\nIntroduction
\n<\/b>What follows is a discussion of songs as living beings, as life forms. \u00a0 This includes the cosmology they inhabit, their teleologies (ends, goals), and the potentials offered to us humans when we engage with them in co-creative ways.<\/p>\n
Songs, as beings highly transparent to their defining vibration, arrange themselves in clusters of resonance, of shared affinities, in what can be understood as song\u00a0 . .\u00a0\u00a0 villages.\u00a0\u00a0 The more primordial of these villages exist deep in the realms of the ancestors, in the collective imagination, in the Gaian Dreamtime. .<\/p>\n
Far inside lies a mystical island
\nThere lives a village of songs evermore
\nWelcoming humans to sing forth their stories
\nSurrender to the flow of the magical lore
\nCan you feel the rhythm of your heartsong
\nBeating in time with the drumbeat of life
\nFly away on the wings of this moment
\nMeeting, becoming, the song village people<\/i>.<\/p>\n
From the Gaian Dreamtime, songs emerge as paths of creation. They need humans to sing them, to fulfill their purposes, much as flowers need bees to gather their pollen. \u00a0And just as honey is created from that union, so the harmonic sweetness between songs and singers fuels an art of manifestation. \u00a0It is a poetic art, one long obscured by the ascendency of reductionist thinking and analytical science, that operates by principles of similarity, analogy, metaphor, visualization, and the power of embodying frequency. \u00a0 This is an art to be reclaimed for those of us awakening from the c0llective dream of separation, to be re-membered, and used responsibly.<\/p>\n
Of significance in this reclamation, is the great number of songs now incarnating from the Gaian Dreamtime into the human realm. \u00a0These new arrivals, like indigo children of the song tribes, carry the vision of their origins, a harmonic of elevated frequency,\u00a0itself mutable in word and melody to meet the shifting needs of the 3-D world. \u00a0To sing them allows this vision, this frequency to ripple out into the material world.\u00a0\u00a0 This helps to crystallize the harmonics of the next octave into form, into wondrous new \u2018growth rings\u2019 for planet earth.\u00a0 These songs are especially attracted to communities that are working to fulfill purposes similar to their own. \u00a0Such communities are supportive of those of us that wish to live the future healed earth now, as in: \u2018we are the ones we\u2019ve been waiting for\u2019.\u00a0 We will conclude with suggestions for the care and feeding of such songs, and in so doing, nourish ourselves and others.<\/p>\n
Distinguishing between Imaginal Realms<\/b>
\nTo explore the world of song villages, it is helpful to distinguish between songs that exist on opposite ends of an imaginal spectrum.\u00a0 From the deeper levels of the psyche, from the transpersonal, come songs that are received, that arrive, or are birthed; \u00a0from the surface levels of the mind, the domain of the ego, come songs that are written or crafted. \u00a0The former rise largely from the mysterious depths of inspiration, the latter are amalgamated, even manufactured, from the latest fashions in rhythms, pop hooks, and so on.<\/p>\n
The boundaries between these two types of songs are as blurred and interwoven as those between right and left sides of the brain, between intuition and intellect.\u00a0 Just as a handy lyric and melody are useful to catch a rising feeling, so are language and conceptual frameworks useful to embody a surfacing idea. \u00a0This is how we bridge the worlds of spirit and form.<\/p>\n
In contrast, when forms become ends in and of themselves, when lyric and melody, language and concept operate bereft of inspiration, then\u00a0the bridge to spirit is not crossed.\u00a0\u00a0 We then get the schlocky art and soulless science found thruout much of modern culture.\u00a0 And in turn, if forms are undeveloped,\u00a0if lyric and melody, language and concept lack practice and maturity, inspirations and insights may slip away, and we lose the fertility they bring to the physical plane.Such imbalances are common to the human experience, beginning steps on the path to eventual mastery of ‘performing the dream’.<\/p>\n
We are defining imagination as the creative matrix of nature, the universal medium thru which worlds develop and dissolve. From this point of view, at your least effective use of the imagination, you are a sovereign maker of ideas operating within the contractive mindfield of the ego;\u00a0 at your most effective, you are a receiver tuned to endlessly more encompassing \u2018conversations\u2019, all echoing the source message of the Creator in increasingly ‘advanced’ ways, and a discerning enactor of what you\u2019ve received.<\/p>\n
