Topic: Michael

[Michael]

Now we're sitting outside our hut on the beach at Langkawi island - it's beautiful just now in the morning, before all the dreaded water sport crap starts up with their jet skies and motorised gliding things, and before the heat builds. This is all just relaxation therapy to build some deeper layers of energy in preparation for the assault of India in a week's time. God it will be full-on when we get there, as we will be staying first in probably the most crowded, noisy, colourful and chaotic place on earth, so some rest is highly called for.

[Michael]

We have finally reached India, and so far we are riding well. Delhi is hot, but not too hot. We are sitting on a roof top in Old Delhi - the muezzims have just started up at 6:17pm. At this phase of India, it is important to synch correctly, so we are paying attention to that - looking for any signs and following politely.

[Michael]

Do you feel Michael that there isn't anyone in the world to actually talk with; that it's all just controlled folly

Yes and no. Yes because that's the nature of reality. No because I value my folly - it's my life.
I am accustomed from a long way back to not speak with others about the things that really matter to me, because that my own business, and no one else can help or understand. But the conversation I do have with others are also my life, and as valuable to me as anything else in my life.

Simply because it is called controlled folly, doesn't mean it is without value. But that's not your issue...

You want to walk the walk without having done the time, or put in the effort to learn. You want your views to be treated as valid, and you can't find anyone to meet you there. But your views are poetic inspirations, and as such have no substance in the world of sorcery. To become a person of substance, you have to start from the beginning, and apply yourself to the lessons one by one. And the first lesson is to get a job in the world, that consumes all of your energy to succeed. It is about submitting to the dictates of a task, of a pragmatic demand. A task that knocks the fantasies out of your being.

[Endless~Knot]

Not totally related, but I can find it can be difficult to find others to talk about the path with. Since mine is so unique, I reserve that for the spiritual folks, but even other spiritual folks may not understand my path totally. I have found I can talk with those who know CC they seem to understand and have a fascinating view of the world and others, and I can get a lot of insight with them. But if say someone is 'fluffy' they may not get me. If someone is in a more organized religion per se, they may not get me. But I find the CC folks do get me more. But I can certainly understand feeling alone on the path. When I focus on it, I find myself in the end, standing alone on it. With only a handful of folks who can really relate to me, or understand where I am coming from. 

[Michael]

A Saur music track, that has been remastered. This was a live recording late after midnight in the open air:
Spirit of the Game

More Saur on YouTube

[Michael]

Latest uploaded video from me:
YouTube: Friends Soon Have Gone
Vimeo: Friends Soon Have Gone

[Michael]

More videos from me:
YouTube: Michael's YouTube Channel
Michael's YouTube Channel

Vimeo: Michael's Vimeo Home Page
Michael's Vimeo Home Page

I have been on a highly productive creative run recently, so there are a number of recent videos posted on these sites.
I have also been remastering numerous only music tracks, which I'll upload soon.

[Michael]

It's intresting how much India had changed since 2004... then almost nobody had any electric devices which they carried like cell phones back then; it can be seen in the videos and the photographs - everyone is just minding his own business; walking etc..

These days they whole nation of india became full of cell towers everywhere and many carry now cell phones with them; talking anywhere they go.

So much had changed...

You are not wrong there. India is undergoing huge changes, not all of which are good. But the rise of the new modern generation is not bad, just astounding. The new pseudo-religious politics is pure evil, and India will rue the day they dabbled with the devil in this. They will look back and equate this period with that of the Mutiny, where the surge for independent identity fell into the hands of violent thugs. Otherwise, the youth of India are about to create a vast wave of change, and that creativity is what is astounding. What we are seeing the beginnings of in India, is a reaction and reclamation of Hinduism from the twisted political clutches of Hindutva - serious religious people are fighting back against the hijacking of their religion for reasons of political power. Hinduism is struggling to rid itself of the sour taste of criminals.

[Michael]

Before I can feel comfortable that my own music will be reasonably understood, I need to share the influences that have formed my musical vision. I will use this thread to not only post some of my own musical pieces, and those of the band I belong to (Saur), but to also share with you some wonderful musical experiences that exemplify why I changed direction since my early inspiration from L. Cohen, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix.

One day, I asked a friend of mine, who happened to be the Head of School of Musicology at my local university, if I could copy from their musicological library. That changed my musical direction forever. I became engrossed in native trance music, recorded by early anthropologists, from Africa, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Haiti, and the Indians of the Amazon. I took up the drum, and worked on it non-stop until I strained my back muscles and was laid up for many years. I also hit my ulnar nerve while opening the back door of my old kombi, which stopped me from playing guitar for many years. But I never gave up, and continued to explore proficiency in instruments and the incredible world of music outside of the oppressive domination of European-influenced cultures. Believe me, there is so much musical and spiritual wealth in cultures we rarely have any access to in the modern world, that I feel a passion to share some of this here and elsewhere.

