My New Old Lute Albums, Available Again

The universe has decided that I’m supposed to be a lutenist again, which was pretty much a surprise to me. As part of my lute activities, I’ve put my 1993 and 2010 albums up on Bandcamp where they’re easy for you to find.

The 2010 album, A Sampler of Polish Lute Music, was one of my projects for Chopin’s 200th birthday year. The cover and liner are photos from Kraków, where my daughter and I visited after a stay in Warsaw to take in the Chopin piano competition.

It’s here:  https://elenegusch.bandcamp.com/album/a-sampler-of-polish-lute-music

My first album, Risurrectione, comes from 1993, so long ago that it was recorded on cassette. My very patient husband recently remastered it into electronic form so it could enter the modern world. I reworked the cover art, my take on the famous Fiorentino cherub lutenist, into a CD cover format.

You can find that one here: https://elenegusch.bandcamp.com/album/risurrectione

 

Photos from Kraków here:  https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/trippy-journal-part-ii-krakow/

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Things You Can Do When You’re Dead! and Some You Can’t

Whatever he’s doing, it’s not this.

Lawrence Spencer wrote 1001 Things You Can Do While You’re Dead: A Dead Person’s Guide to Living, which looks absolutely hilarious.

Tricia J. Robertson wrote Things You Can Do When You’re Dead!: True Accounts of After Death Communication, which looks intensely interesting.

I haven’t read either of these books yet, but I can definitely say that both authors are among the not-dead. Descriptions of the lives of the dead— you can see that language gets tangled right away— by dead folks themselves are abundant, but not necessarily all that clear to those of us still on this side of the veil.

On 9/10/19, after reading through some short Mozart pieces that I hadn’t been familiar with at the piano, I got to wondering if Fryderyk has any kind of relationship with his idol, or ever sees him. I was pleased to find myself easily getting in touch with him and able to have a clear conversation, which is still a fairly rare occurrence.

It seems that nobody really has a relationship with Mozart or gets to talk with him these days, from what Fryderyk told me. He is something of a recluse (we both struggled to find the best word for his situation). I was surprised, since I think of Mozart as a pretty gregarious person. He is secluded in a kind of chamber in which he is in meditation and in communication directly with the Divine Source. The image of a huge column of light streaming down, cascading into him, was strong, but I can’t say I really understood this whole concept. It had almost a science fiction movie flavor.

I wondered if Mozart had become almost a sort of deity himself. I’ve thought of him as something like that, but at the same time, the original planet-based Wolfgang seems so down to earth. It’s interesting to contemplate.

I wondered if they have any involvement with trying to help our dire situation on our dying planet. He said, firmly, that this is the responsibility of those who live on the planet at present, that we wanted and intended to be here and deal with this, that it is “your burden.”

But obviously Fryderyk is involved heavily with the earth plane.

I asked about his relationship with Liszt, having recently heard a 1955 Leslie Flint track* in which the Chopin voice spoke of his friendships with Liszt and Mendelssohn. What is Liszt getting himself up to lately? Is he still involved with us groundlings too?

He showed me Liszt reaching toward us on earth, like a hand reaching down into the atmosphere to tweak things here below. 

How is that different from what he does himself? He works by entering directly into the human heart, from the inside, he said, instead of imposing something from the outside.

But seriously, I insisted, things are not looking good around here. I asked if he had any advice for those of us tasked with getting through the next few decades. He said, “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”

I was trying to ask about what they do all “day,” something I am endlessly curious about, especially since it is more or less what we all will be doing eventually. In the Leslie Flint session I mentioned, the Chopin voice described having a salon in which he and other musicians played over their recent works and gave each other suggestions. We’ve heard before that at least for the more recently dead, life feels much the same as it did when they inhabited physical bodies; they appear to wear clothes, live in houses, walk about in gardens, etc. At the same time, we are told that there are so many aspects of their existence that we can’t fathom with our limited senses.

Perhaps those two things are not contradictory. I’m reminded of an anecdote from Rosemary Brown, in which she described a visit with Debussy, who brought one of his new nonphysical paintings to show her. If I remember correctly, the subject of the painting was a peacock; whatever it was, it moved around and morphed in a way that physical paintings can’t manage. Apparently he was having a lot of fun with this art form.

Michael Tymn’s latest blog post uses the Eiffel Tower as a clever metaphor for the various planes or spheres in which spirits find themselves at different levels of development.
http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/month/2019/09/
He also discusses the naive and fallacious supposition that spirits should be expected to know anything and everything simply by virtue of being spirits. This is useful. My only quibble with his construction is that it is overly linear; spirit communicators tell us that they do exist in “higher” or “lower” spheres, but we are also told that any one spirit personality (or personality here on the planet) is only a part of a larger entity, and that the parts of that larger entity may have more or less expanded awareness. I think we need to consider that linear time, which is necessary for the concept of development or evolution, is not really fundamental to reality, but more a product of our way of experiencing it. Again, I don’t pretend to have a thorough understanding of these matters.

*https://www.leslieflint.com/chopin-july-7th-1955
  There are a number of new Chopin recordings and transcriptions at this site since I last wrote about it here, and the website is easier to use. Note that they are using Mary-Rose Douglas’ beautiful and evocative transformation of the 1849 photograph for their portrait of Chopin, this one:

EVP and the FDP

I’ve written before about the challenges of discernment when working with the worlds of discarnate beings.  (See “When Is an Entity Not an Entity?” among other posts.)  The following is a somewhat condensed version of a December email conversation with Vicki Talbott, who you met in my recent post on Electronic Voice Phenomena and other technologically-mediated methods of communication.  It begins with more on the potential confusions of dealing with Famous Dead People and those who only pretend to be such.  Vicki’s comments are used with permission and appear in bold.  I have added comments that were not part of the original exchange, in brackets.

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

Vicki: Well and truthfully, as mediums we do not normally go around having convos with FDP right and left. Our spirit guides, guardian angels, whatever we have and however we refer to them, are not normally famous. A medium can go a lifetime without coming into contact with many world famous FDP. As above, so below. So it seems strange to me that some organizations and ITC practitioners are promoting this end of EVP communication, the FDP connection. As if that validates their work in a way that your average Joe coming through doesn’t.  [Gary Schwartz’s group working on the “Soul Phone” has apparently been attempting to contact only the Famous Dead.  I find this mystifying.]

The question is why would we believe what we hear from spirit more than we believe what we sense or intuit? Because it’s physical confirmation of communication, which is quite powerful, but still it is NOT confirmation of a famous person coming through. Yes, we know it happens, but no, it is not common. As well, many if not most enlightened FDP do not like to give their names, saying that self-identification injects ego into the mix, not a good idea. So nowadays you see all these folks giddily saying they’re communicating with the likes of Einstein and Tesla. They might very well be. Then again, given the nature of most high-level discarnate FDP who shy away from earthly distinction and name dropping, they might very well not be. It’s just a caution is all, to be very careful about whom you think you are speaking to and whom you tell about it….