We can illuminate this topography of the imagination with the following metaphors.\u00a0 We can compare it to, 1) \u00a0an ocean, its still depths containing secrets of the deep, contrasted with the often choppy surface water, prone to the effects of changing weather, 2) a meditative mind transparent to more unified and spontaneous states of being, contrasted with the ever shifting concerns of the \u2018monkey\u2019 mind, 3) the mythic origins (myths as preexisting natural phenomena, like Mt ranges in the landscape of the psyche) of the world contrasted with the weak brew of reality defined by facts (the solidification of beliefs), 4) \u00a0the realm of verbs, processes and relationships, contrasting with its \u2018thickening\u2019 into static states, into nouns, 5) the difference between primary colors, and the mixing and arrangement of these colors in the creation of a painting, 6) \u00a0the difference between the timeless now, and the psychological time that projects into past and future, 7) the contrast\u00a0between a circle and a straight line.<\/p>\n
There is a healthy \/ unhealthy dimension to the spectrum of the imagination as well. \u00a0Just as a tree connected to its roots is a healthy happy tree, so one severed from its roots is sick and suffering. \u00a0Similarly, there is the imagination of \u2018use your imagination\u2019, that taps into the source-waters of inherent wholeness, contrasted with the imagination of fantasy and delusion that comes from a scatteredness or splintering of the mind (choppy waves, monkey mind, 10,000 facts . . . ). A healthy imagination therefore is fed by what things do<\/b>have in common. To focus on connections between things has a unifying, embodying effect. An unhealthy imagination lives off a diet of what things do not<\/b>have in common, that only sees separations. This then has a fragmenting, disembodying effect.<\/p>\n
The Imaginal Commons
\n<\/b>Assuming we wish to be, as in the above analogy, a healthy happy tree, it is useful to cultivate our connectedness to the world, to explore the deeper reaches of our roots, those that touch into the ancestral realms, the ‘dreamtime’. \u00a0 There, in these more embracive stratums of the imagination, we may feel into a profound communion with our inherent wholeness, our interrelatedness with all things. . \u00a0There in the more primordial realms, we might know ourselves as a field of human consciousness, an awakening organ of awareness in a single planetary being. \u00a0 These\u00a0ancestral levels of the imagination define a bandwidth of frequency, of vibrational coherence. \u00a0We can call it the ‘Gaian Dreamtime’.\u00a0 It is an imaginal commons.\u00a0 It is called a \u2018commons\u2019, because at this more unified level of existence, there is ontological equivalency, meaning that all beings can be considered as \u2018people\u2019.
\n<\/b><\/p>\n
Examples include the stone people found in Native American sweat lodges, the plant people of shamanic traditions, such as grandfather peyote<\/em>or mother ayahuasca<\/em>, and the brother sun and sister moon of St Francis of Assisi. \u00a0In Western academic parlance, this is referred to as \u2018animism\u2019, a term that originated to describe the supposedly illusory and therefore unfortunate projection of human traits onto nature by primitive peoples. \u00a0However, we might instead look at the term as describing simply this: \u00a0the recognition of the imaginal commons by peoples more culturally attuned to that level of the collective psyche.<\/p>\n The imaginal commons is also home to all forces of nature, to all qualities and characteristics that give form and meaning to the material world. \u00a0For example, perseverance, purification, courage, nurturance, and such are \u2018people\u2019 as well, often in the form of deities. \u00a0Examples include the Yoruba water Goddess Yemanja, patroness of oceanic and female energies, the Vedic Hanuman, who signifies devotion and the courage born of that steadfastness, and various patron saints and immortals, such as Saint Christopher embodying protection, and the Taoist Han Hsiang-tzu, representing the muse in music.