To begin, here is one of the most beautiful piece of music I have ever heard. This by a famous Indian musician, a household name in India, yet hardly known at all by the public in western countries: Hariprasad Chaurasia. He is one of the greatest living musicians, although quite old now, renowned for his unbelievable technical expertise on the bansuri (the Indian bamboo flute), and his almost single-handed elevation of that instrument to acknowledgement within the tradition of Indian Classical Music. This man is truly an international treasure, if there ever is one.

I have chosen what is perhaps the best piece I have ever heard by Hari. This is called Raag Malkauns - a raga known as the mystical raga, and Hari brings out the mystical in this raaj with incredible beauty:

http://buriedshiva.com.au/assets/Hariprashad_Raag_Malkauns.wav

[Michael]

The method of a shaman is to strategically navigate away from the familiar world, the world of one's formative life. To do this, we require an adventurous spirit, which seeks new fields of action and milieu. By strategic, I mean we employ the practice of pattern manipulation. Breaking down old patterns, building new ones, establishing ourselves in those until we are internally embedded, then breaking them down again and so forth.

As part of this, we seek to use the external world to shift our assemblage point internally - we become psychological adventurers. There is no point in travelling to all kinds of new worlds if it has no dramatic effect upon our soul. First, we have to kill off the soul, then we build a new soul after our own heart, not of the conformity of those who raised us.

For this reason, I use music from other cultures, and I also use the technique of 'acquired taste' - when at first I can't get a handle on another culture's music, like for example, South Indian Carnatic music, I will expose myself to it over and over until something shifts within me, and I begin to feel why so many people love that kind of music.

I am going to use that process here, by presenting some choice pieces, to save you the trouble of having to sort through all kinds of either too hard examples, or poor examples of music, which is designed to create a shift in the soul's eye.

But there is something that needs to be acknowledged before you can wander safely in strange lands. The British accomplished this in their period empire adventure, when they travelled and lived in cultures far removed from Brittan. They adopted a cocoon of steal to sustain themselves, inculcated into them by the educational institutions, which had at its heart the overwhelming belief in the superiority of the British culture, reinforced by their patent military and organisational superiority during the height of the Empire. That kind of thing is of no use to shamans.

Shamans have to adopt a structure of exterior permeability, in order to allow in all the influences they encounter in their journey into other worlds, along with an internal core of invincible self-belief, rarely, if ever, seen by others. Only the stability of this inner core allows them to become flooded again and again by extreme waves of unfamiliar energy. How one acquires that inner core of power, is a different subject - for a different time, but never forget its absolute criticality. Many people lose their minds on the shaman path.

[Michael]

There are many ways to listen to music, but generally they are either from the outside or inside. Outside listening is when you perceive the music as 'over there' - like looking at a stream of water from the bank. There are times when we can become powerfully affected by outside listening - music doesn't have to be hi fidelity to cut through us. Even audiophiles will deliberately sit in an adjacent room, or turn their speakers to the wall, in order to gain clarity on what they are hearing.

Immersion listening is very much a shamanic approach to entering into the music - perceiving it from inside, like viewing a stream from under the water, to physically immerse and experience from within. To achieve immersion listening at an optimal level, you need either a good stereo system or quality headphones. You can't do this by simply turning up the volume, as poor audio systems have inherent distortion. The brain instinctively retreats from what audiophiles call 'muddy' sound. The music must retain its discrete fidelity, wherein individual sounds have air around them.

If you can't afford high quality stereo systems, or your living arrangements exclude dedicated listening at higher volumes, then get a pair of good headphones. They are a much cheaper way of achieving the required quality. It is important they have a reasonable bass sound, but I advise against bass-boosted sound systems, as they are not a good balance of frequencies - music producers go to a lot of trouble to achieve the right balance of frequencies, and although bass enhanced systems are good, too much is a mistake. It is also not good for your ears.

Then you have to identify the optimum volume. Immersion listening requires saturation of the headspace, but too high a volume will damage your ears and cause a physical compression within the ear itself, which suppresses and distorts the sounds. It has to be loud enough to 'fill the universe' so to speak, but not cause any sense of aurally pulling away from the sound. If you are young, you will mistake this sweet-spot as being louder than it should be, because your ears can sustain volume without pain for a long time. Eventually, you will lose your hearing, and that would be a disaster for any shaman.

The volume should be loud but comfortable with plenty of what musicians call 'headroom', which means extra capacity available to effortlessly handle those peaks and overtones that are not measurable. There is a lot going on in sound that is not accounted for by frequency and limiting equipment.