I’ve watched critiques of a few of the wayward who 1. use their mental instead of physical mediumship skills to ‘tune in’ to the deceased, and thus 2. allow for tricksters to, accidentally or no, make us think we’re hearing the voices of people we aren’t. In these cases it’s sometimes NOT an FDP. What is unfortunate is that some very good people are hurt this way, often without realizing it, as everyone, including the best of mediums, has lessons to learn. 

Braden* has concerns about some mediums thinking they are talking to anyone at all, when actually they are at times resourcing their own higher self and/or the mind of the client, as well as entertaining imposters. 

Elene: Indeed, this can be very complicated.  I’m much more a clairvoyant and empath than a medium (and not very ept as a telepath), but as you know, I do have some mediumistic ability, so I see both sides of this. I do a lot of work with my patients that involves reading what’s stored in their bodies and minds, but also often reading their family members or other close associates.  I don’t advertise about this, but it’s often crucial to healing, and sometimes patients ask me specifically for that kind of work and trust me to be able to do something meaningful.  One thing that helps keep me out of trouble is that even then, I’m not really under pressure to come up with anything– nothing to prove.  If I can’t get any useful impressions, we can still do other energy work or just do acupuncture.  But usually I do get something.

I find that there is typically a representation of the patient’s mom, husband, or whoever in a region of the field around their body, and I can interact with that.  On occasion it has appeared that I actually ended up in contact with that person in real time, but usually it’s more like a recording or template of the person.  It’s not critical to know which is which for doing this kind of healing, as the patient and I can clear whatever needs clearing one way or the other, but I think generally I can tell if I’m in direct contact with a third entity.

(This kind of experience can be quite wearing on me, but is also among the most worthwhile types of work I ever do.)

V: This concern is not a huge one for Braden as he thinks the deluded and the shysters will be discovered and fall by the wayside, but it’s interesting to note, and it’s been helpful to me in determining whether I’m talking to an FDP or my own higher self for example….

The Technician, one of The Seven (high level beings associated with ITC), has stated that with mental mediumship, 1/5 of what is heard is directly from spirit, while up to 4/5 is filtered through the consciousnesses involved, hence some well-meaning yet mistaken psychic mediums out there spouting their own and their clients feelings on matters, peppered with info read from the deceased to bolster the information. Here’s a scenario. The medium says the client has a black dog, a red car, and a bad relationship with a relative, all correct, and anything that comes after that, like a serenade from Frank Sinatra, is taken as gospel truth. 

[Vicki had suggested that I give her questions for our mutual friend Chopin, and I had requested that she ask about Rose Creet, the sitter in the Leslie Flint group with whom he claimed a centuries-long close relationship.  As I told Vicki, I was desperately curious about Rose, but had never been able to get a word out of Fryderyk about her, so I wasn’t expecting much.  Vicki did get an extremely intriguing recording, though, which contains an exotic, difficult-to-understand voice, and then someone who sounds much like Rose as she did in life.  As with some of the other clips, her words are distinct but I don’t understand the meaning of the message.  See if you can do any better than I:

https://app.box.com/s/iikj6re96kfgefouv3zvdrnkcp29ngec ]

E: The very metallic, inhuman-sounding voice that you heard as saying, “Rose, stand up”— would that have been one of The Seven?  Or just a very distorted deceased-person voice?  Can you tell me anything about The Seven?

V: It could have been but I don’t really know. That voice, that entity, has come through on Big Circle recordings for all of us for years. But we work with a high level group of entities who work with even higher entities and on it goes, who don’t think hanging one’s FDP shingle is a good idea….

In a nutshell, some mediums try to read the deceased rather than link with the deceased and thus much of what they say is muddied with earthly human consciousness. When one tries to read rather than link, inaccuracies accumulate, especially regarding feelings and emotions. ITC, on the other hand, by virtue of its method and means, ‘forces’ the physical medium into a direct link, with the deceased being the primary communicator (4/5) and not the other way around. 

E: I’ve had a great deal of practice at distinguishing my own thoughts and feelings, including [apparent] past-life thoughts and feelings of “another me,” from the input coming from discarnates or from my patients and their own associated beings, but there is always plenty of room for error.

Once I asked Fryderyk whether, in direct voice communication, the mind of the medium is involved, since the voices don’t seem to be coming directly from the medium.  (I was particularly concerned with that since in the Leslie Flint opus there are turns of phrase that to me are quite unusual and even incorrect, but occur over and over.)  He replied, “The medium cannot turn off his brain just because he is a medium.”

V: Yes as I said this is not such a huge concern for the likes of you according to Braden. But apparently there are many mediums who aren’t really communicating with whom they think they are. Perhaps it’s a matter of skill and experience, not sure. The medium can never turn off the brain, but with ITC, the human influence on the communication is far less pronounced than with mental mediumship, according to afterlife sources. Which means these guys can say they are someone they aren’t and get away with it more easily perhaps? Especially since we can all hear the EVP for example. Still wondering. 

…That 4/5 packs a powerful ITC punch, so imagine this coming from a prankster, hence the strong caution from the Big Circle.

E: I don’t think I’ve told you anything about my [apparent] encounters with the ultimate FDP, Jesus, as yet, though you may have seen something about that on my blog.  That brings up one aspect that can help with knowing a communication is authentic: when it is not at all what we are expecting or wanting.

My first experience with him, channeled by my now-deceased friend H., was much as one might expect him to be— a very large, loving, compassionate being of great power and yet infinite kindness and gentleness.  When he came to my office with H., a couple of years or so later, I didn’t recognize him at all.  All I knew was that there was a man sitting at my elbow while I worked with H., who was lying on my table.  He seemed quite ordinary, and chatted on and on with messages for her.  She kept asking me if I knew who he was, and I kept replying, “I don’t know, it’s some guy.”  H. was beside herself with amusement at this, and eventually let me in on the secret.

I was astonished, and commented that he seemed so small compared to the way I had seen him before. “Yes, he does that,” she replied— he could present himself in a form that we could deal with more comfortably.

The dissertation he gave through me was completely clear, words and images, and profound.  Something H. would benefit by hearing but didn’t want to hear.  I asked her if it sounded meaningful to her.  “Yes, it’s what he tells me all the time,” she said.  Perhaps he thought that if she heard it through someone else she would finally accept it?

It seemed to me that it was best that I didn’t know I was in communication with this extremely Famous Dead Person.  Since to me he was Just Some Guy, I didn’t get intimidated or freeze up, and I was able to transmit his message smoothly.  It was a wonderful afternoon.  I still profit from the message he gave that day.