<\/p>\n The imaginal commons is where many traditional and folk ways to ‘read the book of nature\u2019, to understand the ‘library of life’, have their origins. \u00a0These connect observations of signatures in the material world, such as color, shape, smell, location, habits, and texture, with intuitive understandings of their sources in the subtler dimensions. \u00a0It\u2019s a little like looking at a computer screen and being able to trace all of its activity back to the originating programs. Affinity groups, defined as ‘families’ of shared traits, are revealed thru this kind of deep associative thinking. These then organize pattern languages that \u2018speak\u2019 into being the primordial sciences we know as astrology, divination practices, vitalistic medicines, whole-plant herbalism, alchemy, geomancy, and so on.<\/p>\n In many ways our inherent wholeness (health), our well-being, is found in the imaginal commons, for it is all inclusive. \u00a0The human urge to ‘self-medicate’ by altering consciousness is often a gesture to recover access to this dimension of ourselves when it become lost or forgotten. \u00a0When certain archetypes are deemed unacceptable (e.g., death), of low value (e.g., the crone), or even the validation to exist (e.g., fairies), it creates dynamic tensions between the archetypes seeking to surface themselves, and the suppression of that surfacing. \u00a0 Without going into all the distortions, neuroses, wars, legal issues, and suffering this has caused much of humanity in recent centuries, it is enough to know that transparency in the psyche fosters wholeness.\u00a0 To allow the unconscious to become conscious creates, eventually! – as sometimes in the surfacing and clearing process things get worse before they get better – health and spiritual illumination.<\/p>\n The imaginal commons is also carried in our body-mind as our evolutionary heritage, our bio-lineage. \u00a0We carry the stone people in the mountains of our bones, the wind beings in our breath, the fire spirits in our vitality, and the water devas in the rivers and oceans of fluids that course thru our body. \u00a0We carry the plant people in the root-like web of our nervous system, in the leaves of our lungs, in the coiled and uncoiling stalk of our kundalini, and in the buds and blossoms of our chakras. \u00a0We carry the lion in our courage, the dog in our devotion to loved ones, the butterfly in our willingness to transform, the owl in watchfulness, the dolphin in our playfulness. \u00a0We carry brother sun in our heart, sister moon in our mind. \u00a0These can all inspire and animate us with their foundational qualities. The stones help solidify our bones, ground our spirit, build our fortitude. The plant people impart to us the power of the green, able to break thru all that blocks the light of love. Brother sun helps us radiate out acts of selfless service and wishes of well being for others. Sister moon helps us remember that the mind is not self-radiant, that it is brightest when it fully accepts and reflects the sunlight of the heart.<\/p>\n At the surface level of existence, i.e. the ‘harmonic’ which defines the material world, all the \u2018people\u2019, all the tribes of creation, have two aspects: \u00a01) their signatures, or frequencies, in form, and, 2) the effects of these signatures upon the world.\u00a0 The former indicates pattern of vibration, (form), the second pattern of relationship (story). \u00a0As we move into imaginal cognitions (dreams, visions, meditations . .) that attune us to the subtleties of existence, these two aspects, frequency and story, are united in an inseparable unit of info-energy. \u00a0They are in essence songs.\u00a0 Creation-songs.<\/p>\n Primordial Origins \u2018As veins pervade all leaves, so Aum<\/em>pervades all sound.\u2019 ~~ Chandogya Upanishad (II, xxiii, 3)<\/i><\/p>\n As the universe unfurls (the \u2018Big Bloom\u2019) before the primordial sound of Divine intent it casts fields of radiant energy,\u00a0patterned arrays of sound frequencies. \u00a0These polarize into opposites, and like the mitosis of a cosmic egg, the message of the Source, often known as Dreamer or Creator, is replicated in the appearance of myriad worlds. \u00a0These worlds reflect back to one another in infinite expressions of interdependence and interconnectivity;\u00a0 they echo with hymns of praise for the beauty of diversity artfully harmonized with underlying unity. \u00a0This fertile interplay precipitates countless acts of creation, seeds of existence which open and sprout before the ever surging will to manifest, before what the Celts call the \u2018oran mor<\/em>\u2019, the great spiraling strain of eternal Melody. \u00a0They individuate as songs, and grow as harmonics of intent that flow and weave and branch out like rivers.