Then you should set aside a time when you are alone and it is dark. Darkness enhances our listening attention dramatically. I recommend you do this at night after the time when the rest of society has gone to sleep, as there is a subtle yet forceful influence on us by the awakened minds of our fellow humans. In immersion listening, we are seeking to depart the common mindspace of humanity, and travel deeper within our energetic being. Most of humanity exists on the surface of our energetic being. As a shaman, we venture deeper into the interior of our being - we allow our perceptual receptor point to drift inwards along the line of human possibilities, until it passes beyond the cocoon of our cultural agreement. We utilise certain types of music to facilitate this, and we also utilise immersion listening techniques.

You can lie down, sit or stand, but I recommend you stand, and allow your body to spontaneously move in accordance with the music. Call it dance if you wish, but it is more about releasing the body to float naturally. To assist this, best begin by doing some squatting and prancing, lifting your body gently off the ground, and freeing up the legs and arms.

Enter into the music and allow it to call you deeper into the universe, which is actually deeper into your own soul.

[Michael]

comfortable slumbers effect the consciousness in different ways

I'd like to share two pieces of music. The first is in regard to runningstream's comments. It is a song I wrote and recorded long ago - I am far down the path now, yet confront the same dilemma every day. I have tried to sing this song in a way that enables the listener to escape the words, and focus only on the sounds. But the words pierce through, and the meaning is at variance to the human world's beliefs. Thus I ask the listener to sit inbetween the mind and the soul - between the two streams, that of the outer play of our being, and that of the inner: the two waters. Inside, we pass a threshold beyond which words have no meanings - we perceive only inarticulate feelings and sound. If we sit on the fence, we can sense the two streams, where meaning has meaning verses where supersensory flow has meaning.

http://buriedshiva.com.au/assets/runningaway.wav

The next piece of music is from my band, Saur. This exemplifies the use of music to journey out of our mind's skin:

http://buriedshiva.com.au/assets/whereami.wav

[Michael]

#Shamans have an unavoidable relationship with the astral world. The astral is the world of values: dreams, visions, intuitions, gut feelings, second sight, hunches. It is also the world of emotional images. Thus it is the world of desire and fantasy as well as fear.

Music has a special relationship with the astral. The core components of pulse, simple rhythm, tone and timbre come from deeper in our psych than the astral, but as soon as you build relationships into the sounds, it crosses over into astral - like harmony, complex rhythm and melody.

A shaman needs to have a very good handle on the astral world, because it is in essence the world of illusion. It is thought that a shaman is an intermediary between the physical and astral worlds, and this is not without some basis in truth. But it is not how the shaman operates. The shaman commands the astral to bring benefit to the physical world and a community.

Thus, it is imperative that we clearly describe what the astral is, so that we are able to effect that command. The best description of the astral, is that it is like a glove - on the hand, the soft inner side is against the skin, but as we peal the glove off it turns inside out. Then, the inside becomes the outside, and visa versa. So it is with the physical and the astral: who we deem to be 'ourself' in physical becomes the external world in astral, and what we deem to be the outer world in physical becomes our own self in astral.

It is on that basis of understanding that a shaman is capable of achieving the capacity to command the astral. To command means the shaman is not at the mercy of the astral - its trickery, dangers and illusions are deeply understood, so that the shaman grasps the astral and moulds it to his or her purpose.

For beginners, the astral is full of fascination and inflation. Extreme experiences are had, and it is generally believed only rare beings are capable of avoiding becoming trapped by the astral. One of the traps is the feature of astral colonisation. Religions, traditions, movements, and cultures create colonies in the astral. A wandering soul can penetrate into these colonies, but always their comes a point at which the soul has to commit to the colony's view, and forego any other view. Almost all astral colonies demand absolute adherence to their own view, and it is unacceptable to really belong to one while frequenting the view of other colonies - you will be confronted by a threshold past which belonging excludes alternatives.

Many of these colonies are obscure, unless you are born into them, but there are a few worth mentioning that present a common struggle for any budding shaman. Two are worth explicit description:

1. Your family and formative attitudes towards what is meaningful in life. This is probably the greatest astral colonial power to be overcome and freed from. It involves attitudes around family life, making money, race and gender, status, self-respect, aspirations and accountability. Its primary weapon of containment is shame.

2. North American #Spirituality. This has become often the first astral colony a neophyte shaman in our modern times has to utilise to develop personally. Like all colonies, it holds out the promise of ultimate meaningfulness, but also like all the rest, eventually entraps in illusion. This astral colony holds forth the glorious qualities of love, hope, light and freedom, and is filled with emotive images of beauty and sensuality. Then it contains the whole sphere of enlightened spirits who become our spiritual guides and inform us about the path of human evolution and our special place in it.