V: You hit the nail on the head with your Jesus encounter.  This is exactly what Braden has been saying about it. He once said I’d be too intimidated to know who some of these entities were, and he’s right. Of course, others may react differently and hobnob with The Christ for lunch. Not me.
[Anecdote about someone who was in a clearly fraudulent séance but received a message that was useful and comforting to her.]

E: Which is another important point– often it doesn’t matter so much if we know the exact source of the material, as long as the message itself is valuable.

V: This is also true.

 

*Vicki’s deceased son, a strong and humorous communicator.  See previous posts on EVP.

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part II

“Chopin Anew” by Jan Nyka. This image is amusingly appropriate in the context of EVP, don’t you think?
http://www.jannyka.com/index.php?/commercial/people/

At the beginning of the ASCS conference, Suzanne Giesemann gave a charming, inspiring, but no-nonsense talk about her development as a medium, which included stories about striking synchronicities— and another slew of them for me. Here she outlines her journey from hard-nosed Navy commander to professional mystic: https://www.suzannegiesemann.com/about-suzanne-2/

I want to tell you about an enlightening anecdote from Suzanne. One day, during her meditations, she received a visit from an entity who called himself Odin. Ohhhkkaaayyyy, she thought. She didn’t remember much about Norse mythology, so she went off and read up about him. What she found was a whole package of synchronistic threads that connected with people close to her, having to do with lightning and runes in particular. The next time she encountered Odin, she blurted out, “Are you real?”

“I am as real as you are,” he replied.

“But you’re a myth!” Suzanne insisted.

“You’re a myth!” was the answer to that.

 The idea was that all personalities, human and otherwise, bubble up from the substrate of the universal mind, and all are pretty much the same in essence, and all equally real or unreal, depending on how you look at it. That’s about as close as I can get to explaining my experiences with such eminences as Kuan Yin or Medicine Buddha.

And as close as I can get to explaining the following.

As I described last time, I was putting a lot of effort into listening during October, and something began to happen that interfered mightily with that. At first mildly, then catastrophically, I developed a case of constant high-pitched tinnitus. By the last week of the month, it had taken over my life and I could hardly think of anything else.

I suspected that the new problem might have something to do with my trip to the conference, either the work with the spirits, the flight, the drastic changes of altitude and humidity, or all of the above. I’d also had a slight virus sort of thing right after the trip. I started looking for help to sort it out. That’s when things got even weirder.

I began with a remote polarity treatment from the person who had helped me with issues like this before. My therapist encountered a crowd of beings around me who seemed to all be trying to talk to me at once, and she thought that was creating the ringing in my ears. She came up with a strategy for communicating with them one at a time in a controlled way that would limit any trouble. Sigh… I’ve had all too many issues over the years with entities knocking hard on my doors… but I guess it’s an occupational hazard.  And it has led in fruitful directions at times.

For a while after that session, the sound in my ears died down a bit. The theory about these critters being the main cause of the tinnitus doesn’t seem to have panned out in the time since then, but they were most definitely present and they needed to be dealt with. I cautiously set about making their acquaintance, just a few of them. They were very accessible, and seemed enthusiastic and positive about communicating with me. One gave me a warm hug. Another— I’m grateful for this— reached into my head and tweaked my eyes so that colors became dramatically brighter and for quite a while the usual dryness was gone. Perhaps more ominously, another asked why I was bothered by the ringing, since they were “tuning me” and I ought to be happy about it.

I didn’t detect anything untoward, but I wasn’t comfortable with having anyone trying to control me or use me for their own agenda, especially without my conscious understanding and consent. I made an appointment with my psychic mentor, Mendy Lou Blackburn, who is always the person I turn to when matters like this get beyond my abilities. When I went to bed, I asked Fryderyk what he thought was going on, and he had something to say about it, but in the morning I couldn’t remember what it had been.

Mendy Lou and I looked extensively at the whole situation and tried to figure out how these entities fit in. They didn’t seem connected with the Big Circle, the group Vicki and friends work with. Mendy could see them clearly, as a sort of vortex containing multiple small lights. They appeared to her to be a mix of beings of different levels of development. When she used the term elementals, I remembered that Fryderyk had said the same thing the night before.

At one point I looked around for my link to the Big Circle, for comparison, and instantly Braden popped into the room in a burst of light, so Mendy Lou got to meet him and get a sense of his fun-loving personality. It was comforting to have him show up. Fryderyk also made himself known, but he stayed in the background.

So there I was with an unwanted “fan club” and still an intolerable level of constant noise. I went to the office and put my questions aside for the time being. By the next day, with the ringing still driving me nuts, I felt I couldn’t stretch my stressed and irritated self far enough to deal with the mysterious entities anymore. Apologizing, in case they were sincerely there for my good, I wrapped them up in a sort of package and pushed them out of my field. I just didn’t know what else to do at that point. Since then I haven’t heard anything further from them.

I told Vicki about all this, and she confirmed that Braden and company were not involved and didn’t know who these beings were either. The Big Circle folk told her to let me know that I was “climbing Jacob’s ladder” and all was well. All the sources seemed to agree that I was somehow being changed to be able to perceive more, and that I should be patient with the process. I felt a little bit better.

The process of clearing attachments and emotional junk continued with a remote treatment from James Rolwing, and Thought Field Therapy (the original version of tapping on acupressure points) with Diana Ristenpart. After that, the tinnitus changed, in quality though not volume, and became a less obnoxious type of sound so that it was more tolerable. A range of pure sine wave frequencies disappeared and I was left with an array of tiny chimes combined with cicadas. Strange how that is less bothersome!

After a lot of phone calls, I was able to get in with an audiologist and a nurse practitioner at an ENT office, and they found inflammation in my Eustachian tubes— a potential physical cause for the sound. Mercifully, my hearing tested as mostly intact, except for a small deficit at very high frequencies. I’d been terrified of having a significant hearing loss, which is often associated with tinnitus. Since I’ve always hated noise and have carefully protected my ears, this whole thing has seemed awfully unfair!

With the onset of the ringing, everything in my environment became oddly loud, subjectively, and my impression was that the effect was different from the hyperacusis that can occur with hearing loss. Sound is much more three-dimensional and multilayered, richer and more colorful, and I pay attention to it differently. Once Fryderyk told me that music is an environment in which one can move about, and I think I know vividly what he meant now.

So is a process of “tuning” still going on? Am I going to be able to hear more of what nonphysical sources want to tell me? Or am I taking a long time to get over a viral infection and a great deal of stress? All of these? I don’t know if I’ve had enough brain-space lately to be able to tell. No dramatic new openings appear to have occurred in my psychic development to match my increased awareness of physical sound. Meanwhile, treating for inflammation and taking Chinese herbs for the pattern I’m showing has helped, as far as I can tell.

I did have an unusually extensive conversation with my composer friend, though, and I’d like to think that I was showing a little more ability to hear what he wanted me to know. This happened on 11/17:
Fryderyk showed up when I was about to go to sleep, as he so often does. I reported that my tinnitus had lessened, and told him that I hoped to be able to hear him better through whatever process was going on with the changes in my ears.