<\/p>\n Every so often a spontaneous burst of attraction (LOVE!), will interrupt this flow and create vortexes of heightened resonance, swirls of affinity. \u00a0These coalesce and settle along the banks of these melodic rivers as . . . villages. \u00a0Such villages hold the character of their founding harmonic, established as pattern and archetype. \u00a0Here beyond time and space, these percolate as unmanifested potentials, exist as events without beginning or end. \u00a0These pregnant settlements eternally yield \u00a0before the tides of Divine causation, their vital force flowing out as waves of creation, and ebbing back with the nutrients of their passage.<\/p>\n Out of the mythic muck of the Dreamtime landscapes, countless beings rise like lotus stalks before flowering into form.\u00a0 There are midwives who attend to those emerging from the muck-womb. \u00a0 One is the Hopi spider woman, who sings to each budding being its refrain of the great Melody, its creation-song. \u00a0As the midwife sings, each begins to sing, to echo her song, finding that it is their song.\u00a0 Their heart stirs and begins to beat with hers, with the heartbeat of creation.\u00a0 Their song joins an ongoing chorus of songs across the universe, and a power upwells from the great Mystery.<\/p>\n This power articulates each being.\u00a0 It defines and gives voice to each its unique medicine, its force of inspiration. \u00a0To fulfill the purposes of this gift, each are draw to the densities of the surface world.\u00a0 There, the paths of creation are enfolded into the innumerable designs and geometries of physicality: \u00a0light freezes into matter, sound slows into formations, energy goes dormant into mass, and in the case of humans, awareness self-limits into ego, myths are rationalized into literalness, and our remembrance of the great Melody is lulled into forgetfulness.<\/p>\n However, the paradox of the 3-D world and its great bundle of boundaries, is that these very fixations and the challenges they present provide the means to be free of them.\u00a0 A poison creates its own antidote.\u00a0 The abrasive actions between our will for liberation and that which appears to obstruct our freedom, creates a friction, a passion, a fervor, an evolutionary heat.\u00a0 The ensuing crisis softens the surface layers of the psyche, allowing, even compelling us to draw from our deepest resources to break thru the impasse. \u00a0We return from such\u00a0journeys born anew, with a newly awakened soul purpose. \u00a0 This purpose is our authenticity, our inner compass, our strength. \u00a0It is our medicine, our creation-song, our ‘gift’.\u00a0 It is thru such resolutions that we re-integrate ourselves at a higher vibration.\u00a0 We then less \u2018live a life\u2019, and more allow life to live thru us.<\/p>\n When we share the gift to help others as it has helped ourselves, we run the power of the Mystery.\u00a0 It passes thru us to reach others, and we become a link in the chain of Happiness.\u00a0 Illusions of form and separation lose their grip, and shed away.\u00a0 Life becomes aware of itself thru our individuated form, and once again. . .\u00a0 the eternal Melody becomes audible.\u00a0 Though we are consciously merged with the universe, we retain enough individuality so we can enjoy both worlds, the part and the whole, reflector and reflected, lover and beloved. .\u00a0 From this place we offer the Source, the Eternal Now, the de-light of having its Love sung back to it in yet another unique way, one of \u2018a 1000 ways to kneel and kiss the ground’.<\/p>\n Dreamtime and Evolution The planet Gaia formed of the melodic intent of the sacred elements, the consciousness beings we know as fire, air, earth, and water.\u00a0\u00a0 Their service, their gift to us, was and is, to jointly create the physical plane as an artful arena for evolution. \u00a0As the earth evolved, the feedback relationship between these generative forces and their \u2018out-picturing\u2019 into form complexified.\u00a0 The increasing diversity ‘above’ was a result of the growing cooperation of the elemental intelligences ‘below’.\u00a0\u00a0 This gave space for further expansions of the Divine outbreath, which pulsed to the surface world as a quickening of life currents. \u00a0 This activated more earthly wonders into being, crystalized yet more joyful and terrible beauty.\u00a0 The heightened unity of forces below continued to be mirrored in the world above, until the rising crescendo of synergy sounded a new energetic, a new story. \u00a0This allowed yet more energy to penetrate and excite the molecular substrates of the developing earth.