When you are more experienced, you will recognise that tell-tale tag: special. You are special, your children are special, your community of light is special, your spirit guides are special, and the path that human evolution is leading towards is a special promise. Furthermore, you must detoxify yourself from the negativity of the world, which is dragging humanity backwards. Note carefully here the next tag of allegiance and membership: purity. Purity is an age-old device, most obsessively employed by the Jain astral colony. It means that impurity must be shed and avoided, while the pure alone is allowed to enter your being.

This is North American #Spirituality, and it's all hocus-pocus. Remember the rule of thumb: what you see in the astral is a reflection of what is inside you. Your sacred spirit guides are simply a personification of your own immature desires for belonging, acceptance and to be loved. Perfectly natural, but adolescent on the shamanic path.

In order to command the astral, the shaman must see through all these heavenly trinkets, just as s/he must see through the horrors and fears that also propagate the astral world - again reflections of our unrealised being. The shamanic path is not an easy one, but if s/he is to avoid ensnarement by malicious spirits, who actually do independently inhabit the astral world, and who delight in masquerading as angles and mothers, then all hook-holes within the soul must be released. This is a long and arduous task.

Shamans own their own person - grounded in their own 360° field of awareness and responsibility. Upon them, and no other, do their decisions and survival depend, except for that one element of their being - the stem. There is nothing romantic about it.

[Michael]

Here is a song with a style different to what is normally heard. I enjoy pushing the boundaries while retaining a foot in the conventional. The lyrics are an example of how a #shaman commands the astral. It embodies the technique on how to command the astral by stepping slightly aside from the familiar.

Golden Throne

[Michael]

Most western music, especially popular music, is extremely short by our wider species standards. Typically a song on the radio is three minutes long. The result of this is that modern global culture has become accustomed to presetting our expectations for 'listening energy' to around this length of music, after which we become restless and distracted. Western Classical music has a variety, where some pieces are around five minutes and many are up to twenty minutes. The audience for such music presets their listening energy for that length, and thus do not become distracted - it is a niche musical culture where longform is not only accepted, but also expected. But this remains a small sub-set of the general public in western countries. The majority are becoming increasingly shorter in their attention span tolerance.

In contrast, the Indians of the Amazon used to go for three days in their music events, wherein the playing never stopped. The puppet shows in Indonesia would go all night. In the traditional setting of Indian Classical music, often in a temple, they would typically go all night. I recall Ravi Shanker describing how he would play all night at musical events in his career. Also Indian Classical music is almost always at least twenty minutes long for each piece, and often twice or three times that length. Recently in India we went to some concerts, and after two hours, had to leave to be sure to catch rickshaws or buses home, but the concerts were only just getting started by then.

There are many other examples you can find, but the critical factor is that the audience approaches the music in a different way to the western public. They settle in, gradually move into a trance state, and allow the musicians to build their musical structure slowly. One aspect I noticed, and came to appreciate, in Indian Classical, is how they did not necessarily change the tempo or intensity of the piece over the whole length - that was not the purpose. The purpose was to enter into a musical trance and just settle down there, going nowhere. This is important, as we belong to a linear time culture, whereas many traditional societies lent towards circular time. Thus they were not addicted to the crescendo, the 'mountain climbing' approach to entertainment, which is so pervasive in western culture - the approach, the climax, the afterglow etc.

Of course, some of these longform traditional music pieces are crescendo style - they also like the experience of building slowly towards and up a mountain, except they take a much longer time to reach the top, and may not even reach the top at all - once you are comfortable with the endless planes, you can enter into the climbing feel without anxiety to reach any extreme climax, as it's all just part of the flow. Up, down or flat - it's all the same.

From a shamanic perspective, it is imperative to know about and practice the trance state. In this, it is essential to become comfortable in a feeling of transportation that is not a trajectory, leading towards anything - it simply is: the state itself is the purpose. Longform music is excellent in providing the atmosphere to enter into this trance state. Once comfortable with non-trajectory music, you can also appreciate longform climactic pieces, as they still require a different mental state.

When approaching such longform music, prepare yourself. Set aside sufficient time physically as well as mentally. Sitting or lying are good postures, but personally, I recommend standing alone in the dark. Be sure you will not be interrupted, and that the world is not going to distract you. Relax, and allow the sounds to flow through you until you feel a natural movement in your body. Let you arms float without trying to do any specific dance. Allow your legs to move gracefully with the rhythm. The idea is to enter into a trance through your body, not just your mind - get the thinking mind out of the scene, and release into a visionary, meditative, transpersonal experience.

Here are  few great examples I have found to enter into this state. I have remastered these to make them suitable for immersion listening, and they also utilise melodic styles that are unfamiliar to our western ears, so that assists in shifting the mind beyond its accustomed groove.