I asked about his efforts to speak through direct voice, wondering why it seemed worthwhile to take so much trouble to make physical sounds rather than just talk to someone inside their head or through channeling. He replied that it is important for him to speak in actual words, not just thoughts, because words have a physical effect on the material world.

“In the beginning was the word?” I asked. His answer was something to the effect that in the beginning was a thought, then a word that shaped reality.

“How does music compare to words?” Up to that point he had been more or less directly dropping concepts into my head, despite the subject being the primacy of words, but this came out as a clear verbal message: “Music is a scaffolding on which we can build reality.” That was a striking idea that I wanted to be sure not to forget, so although I wanted to get to sleep, I dutifully grabbed my notebook and pen. Which, as it has done many times, broke the connection.

After settling back down, I was able to get back in touch with him, and we continued along the same lines. A direct-voice medium is like a radio, he told me; you tune the medium, tune yourself in, your own station. There were images of communicating with me, in contrast, being something like wandering through a cave with twists and obstructions.

I asked if things might be easier if I were a trance medium. He doesn’t like to work with them, he replied, because they can’t really give consent. Even though they’ve consented to the overall procedure, they can’t filter or respond to any of the communication. He prefers the relationship, the dialogue involved in working with someone who is aware of what’s going on.

(Regarding “Music is a scaffolding on which we can build reality,” a musician friend expressed something strikingly similar to this just a couple of days ago, even saying, “In the beginning was the word.”  She said she is trying to affect the world from the inside through music and meditation lately, rather than continuing to work with political organizing and that kind of thing, as she used to.  I expect that other musicians have expressed similar thoughts.)

Vicki mentioned that Braden had warned her against thinking she is communicating with any Famous Dead People, because they are likely to be impostors– although he himself had brought Fryderyk to meet his mother.  For example, he said, if someone shows up who purports to be Elvis, you should run. I mentioned this to Mendy Lou, who recounted the time she not only met Elvis, but had a lengthy conversation with him, many years ago when she was working in Las Vegas. I also mentioned it to a patient who has a strong interest in these matters, and she replied that I shouldn’t be surprised if I did run into Elvis sometime, because he’s her cousin, albeit a distant one. Six degrees of separation and all that.

So when I showed up at Vicki’s presentation, and she saw a momentary flash of her friend “Fred,” she pushed the thought aside.  Why in the world would someone associated with him walk into her workshop?  Her boggle threshold had to be raised a bit, along with mine.  The pattern that began with meeting my Famous Dead Person so many years ago seems to be building up more coherence over time, but I’m still not always certain what is being asked of me.  Now I’ve been brought into the Big Circle project in some way, and telling you about it must be part of that.  Otherwise, I’m awaiting further developments.

 

Mendy Lou Blackburn:  http://mendylou.com/
James Rolwing:  https://www.facebook.com/pg/PatternReleaseEnergetics/about/?ref=page_internal
Lunasol Polarity Therapy:  https://daynaurora.wixsite.com/lunasol-polarity?fbclid=IwAR06LGeVHFtlqrv8ALvx0qJevC3_DcmpCGHqOxl9wVyndUDZ64cFtBcf2bU

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part I

In the past couple of months, my boggle threshold* has been raised a few more notches. I’m getting more and more “whatever” as time goes on.

The annual conference of the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies was held October 4-7 in Raleigh, NC. I had belonged to the organization for about a decade, but had never been to any of their events. This time I felt that I needed to be there, and the second day in, the reason became clear.

While waiting to register at the beginning of the conference, I found myself sitting next to and chatting with Terri Segal, who told me she was there to present about Electronic Voice Phenomena. This was the first synchronicity of a series. The next afternoon, I went to see what she and her cohort Vicki Talbott had going on. It turned out that they were giving not just a talk but a workshop in which we were able to actually try out the process.  Here’s a description of the session: http://ascsiconference.com/team/vicki-talbott-and-terri-segal/

Electronic Voice Phenomena are a subset of Instrumental TransCommunication, a range of methods of recording images or sounds produced by discarnate beings by means of electronic devices. For those who hadn’t heard of EVP, it might be helpful to stop here and read these:
https://atransc.org/recording-evp/
https://atransc.org/about-aaevp/

The conference had two tracks of presentations at the same time throughout, so it was sometimes hard to choose between them. Only a very few people attended the EVP session, which surprised me as well as the presenters, because this is usually such a popular subject. (Later, a number of people said they hadn’t been aware it was happening, although it was clearly indicated in the program— I had the feeling they might have been steered away!) I was fairly familiar with the idea of recording discarnate voices, but hadn’t heard many examples, and didn’t know a lot of details or much about the technology involved.

As we started the workshop, I became aware of Fryderyk being vividly present at my side.  He seemed to be practically jumping up and down with excitement. It was the only time he was around during the conference, in fact the only time he had contacted me during a period of a few weeks. I had no way of knowing that he had already made the acquaintance of this group!  We got brief recordings of him during the workshop, but there isn’t anything earthshaking– except, of course, the existence of the recordings in themselves.

The recording process went like this: Vicki had each of the attendees in turn ask a question of one of the discarnates, then let the recorder run for ten seconds so that they had time to answer. The equipment used was very simple, a small, rather old-fashioned hand-held Panasonic recorder. At the time, nothing at all out of the ordinary appeared to be happening. We spoke our questions, and then there was no sound but the slight whir of the instrument.

The fun began when the recording was played back, and voices that had not been present before showed up. I witnessed this in real time.  Even though I was already familiar with the concept, actually experiencing it was positively freaky.  I’m including links to a couple of clips so that you can share my freaked-outedness.

My question for Fryderyk was quite simple. I told the group that I was in touch with someone who very much wanted to speak, someone who I knew had a lot of experience with direct voice and other methods of spirit communication. “I know you’ve been wanting to say something. What would you like to say?” His reply is unclear, to my ears; the only part I can pick up for sure is “it’s helpful” at the end of the message, but that part is definite. The fact that there was any audible reply at all was enough to leave me pretty stunned. https://app.box.com/s/t9j5uactcum3evvcvdzf368gqj1ms7ho

In addition to Fryderyk, we called upon Vicki’s son, Braden, and someone close to one of the attendees, unknown to the rest of us, who was not named. All three replied immediately. I didn’t get to really hear what was said by that third person, only that a voice had come through, and since it was none of my business, I didn’t ask further.

I wanted to ask Braden something, and as I did so, I got to wondering if I could perceive him somewhere in the room.  I looked around, and my eyes stuck to a patch of air near the ceiling, about two feet wide, that looked somehow different from the rest.  As I was realizing that the odd patch was Braden, he suddenly reached out toward me with a considerable amount of energy, so that the effect was that he bopped me between the eyes!  It didn’t hurt, but I was knocked back a little in my chair, and everyone saw that.  I explained to the group what had happened.