\u00a0 This rising harmonic sung the biosphere, the world of animate organisms, into existence.\u00a0\u00a0 The planet now hummed with a new chorus of creation-songs.<\/p>\n The octave of biology could carry upwellings of vitality that were more expansive and direct in their expressions of origin.\u00a0\u00a0 These include subtleties\u00a0of instincts and drives, tendencies and abilities, as well as the transparencies to deeper orders of design that we find in crystals, shells, flowers, butterflies, and birds. \u00a0These upwellings fed more of the Divine intent to the surface, and with it more cohesive ordering principles. \u00a0Increasingly, this next level synergy \u2018possessed\u2019 the growing diversity of life with yet deeper acts of unification, yet greater heights of organization.\u00a0 From these marriages of different forms issued creations far beyond the sum of their parts.\u00a0\u00a0 Like 1 + 1 = 3, this is how lichen arose from algae and fungi, how ants developed as collective organisms, how a heart starts to beat when enough cells get together, and how humans arose from the biosphere.\u00a0\u00a0 It is how self-reflective awareness, with its attendant insights and intuitions arose from humans, and with it a planetary sphere of mind, a proto-telepathy, now exteriorized in increasingly interactive communication technologies.<\/p>\n This sphere of mental activity, sometimes called \u2018noosphere\u2019, contains all of history, all the wounds and gifts of ego-mind, the crises it begets, as well as the exhaustion of all that has created them.\u00a0 Thru the widening cracks in the faltering collective self-image, in the addictive needs for status, endless material gain, and power over others, shines a light of inherent wholeness.\u00a0 As we move towards and metabolize this light in acts of self surrender, we reclaim our heritage, and the Dreamtime thereby surfaces, comes to light as our now living existence. \u00a0This results in us becoming more conscious expressions of wholeness, and we thereby abide in the gravity of Union, aka<\/i>\u00a0Love.<\/p>\n It appears then, that we humans are in the early phases of synergizing a sphere of heart-centered activity across the planet, one that will increasingly outshine that of mental activity. \u00a0 We might call this the \u2018bhakti-sphere\u2019 .\u00a0 The bhakti-sphere provides the fertile soil we need to sprout as seeds of Gaian self-awareness. \u00a0All of our evolutionary inheritance (planetary DNA) is invested in the promise of the human species collectively flowering beneath the growing luminosity of our hearts. \u00a0 We flower as a conscious co-creator with Mother Earth, dawning a new sun, and lighting ever more wondrous paths for Creation.<\/p>\n \u201cOur task is to make the hidden life of God shine in this lower world, the world of matter\u201d\u00a0 ~ Martin Buber.<\/i><\/p>\n Dreamtime Song Villages Bearing in mind the challenges of describing a hyperdimensional phenomena using a language modeled on and by a 3-D defined world, we begin: \u00a0 by again noting that in the \u2018as above so below\u2019 axiom, all the self-organizing activity we see in earthly ecosystems, including bacterial colonies, algae blooms, multi-celled plants and animals, forests, and human cities, all dot the landscape of the Dreamtime as confluences of affinity, nodes of vibrational nestedness. \u00a0In this imaginal commons, where all exist as ‘people’, these can be understood as countless hamlets, villages, towns, and cities, fluctuating in configuration, and sometimes existence, depending on the ever unfurling course of planetary changes.<\/p>\n In this ecology of settlements, there is a capital city of Nature that oversees the entire planet. \u00a0It manages hierarchies of incrementally distinct fields of association, all of which have counterparts in earthly landscapes, weather patterns, societies of all kinds, traits, human values, and such.\u00a0\u00a0 These include, e.g., abundance villages, sometimes called ‘cornucopias’, where we find Lakshmi mantras, fertility songs, and thanksgiving prayers, all ruled by Jupiter.\u00a0 Or villages that hold the creation-songs, the source identities of particular types of plants or animals.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, hunting and gathering traditions among many of the worlds indigenous peoples invoke the \u2018owners\u2019 (oversouls) of a species thru meditations, spells, songs, and dances. \u00a0These tap into and recount the origin story of the animal or plant being sought. \u00a0This is done to cultivate the connections needed for successful hunts and harvests .