creature? Does it reside within the collective human unconscious, as an archetype? Is it a denizen of my own psyche, that somehow I can project outward so that it can be seen by others? Does it perhaps have aspects of all these possibilities?

When my first mentor in shamanic studies introduced me to the concept of power animals, I remember telling her, quite sincerely, that mine was probably a Dragon. She looked dubious, and seemed to consider telling me what a silly idea that was, but she was kind enough to keep her mouth shut. Later I was embarrassed to realize how ridiculous I had sounded. No one had mythological beasts for power animals; according to the teachers of shamanic arts, they were supposed to be the spirit representations of our normal Earth-based species, perhaps even the collective unconsciousnesses of those species. But then later still I discovered that I was in fact associated with a Dragon after all, so there!

My Dragon was as vivid as anything I’d ever experienced in the spiritual world, and he certainly functioned as a power animal on my behalf, but I always thought that was odd, since dragons are not real animals on our planet. That is what I told Christine one day in July of 2006.

“Dragons are real,” she replied, with conviction. She explained that she sees them all the time, but that they seem to exist in a different plane or dimension from ours, so that we aren’t usually aware of them. She had toured the stone circles and sacred spots of England not long before, and Stonehenge, she reported, was particularly filled with dragons.

We were at the end of the time available for visiting that day, and I didn’t get a chance to ask for the rest of this tantalizing story. At the next opportunity, I asked how exactly she perceives the dragons. She said that she sees vague outlines, enough to recognize them, but she doesn’t see them in detail. She couldn’t tell me, for example, whether they looked like Chinese dragons or Western ones. Sometimes there is just a “knowing,” she said, nothing visual. She said that other mythological beasts appear to have the same frequency and to exist in the same dimension; I took that to mean that they have the same sort of feel to her.  Her idea is that humans have a subconscious awareness of all these beings, which is why they show up in our art, literature, and religion.

Soon after, I had the opportunity to find out directly what Christine was talking about. She came to my office to check out the place and explore whether she would like to move in with me there. Looking into the treatment room that could become hers, she told me that there was a dragon right there and then. I couldn’t see a thing. She suggested that perhaps she could “put me on her frequency,” and then I might be able to see what she saw.

I had no idea how this could be accomplished. Christine explained that she does treatments mainly by putting herself on the appropriate frequency to interface with the patient’s distressed body parts, and that she can switch frequencies with no trouble at all. She put her hand on my shoulder and led me toward the room.

I still didn’t exactly see anything. I scanned the room from right to left, and as my eyes swept across the center of the room, toward the far wall, suddenly they seemed to “stick.” My gaze was drawn to a particular area about two feet across and four feet tall, directly in front of me. The air seemed thicker there. I kept looking away and scanning again, and each time my eyes were pulled toward the same spot. This, of course, was where Christine was seeing the dragon. It was almost as if something reached out and grabbed my vision, as if I were required to look right there whether I cared to or not. I had a definite sense that the creature was purple, definite enough that I could show you the exact shade.  A purple, living something, hovering in the center of the room.

We went back into the waiting room and continued to chat. Every so often I looked back at the treatment room and tried to tell if the beast was still there. For a long time it was. Eventually my eyes no longer felt that pull or the sensation of density in the atmosphere of the room. I assumed the dragon was gone.

The spot where the something was is now the location of my treatment table. I’ve never run into any unexpected beings there, though as I’ve told you in other posts, sometimes patients do bring guests of various sorts into the room. Last Christmas, Christine gave me a papier-maché ornament in the shape of a small, winsome purple dragon, to commemorate our sighting.

 

When my daughter was a child, she had a great deal of trouble with her health. At one point, desperate to help her, I journeyed to ask for a power animal to come to her aid. I encountered a noble but unsurprising beast, a Bison cow, motherly and comforting. I told Lenore about this animal and suggested that she could ask her for support whenever she felt she needed it. Lenore soon reported back to me that she had tried to get in touch, but that the Bison had refused to speak with her. Instead, she had been put in contact with a completely different creature, something that seemed much like a snake, but with some sort of long feathers or other streaming appendages.

I was nonplussed by the Bison’s lack of response, and went to see if I could find out anything about the snakelike being. I had a strong impression of it, but like Lenore, couldn’t get a really thorough view of it, only bits and pieces. When we compared notes, it seemed that we were talking about the same creature, whatever it was. Long and sinuous, sailing through the air, streaming feathers or something similar, and mainly lime green in color. It had a certain resemblance to a Chinese dragon, but only in its overall shape; it was distinctly different from any dragon images we knew of. We unceremoniously dubbed it The Snaky Thing– no disrespect intended, only description.

Long and snaky, feathered, and flying. That’s Quetzalcoatl, right? Or Kukulkan if you prefer. One early type of representation of this deity depicts him as twining in a spiral about the body of some noble personage as a Vision Serpent– not so different from what James saw when he was treating me. It’s unclear from the descriptions I’ve found whether the Flying Serpent is supposed to have actual wings or not; most representations don’t seem to include them. I don’t think I had an impression of wings with our Snaky Thing, but I couldn’t see it clearly enough to be sure. Perhaps I can get in touch with it again and find out more.

“The Snaky Thing”?
Quetzalcoatl by Dan Staten
(Thanks to ImageShack)

 

Dragon-like creatures seem to abound in the human psyche around the world, sometimes as sources of wisdom and power, sometimes threatening or even standing in for pure evil, as when they are used to symbolize Satan. I wonder at times if there may be some kind of ancient mammal memory of flying dinosaurs– and at least some dinosaurs are known to have had feathers. The huge model of a pterosaur hanging in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, in fact, is meant to be a Quetzalcoatlus. Go figure. This flying creature, though, is mostly wings, with a long narrow beak, and looks nothing like Lenore’s friend, nor like a Mayan stone relief. But perhaps it did have its own colorful and impressive feathers.