Later, Vicki found that the discarnates were talking about Braden bopping me, just before I told her about it.  You can hear “he’s tapped her” near the beginning of the clip, and “I’m quite amused”; the rest is fuzzy to me.  https://app.box.com/s/0w9achce66o378g022t6x998mojh4xq6

Although Vicki is addressing Braden in this clip, I am reasonably certain that the voice saying “Very good. It’s me here” belongs to Fryderyk. That message is 100% audible and definite. https://app.box.com/s/seb9mfix0585y4zq1dvbultwey80r37f

Let’s stop a minute and contemplate this. After 25 1/2 years of contact with Fryderyk, struggling to get verbal messages, his voice, physical vibrations of sound, captured in a form that I can not only store and listen to myself, but can send to you. His voice, so similar to the one I had heard in the Leslie Flint recordings, where I had never been absolutely, entirely sure it was him.

When I was next in touch with him after the workshop, the first thing he conveyed to me was immense relief at the ease of communicating directly instead of through layers of cumbersome instrumentation. It struck me, though, that the brief messages that come through by EVP are not so different from the almost aphoristic verbal messages I receive from him, when I can get any definite words at all. It seems to me that when he is able to convey words directly to me, he’s put thought into boiling the concept down into a short, pithy phrase. It must take a lot of energy to get even such small transmissions through my thick skull.

There is a significant difference, though, between getting advice from him inside my head, especially controversial advice— say, being told that it’s fine to experiment with styles of trills and have fun with them— and hearing it objectively in an .mp3 file. The physical recordings have a unique value.

You will notice, if you listen to even a few examples of EVP, that sometimes the voices sound pretty ordinary, sometimes they sound electronic or robotic, and sometimes there’s a lot of fuzz, rather like a phone call with a really bad connection. Sometimes individuals are easily recognizable, sometimes not. Researchers use a witness panel to rate the clarity of the messages and to make sure there really are words in the first place. Some “scientific” folk say that there is only noise and listeners convince themselves that they’re hearing words because they want to so much, but I think you can already tell, if you’ve listened to even the few clips I’ve linked here, that this is simply not the case. The phenomenon is quite real, and one must deal with it. Nonphysical beings can manipulate physical sounds to create verbal messages. We are way past arguing whether this is actually happening. Now we need to understand how it can be possible, what the physics of it is.

You’d think I would be over the moon with joy at receiving even a few electronic words from my old friend. Instead, I found myself near weeping and in a kind of shock. It was strangely hard to deal with this new evidence of his existence. Suddenly, despite all the overwhelmingly intense moments I’d experienced with him over the years, he was somehow more real than I could handle. And although I knew very well that he’d worked closely with other groups and had multiple intellectual and emotional connections, walking into this room and finding him engaged in a major project with people who were complete strangers to me was also a little more than I could take in at first.

(It was not the first time I’d observed Fryderyk messing with electronics; that had occurred back in 2009. You may recall the anomalous behavior of my printer when it spat out three portraits of Chopin, which were not on the document I was attempting to print. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/fryc-in-print/ That constituted a form of ITC, I would think. The EVP was just another order of magnitude weirder for some reason.)

There is also the frustration of trying to understand the meaning of the messages. Sometimes the words sound perfectly obvious, yet the message is still obscure. One of the later clips of Fryderyk that Vicki sent me sounds to me for all the world like “I’ve made a cologne for her.” Here it is:  https://app.box.com/s/izaal6l0fhwyqqbgo37ixq08gwapn8ob  Can you make any better sense out of it than I can? And if I am hearing it right, exactly how am I supposed to obtain this otherworldly cologne? (I haven’t experienced any anomalous scents lately!) My husband jokingly suggested that he’d made me a clone— that would be great, I could get so much more done!

After the conference, Vicki and I began a correspondence, and I was interested to find that her impressions of Fryderyk, who she knew little about as a historical figure, were identical to mine— including his dry sense of humor. And I was amused at the idea of him joining forces with Braden, who is also a composer, but in what seems like a diametrically opposite genre, hip-hop. So Chopin is collaborating with a rap artist these days….

Like Fryderyk, Braden— as you might have guessed from the bopping incident— is a comedian as well as a musician. I mentioned to Vicki that Chopin used to do a Victor Borge-like act at the piano, something she hadn’t been aware of. She replied, bemusedly, “So that’s why they wanted me to watch that Victor Borge video on YouTube….” (Both of them left the planet before the existence of YouTube, but it seems that is irrelevant.)

*The boggle threshold is the level of weirdness at which one’s brain freezes up and can’t process what it perceives any more. Thanks to Michael Tymn for the concept.

https://www.transcommunication.org/index.php
https://atransc.org/big-circle-recording-sessions/

25 Years with Fryderyk

“Chopin Anew” by Jan Nyka.
http://www.jannyka.com/index.php?/commercial/people/

As of today or possibly tomorrow, it’s been 25 years since the earth-shattering day when I first found myself in contact with Fryderyk Chopin.  At the time I didn’t realize how important this event was and I didn’t make note of the date.  I know it was a few days before Valentine’s Day.

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/how-i-met-fryderyk/

While looking for a particular portrait to add to this post, I came across the photo (not painting) at left, which practically caused me to faint.  I would love to know what processes were used to create it.  The hair is a little on the dark side, and maybe the jaw has just a tad too much bone, but overall the likeness is stunning.  It brings Chopin instantly, dramatically, immediately into the present moment, where, for me, he always is.

And I’m going to leave my observance of the day at that.

STTNG “Sub Rosa”: Predatory Love

I wrote the following in May of 2010, as part of a letter to a friend, and today I ran across it while looking for something else. It seems like an appropriate story for Halloween and Día de los Muertos, almost a ghost story but not quite. 

There has been so much news of sexual abuse and coercion lately, and our group mind is busy chewing over what constitutes abuse and what possibly is just a matter of being a jerk instead. For my own rather different reasons I have been considering this question as well. The situation in the STTNG episode I describe here is pathognomonic of abuse: one being takes control of another and prevents her from living her own life. Yet, as in real relationships, things aren’t absolutely cut and dried.
**************************************************************************

The other night I had the opportunity to record a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that I’d been wanting to get my hands on for years, “Sub Rosa.” I hadn’t seen it in probably a decade or more. This time around, I found myself thinking, “Was Gates McFadden’s acting really that bad?” [sorry] and “I can’t believe they piled that much makeup on those poor women,” and “Why did they give Deanna Troi SO much hair?” and “Geez, none of their uniforms really fit.” Somehow the show, which honestly was high-quality overall, seemed even more dated than Classic Trek from the ‘60s!