<\/p>\n All human societies have their signature Dreamtime villages.\u00a0 Psychic access to these ancestral villages serve to fertilize, \u00a0strengthen, and inspire surface dwelling people. \u00a0The Huichol Indians, e.g., have no written language, and so depend on the \u2018heart memory\u2019 of shamans and elders to transmit cultural teachings down thru the generations. \u00a0Such mythic renewal is often done by singing during all night ceremonies, updating these teachings thru messages received via dreams or visions. \u00a0Similar imaginal cognitions, ways of accessing guidance for individual and society, were universal among humans before the advent of writing, books, and more modern, exteriorized, information technologies.<\/p>\n In recent centuries we have been educated in principles and worldviews that ignore, mute. or scramble signals from the deeper, nonphysical wellsprings of existence.\u00a0 This acts to separate us from beings (elements, plants, animals, many indigenous peoples) that ARE tuned to the Dreamtime as a commons from which they draw communications and culture. \u00a0The effects of this disconnection have led to much of the imbalances we experience in the world.\u00a0 Hence, as a function of the Gaian immune system, as acts of benevolence by beings who wish us well, and as gestures of grace, song villages have formed specifically attuned to the frequency humanity must move into to reunify with the family of creation at a deeper level of engagement, to bloom the Bhaktisphere.<\/p>\n The songs that inhabit these villages are songs of ceremony, for the Bhaktisphere is all about life lived as ceremony, sacramental celebration in a temple universe.\u00a0 Ceremonies offer safe passage for our deaths and rebirths, help midwife us out of our sticky cocoon of ignorance, and give refuge for self-transformation.\u00a0 Such songs hold sacred space for our maturation as a species.\u00a0 They act to purify, bless, celebrate, move with devotion, call into creation, disperse or metabolize negative energies, honor and invoke all manner of helpful Beings, give guidance, give thanks.\u00a0\u00a0 These songs come from profound places of pain and suffering, from Divine ecstasy and grace, the depths and heights of the hells and heavens that turn the wheels of karma for this world. \u00a0They emerge into our lives with a mission of spiritual healing, and go thru any number of changes in melody and word as they adapt to their life\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n Such songs appear across all cultures and eras.\u00a0 They are found anywhere that the longing to shed the restrictive and outworn armoring of egoic life is answered with the balm of melodic medicine.\u00a0 This includes spiritual traditions of the past, many of which, like first flowers thru the snow, were running this frequency long before it surfaced to the extent it has now.\u00a0 These forbearers offered their prayers, their lives, in service to the dawning of higher consciousness.\u00a0 Hence, we find vibrant neighborhoods of Vedic mantras and slokas, Sufi poems, Sikh shabads, Essene prayers, Taoist chants, and Gnostic hymns in these \u2018next octave\u2019 villages.\u00a0 In this globalized context, they gain a new relevance, as growing numbers of humans are now able to receive the vibration they hold.\u00a0 Ancestral songs of nature-honoring peoples, many with a history of persecution, find refuge in these villages, and new purposes. \u00a0These songs gain new relevance when they reach and teach those humans seeking to reclaim\u00a0their birthright of indigeneity to the planet, many of whom have been raised among nature dis-honoring peoples.<\/p>\n The urgency of the planetwide crisis is causing a rapid rise in the population of Dreamtime songs.\u00a0\u00a0 They are arriving in all manner of earth and body conscious venues, and from there percolating thru the cracks and fissures of the collective egoic mind and its fascinations. \u00a0Such social vortexes can include intentional communities, organic farms, healing sanctuaries, meditation venues, social justice organizations, yoga schools, eco-festivals, permaculture workshops, tribal revivals, vision quests, and so on.\u00a0\u00a0 We find revitalized and newly received songs among devotees of contemporary spiritual masters, such as Osho, Amma, and Prem Baba.\u00a0\u00a0 Songs from the plant world are (re)appearing as the contemporary herbal renaissance comes of age, and shamanic medicine circles reach broader circles of initiates. \u00a0Community choirs are likewise increasing in popularity in many parts of the world, often fueled by songs to raise consciousness. \u00a0All these are part of a \u00a0growing global culture of compassion and earth-conscious living.\u00a0\u00a0 All are working the frequency of the Bhaktisphere, honoring their differences while heeding the call to surrender into a more embracive order of unity, into one harmonic, one Song.<\/p>\n On Birthing Dreamtime Songs Cultivation of the senses Attention and Focus If you regard your attention with reverence, if you do not take it for granted but rather regard it as a gift, then you will want to reciprocate appreciation for this gift by using it wisely. \u00a0 One way to do so, is to exercise and develop one’s focus to\u00a0hold a fixed awareness. \u00a0One\u2019s capacity to effect transformations it thereby deepened and strengthened.\u00a0 The high arts of focused attention include sitting meditation, the meditative movement arts such as yoga and tai chi chuan, the merging of awareness and action in the present moment known as \u2018flow\u2019, and the energized concentration of unselfconscious creative activity.\u00a0 All these help us cultivate a cohesive vibration, for dissipated energies can only hold lower frequencies. . Medicine Circles Medicine ceremonies not only thin the veils between levels of the imagination, allowing songs to more easy passage, but these particular plants and fungi are themselves exemplars of the frequency they seek to cultivate in us.\u00a0\u00a0 Though they can communicate telepathically (in silence), thru songs they can \u2018talk\u2019.\u00a0 Such vocalizations externalize meaning, allowing the healing forces of the plants more agency in the world.\u00a0 It is not uncommon for participants to feel as though songs are being sung thru them, suggesting that other beings (ancestors? plants? the songs themselves? ones higher Self?) are invested in having these songs sung, and sung in certain ways.<\/p>\n The Santo Daime, an eco-Christian religion originating in Brazil, uses the teacher plant \u2018daime\u2019 (B. Caapi<\/em>), as a sacrament, and receives its entire doctrine thru hymns from the astral, perceived as \u2018singing murmurs\u2019. \u00a0These hymns touch on a wide variety of subjects relating to harmonious living, to creating and stabilizing a culture of peace.\u00a0 All plant and fungi inspired religions and spiritual practices have similar, though stylistically distinct, songs associated with them.\u00a0\u00a0 Like all good teachers, these vegetative beings wish for the initiates to learn their lessons so that the teacher is no longer needed. \u00a0 The teacher can then become\u00a0 . . a colleague.\u00a0 When we internalize these lessons as a way of life, then we live life as ceremony.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n Life as Ceremony While we might understand the attitude of constant service to life as the most radiant jewel on the altar of ceremonial life, the altar itself, constructed of time and space, is another area to attend to.\u00a0\u00a0 The tick tick tick of incremental clock time, and the Gregorian calendar, have their, quite limited, usefulness.\u00a0\u00a0 However to live solely by their influences restricts perceptions of the world to the linear and unidimensional. \u00a0 One might occasionally ‘lose the clock’, and open to more nature-based sense of time, to biological rhythms, such as the aging process, seasons, element transformations, fertility cycles, sleep and wakefulness, breathing, heartbeats, and so on.\u00a0\u00a0 All these to degrees coordinate with lunar time, the new and full moons, 13 of which pass in roughly a year.<\/p>\n To recognize these more organic passages of time, including solstices, equinoxes, and the regular transit of stars across the sky, is an education in expansive perception of the universe. \u00a0It is said that space given meaning becomes a \u2018place\u2019. \u00a0Our task as ceremonialists is to see physical space as sacred place, and to attend to it as such.\u00a0\u00a0 There are many ways to do this, including sweeping, clearing, smudging, arranging objects such as rocks, flowers, and tree boughs (the decorative possibilities are endless!), honoring directions, offering prayers, or food, to the spirits of the land, to the ancestors, chanting mantras, and singing of the world we long to live in, singing in such a world.