But the story was still of interest to me. It was about almost exactly what an ex-friend and colleague insisted was happening to me: a disembodied being was making inappropriate and harmful use of humans, while claiming to love them and take care of them. The story began with Dr. Beverly Crusher, the Enterprise’s chief medical officer, beaming down for her grandmother’s funeral. The planet where her grandmother lived had been terraformed into a replica of the Scottish Highlands– which I guess was someone’s idea of the perfect environment– and the clothes and houses looked like they came from around 1800.

When Dr. Crusher read her grandmother’s journals, she discovered that this century-old lady had had a handsome lover, a guy in his 30s! Very soon the lover made an appearance and offered his services to the granddaughter. He represented himself as a ghost, a regular human spirit, nothing too untoward. She quickly fell under his spell. For short periods he would appear as a corporeal man, but then he would dissolve into a green mist and sink into her body, merging with her in a way that looked eerily familiar to me. They didn’t make it clear whether this was an overtly sexual act, but it sure looked like Beverly, squirming around most sensuously, was having a wonderful time.

The green mist guy, whose name was Ronin, asked Dr. Crusher to stay with him on the planet so that they could be completely joined forever. She was so messed up by that time that she instantly resigned from Starfleet and did as he asked, having no problem with leaving all her friends and everything she’d ever worked for. But by that time the captain and others were on to Ronin and trying to get Dr. Crusher out from under his influence. They had figured out that he was not a ghost at all, but an alien being made of “anaphasic energy,” a (made-up of course) kind of energy that was unstable and couldn’t exist without some kind of physical host. (Making one wonder how such a creature could ever evolve in the first place.) He’d been preying on the women in Beverly’s family generation after generation. They had a sort of candle, a family heirloom, that was where he lived when he wasn’t invading their own bodies.

And that’s when Ronin started attacking people, even killing one, to save himself. Finally Dr. Crusher had to kill him herself– of course, what else– blowing him away most dramatically with her phaser.

But at the very end, looking at her grandmother’s journals again, Dr. Crusher commented wistfully that whatever else he’d done, he had made her grandmother very happy.

Star Trek at its best has often managed to find stories that resonate for a great many people, at some deep subconscious or even mythological level. In this case, the plot concerned something that does appear to happen, a disembodied being interfering in the life of a human, but it also can be taken as being about physical-world relationships that are obsessive and controlling. It’s kind of the ultimate in codependent relationships.

And it’s very close to the kind of relationship my ex-friend accused me of having with Fryderyk.

I don’t have the slightest worry that I am being preyed upon or abused, but this story did make me take stock yet again. What would I be doing these days if Fryderyk had not happened to me? Would I have followed my “plan A” and studied jazz bass? Would I be a really hot lutenist? Would I somehow have become more myself if I hadn’t been concentrating on him? It seems like I might have saved many thousands of dollars by not buying a grand piano and not taking so many lessons, but then, I was already taking lessons and teaching, and I might have done all that anyway.

I do think that I’ve been significantly happier than I would have been otherwise. Maybe the happiness of romance is nothing more than a bunch of oxytocin circulating through the system, but it’s happiness nonetheless.

On the Nature of Persons

1/4/11

Fryderyk hadn’t been around for a couple of weeks, and I was starting to feel lonesome. I “rang his phone” a number of times during the day, and then late in the evening, while I was reading in bed, he visited.

A little while before that I had seen a video about Jay Greenberg, a young composer and pianist with near-miraculous abilities, someone it seemed Fryderyk might be able to relate to, a good topic of conversation. The boy was only 12 at the time the 60 Minutes excerpt I saw was made, but he had already written a huge amount of music, and even as prodigies go, he was positively scary. For example, at the age of 2 he’d started asking for a cello, although his parents were not musicians and he’d never been exposed to such a thing, and he started drawing wobbly staves on paper and putting notes on them. When he was given a cello, at age 3, he could play it right away.

I told Fryderyk what I had seen and asked if he had anything to say about it. Many of us see reincarnation as a likely explanation for such extreme abilities in children, and indeed, in the Leslie Flint tapes, the Chopin entity had talked about his efforts at music in other lives, and being ready to hit the ground running in the 19th century because of that preparation. Michael Tymn* favors another theory, that the spirits of deceased adults who had developed their abilities in the arts during their lives “overshadow” and take control of these children, using them to express their own work. What did Fryderyk think about that?

First, he gave me to know that I was looking at the matter from the wrong angle. This happens rather a lot– at least he no longer insists that I’m not listening to him! The idea of a person having different lives in sequence was incorrect. I don’t think of time as linear, myself, so I was fine with that. This part was fairly incoherent, with a sense of rushing energies and various ideas flying at me at once. I struggled to pin it down. “What are you?” I asked for the zillionth time. As has happened before, I saw a flame– same thing you and I are, of course. When I tried visualizing a child artist, such as himself, and asked about other spirits floating around trying to control it, I got nothing.

I was able to pick out the thought that the rushing lights and colors represented a person and its activities and creations, and that the person was an extensive being that existed in many forms and did many things at once, so to speak. He seemed to be using the term “person” (at least as I was hearing it) to mean a total entity including what we might call the Higher Self and any and all individual, earthly lives or personalities. I would be more likely to use that word to mean one of those individual personalities, myself. So I asked him to elaborate on what a person was, in his view.

This time I got words. “A person is an outpouring from God,” he told me. Along with that, I received feelings and visual flashes of a kind of river of light and fire. I still wanted to know more about how he saw the relationship between the different parts of the larger entity.

He explained, “The person is a force which pushes out in all directions, and those directions look like separate lives.” This sounded a lot like the concept described by the Seth entity years ago, in books like The Nature of Personal Reality. It also sounded so good that I wanted to be sure to remember it. I turned a light on and hunted around for my notebook and pencil, which would normally be right by my bed, but dang, I had cleaned my room and moved them. By the time I’d written the sentence down, the contact was broken. As I had feared. I wanted to ask him something about his own larger being, but there was no more communication to be had.

 

* Find his blog here, with links to his books: 
http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/

 

Talking with Chopin About Music and Possibilities

Nokturn by Jerzy Głuszek

For years I have been collecting the helpful, fascinating and sometimes perplexing thoughts on music that I’ve received from my currently solidity-challenged composer friend. Every time I’ve gotten close to putting it all together in a nicely packaged presentation, more has come along, and I’ve delayed trying to finish it. My understanding has also changed over time, so that I’ve had to rewrite some sections. I’m thinking that I’d better start sticking the individual bits into some posts or they will never see the light of day.

A lot of what I’ve learned has been specifically about playing the piano and about performance practice, and unlikely to be of much interest to the non-pianist reader. I’ll put that material in another post. Today’s entries are more generally about music and about how it relates to other aspects of our lives, though there is still some nerd stuff.

 

6/28/10

[A friend who has since died] indicated, while I was doing acupuncture for her, that something major in her life was “disgusting.” I was getting signals of disagreement from our Sources about that, being told that it was necessary for her to integrate this part of her life and deal with it quite differently. Fryderyk was coming in strongly at my right, and I asked what he wanted to say. I saw a vibrating column of light, and the ideas associated with it were like this:

Everything is a vibration, a frequency. And what is a frequency? It’s a note. There are not good notes or bad notes, there are just notes. It’s a matter of how they’re put together. In your case, he had me tell her, you’re in the middle of playing a piece that’s already been written, maybe even near the end of it, but you can still improvise. And if you don’t like this piece, play something else.

 

10/26/10, after returning from a trip to Poland and across Europe to France during Chopin’s 200th birthday year:

A while back, I think in early September, I asked Fryderyk about that pesky measure on the second page of the D flat nocturne, Op. 27 No. 2, where suddenly the left hand adds an extra voice. I’m talking about measure 23, where we find an F and an E marked with extra stems with eighth note bars. The “Paderewski” edition notes say that he implied that something similar was going on in the few measures before and after this, but there is no evidence for this that I can see. My understanding from him is that he meant this notation only in this one measure; he was not saying to do the same thing in other parts of this passage. However, I’m still not entirely clear why he brings in that extra voice.

I couldn’t get a very good reading on this matter, but there was something like “adding an extra dimension” or “making it 3D.” He told me that there were other similar instances later in the piece. I was directed to look at the last page. I was in bed at the time, ready to go to sleep, so I didn’t go to check out the page till the next day.

What I noticed then was measures 64 and 68, in which he makes a dotted quarter note out of the first D flat in each arpeggio pattern. This appears superfluous, since the pedal is held and those notes will sound all the way through the pattern anyway. He seems to want extra emphasis on these notes. It’s all the more perplexing because, as Jeff Kallberg [musicologist and expert on Chopin’s work] pointed out, the different manuscripts have the dotted quarter notes or not, or have the dot in measure 64 but not 68.

When I next had the chance to communicate with my disembodied teacher, I dutifully reported that I had looked through the rest of the piece for instances of extra voices coming in temporarily, and that I had found the above. I heard, “If you point out something to someone, they will then start seeing it everywhere,” which was objectively true but didn’t seem very helpful or significant! Attempting to understand the dotted quarters, I held an image of measures 64 and 68 in my mind, and there was an interesting visual effect. The notes became literally 3D; the dotted quarters moved to the front of the image, and others took places in two other layers before my mental eyes. I felt that I did have a certain understanding of what he was after. Sort of. (Later, when I had a chance to experiment at the piano, I found it was pretty easy to bring those bass notes forward or push them a layer or two back, and it does add contrast compared with similar figures in other parts of the piece.)

I apologized for bothering him about such a picky detail. “Since you took the trouble to write it that way, I figure it’s important, and I want to understand it,” I explained.

His reply was something I would like us all to keep in mind, and wish I could convey to the folks who are selling Chopin pencils, Chopin chocolates, tours of his birthplace, etc. etc. Imagine a kind of sigh of resignation along with this statement:

“Not everything I do is important.”

I found this hilarious.

I had another question, having to do with my efforts to memorize some of the pieces of his that I’d been playing for years. To me, a lot of the ornaments and fioriture are surprising, in that one might expect that the ornamental stuff would get more intense and complex as the piece goes on, and it doesn’t necessarily do that. The seemingly random nature of these bits makes memorization more difficult, at least for the likes of me. Which way did he do it this time?? It’s so unpredictable.

The answer to this was so obvious that I should have seen it myself. He didn’t want to be predictable. He wanted to surprise us and keep us guessing, keep our ears and fingers engaged.

 

I had begun this conversation asking for his advice and assistance in treating a mutual friend. We had had considerable trouble working with her before; although she had gotten considerable improvement in some areas, treatments were strangely hard on her. The last time we had done a session, we had tried something different, and instead of her being ill for a while afterward, I was. I felt we needed a new strategy. Fryderyk told me, “Let go of obstacles.”  I thought that was interesting because we don’t think of obstacles as something we hang on to.  Yet I know I do that. That measure in 27/2 with the 48 notes in the right hand is probably a good example. It’s easy to hang on to the idea of its being difficult, whereas perhaps we could hold the thought of making it easy and fluid instead.

“Let go of wanting to prove yourself” was another thought that came up. Not easy either.
[unknown date]

The 48-note fioritura in 27/2 is a particular bête noire for me and I’m sure for a lot of other players. At one point, terminally frustrated with such things, I asked Fryderyk what made him decide on 48 notes or 17 or 23 or whatever strange number comes up in those passages, which can be so inconvenient to play, since they usually don’t match up mathematically with the other hand’s part.  He showed me a curving ribbon shape that represented the musical line as it existed in time and space. The number of notes given exactly filled up the length of the ribbon. So there were exactly as many notes as were needed, no more and no less. Just enough. Obvious to him!

 

~11/15/10

One of the things I’m enjoying about the lute practice [for my album of Polish Renaissance pieces] is that, even though it’s one of my “Chopin Year” projects, it has nothing to do with him whatsoever, and I can have it all to myself!  I got to wondering, though, whether Fryderyk might be familiar with any of those old Polish tunes.  I was thinking that back then they tended to be involved with mostly the music of their own time or not too long before, and that most people were not even paying attention to Bach or works of his time, let alone anything earlier, so the Renaissance and early Baroque tunes probably weren’t on their radar.  The response I received to my question about this sounded a bit miffed.  After all, he had gone to school, he pointed out.  The Warsaw Conservatory had copies of works like this in its library, and he had been able to explore them that way, and for heaven’s sake, did I think he wasn’t educated?

No, of course I didn’t think that, and the image of him leafing through dusty old copies made a pleasing connection for me.  “Oh, I used to love poking around stuff like that in the libraries at YSU and UNM!” I enthused.

I asked whether one heard folk music much in the city, or if one had to go out to the country to experience it.  I was given to know that this was also a fairly dumb question, because people from the city spent time in the country and vice-versa, like the young country gentlemen who roomed with his family, so the same people might often be found in both places.  I kept my mouth shut about the fact that the downtrodden peasants didn’t get a chance to go much of anywhere.  My question was not really so dumb!

I was trying to ask whether there were written sources of folk music around, or whether he learned that stuff by ear, when I fell asleep.

When I woke up this morning, it occurred to me that young Fryc would have been quite unable to read any lute tablature that might have been lying around at the Conservatory. However, he may well have tried some organ tablature and so become acquainted with composers such as Jan of Lublin.  I’d like more details.

 

12/30/13

Last night Fryderyk visited when I was about to go to sleep. I told him that I was trying to prepare a mini-recital for a friend and that things hadn’t been going too well that evening. “New things keep going wrong all the time!” I complained. “I can’t take care of my mistakes because they’re so inconsistent and I never know what’s going to happen.”

Well, at least this time he didn’t hand me the usual “You’re looking at this all wrong” or “You’re asking the wrong question.” He began with a clear sentence in his bumpy sort of English, but I can’t recall it– I knew I’d kick myself in the morning if I didn’t get out of bed and write down his exact words, since I was getting a definite verbal message, but I decided to stay where I was. He told me that of course new things keep happening, because a piece of music has so many possibilities within it. He showed me something similar to what he’d conveyed sometime last year, which I described in my post “Wait. Show Up. Enjoy.”   https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/wait-show-up-enjoy/   A piece of music is a kind of three-dimensional environment in which one can live and move about. (Yes, time does add a fourth dimension, but the image is three-dimensional.) I saw myself in the center of this matrix, with threads spreading out in all directions.

He seemed excited about this field of possibilities. Wow, you can do anything you want! I, in contrast, felt rather small in the midst of it all. He spoke encouragingly, something to the effect that I should tug and pull on those threads to shape the music the way I wanted it to be.

He faded out. I went to sleep.

What Fryderyk described was not so much the way I’ve been experiencing music, but definitely similar to the way I’ve been experiencing the ground of reality itself. Which may well have been part of what he was talking about. His messages, even when they sound painfully obvious and simple at first, do tend to generalize to many aspects of my life.

This morning I was looking at an article by Jeff Kallberg in the book Mary-Rose [Douglas] gave me for Christmas. It concerned a newly-discovered copy of the first edition of the Op. 9 nocturnes, which Chopin had annotated for a student, adding dramatically different ornamentation to 9/2. “We can now securely assert,” Jeff wrote, “that Chopin began modifying the ornaments in this work shortly after its publication….”

Yup, that’s our Fryc. So many possibilities, and he wants them all to be available.

 

On 8/2/14, I was asking Fryderyk about a pedaling question; I’m not sure what the piece was. I received these words:

“You are making the supposition that I have written a symbol which is absolute. You are looking for the sound of words on a page. Words are not sounds and symbols are not music.”

 

5/3/16

A great fan of Chopin and expert on his life expressed the thought that he did most of his composing on paper, not at the piano. It was her belief that even when he first began to work out his ideas, he did so away from the piano.

This is not what is generally believed about Chopin’s creative method. As soon as I could, I asked him what he might have to say about the matter. When he was beginning to put a piece together, did he start with the piano, or with a pen? He told me clearly: “Sound. Sound is primary. It doesn’t matter how you get there.” Apparently I was asking the wrong question again. He added, “Sound comes from the inner being.”

Wanting to be completely clear, I tried once more to ask how he started, and he added: “Exploring sound. Sound, not thought.” Which does imply starting with an instrument, I would think, not inside one’s head.

Since the words were definite and exact, I wanted to be sure to catch them verbatim, and I stopped to write them down. Unfortunately, after that I could not get back into the channeling state and was unable to hear any more. Research continues.

 

See more fantastic Chopin cartoon portraits at http://muzeumkarykatury.pl/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=147:umiech-chopina&catid=54:umiech-chopina&Itemid=228

A Failed Life?

Clésinger’s bust of Chopin, done after his death

You are perfect just as you are. And you could use a little improvement.
— Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

 

It’s Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin’s birthday, a major holiday in my calendar.

A while back I was taking another look at a biography of Chopin from the 2000s, in which the author summed up her subject as “a failed life redeemed by art.”

Think about that for a moment before you read on. A failed life.

OCD-like as I am, I got stuck on that phrase. First, we should all fail so awfully as Chopin, shouldn’t we. But seriously, what would constitute a failed life? I cannot think of very many circumstances in which that could be said of someone. Even in the case of a mass murderer, there would always be the chance of redemption (and that person might have been very successful at mass murdering). The only time that I might say a life truly failed would be if it never got started— if a child died in the womb or at birth. Even then, there might have been some point to that life while it existed, in that it had effects on the lives of its parents and perhaps others.

It is worth spending some time on this issue because it seems that most people, most of the time, tend to believe that they are failing, or at least that they are not succeeding sufficiently. I often feel very much that way myself, despite recent days of great “success” in my practice and a patient calling and telling me how well he had done when I treated him. Our temporal ideas of success and failure are relative, slippery, malleable, and ultimately have little if any meaning. Better not to get overly involved with them. Let’s explore and explode some of them.

The author of the Chopin biography was comparing him to a certain type of Romantic-period literary hero. It was convenient, I suppose. We fit facts into our stories and organize them around preconceived themes all the time. The story, in this case, has to do in large part with love gone wrong. If we look at success and failure through this lens, poor Beethoven comes off even worse, and most of us would receive questionable grades. Is a person who’s been through a divorce a failure? How about a person who remains single throughout life? A celibate clergy member? This is not a very useful filter.

One might postulate that being loved in a more general sense is a sign of success in life, but then, some people who are bucking trends and rocking boats may be doing critically important work but be widely hated for it.

Financial failure, maybe? Our society certainly pays a lot of attention to that. Chopin made a lot of money for a while there, until he became too sick to work, so he’s kind of safe on that score. But we all know very well that there are both great humanitarians and total scuzzbags who have made a lot of money. Not a good measure of a life.

Reproduction, perhaps? In terms of a stripped-down view of evolutionary biology, all that matters is that you pass on copies of your genes to the next generation. Chopin didn’t manage that, but then, since he probably had a very adverse genetic disorder, that may be just as well. OK, that’s a biological fail (though descendants of his sister are around today). But this measure would mean that the Duggars are incredible successes, and your stomach is probably churning as hard as mine at that thought. Chopin’s artistic “children” are surviving quite nicely and have had many descendants of their own. Human life has far more complex effects than mere genetic replication. Passing on one’s thoughts is likely more important in the long run for humans than passing on one’s genes.

Teaching is a hugely significant way of passing on thoughts. Chopin did a great deal of that, and the community of pianists continues to learn in depth from him by playing and studying his work.

What would constitute failure for you? Whatever that is, is it a true measure, or have you received it from the world without examination? A case can be made that if you have enough to eat and a roof over your head, you have already succeeded big time in a fundamental and crucial way. If you have strong connections with other humans, you’re in even better shape.

Jim Carrey put it this way: “I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame so that they can see that it’s not where you’re gonna find your sense of completion. I can tell you from experience the effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is, because everything you gain in life will rot, and fall apart, and all that will be left of you is what was in your heart.”*

I think Suzuki Roshi nailed the truth superbly with his famous aphorism. For the essential, real, universal You, there is nothing to do, nothing to be or to become. For the everyday, changing mirage of you, there is always the potential to develop further. We can fully accept the present self while still moving toward what may turn out to be a quite different self. We aren’t finished— even at death— so we haven’t failed.

 

*http://www.higherperspectives.com/jim-carrey-speech-1468783748.html