\u00a0\u00a0 Anyone familiar with Gaian Dreamtime songs knows that sacred time and place provide not only subject matter and themes for such songs, but the ideal set and setting for them to appear. .<\/p>\n From Dreamtime to Machinetime The ascendency of the modern mind, with its fixations on the physical level of reality to the exclusion of all others, clouded over access to these influences.\u00a0\u00a0 This \u2018progressed\u2019 into suppression of such access, mirrored in such varied examples as Puritan religious beliefs that moved spirituality off planet to a paternalistic god, leaving nature unconscious, mute and in need of taming, \u00a0the rise of ‘scientism’ in the modern era, which\u00a0makes a religion (worldview) out of a research method,\u00a0Freudian neuroses, the demotion of shamanic wisdom tales into nursery rhymes, the devaluation, if not banishment, of goddess figures and their ways, and the colonization (\u2018improvement\u2019) of all that could be bent before the will of the materialist paradigm, including the imagination.<\/p>\n As previously mentioned, attention is energy, and if you do not take the responsibility to manage your own, then someone(s) will step in and manage it for you, with their interests taking precedence over your own.\u00a0 While all humans need a cultural script to navigate thru experience, a mark of maturity is to free oneself from elements of the script that impede one’s authenticity, and so the development of one\u2019s own talent, gift, power, and purpose. \u00a0 By scripting your life to maximize positive potentials, is to claim an inner authority, and with it true self confidence.\u00a0 As a global economy has been built around selling all the things that a disempowered person needs to think s\/he is empowered without actually being so, there are great forces at work to keep the colonized imagination placated, to keep it from rebelling.\u00a0\u00a0 Hence a quite intricate and seductive world has developed out of the promise of purchased rewards in an advertised reality, out of the norm that we need a well-develop self image, a social persona, to manage our ego-created reality, instead of listening to the little voice of spirit within, our instincts and intuitions..<\/p>\n For those normalized to such a world, there are songs that affirm it lifestyles and ways.\u00a0\u00a0 These live in the suburbs, shopping malls, urban highrises, and ghettos of the imagination.\u00a0\u00a0 They tell tales of drama wrought from humans divided from nature, split from spirit, from each other.\u00a0 They run a range of concerns, including reactions to events, romantic love, social status gained or lost, and shifts of identities in the egoic spectrum, from self-pity to self-inflation.\u00a0 In this fractured environment, the capacity of songs to unify, to create social cohesion, takes on an us vs. them<\/em>dynamic.\u00a0 You then need an ‘other’, like an enemy, a competing product, another nation, race, gender, or age group, to bond people in service to a cause.\u00a0 Hence, countries have their anthems, sports teams their fight songs, corporations their jingles, etc.\u00a0 We likewise hear these songs on media sponsored by the various political, social, and economic agencies that have an investment in the status quo, in target groups being defined, maintained, and ‘farmed’.\u00a0\u00a0 No matter that these songs, having no root in the nourishing soil of the sacred, are short-lived.\u00a0 Consumerist culture LOVES things with short lifespans, such as top 10 songs,<\/b>disposable diapers,<\/b>and celebrity politicians, as it provides a rapid turnover of reasons to buy new things, to use up things rather than just use them.<\/p>\n The cumulative effects of serial unsustainabilites have led not only to shallow, hook-laden songs, but the gradual deterioration of the materialist worldviews that have propped up our 3-D empire.\u00a0 This to the point where\u00a0the lost treasures of the imagination, the exiled archetypes, the forgotten deities, are starting to sprout up thru the cracks in the road of progress. \u00a0These include Goddesses of all sorts, the Green Man, Nature devas and fairies, oversouls of plants, animals, and minerals, as well as the midwife, kitchen gardner, intuitive healer, yogi, shaman, diviner, mediator, peaceful warrior, and bard. \u00a0These rise in power surges of creativity, for they carry with them the momentum of Nature seeking to rebalance itself.\u00a0 These forces of renewal are surfacing like lotuses in the cultural waters of the planet.\u00a0\u00a0 Among these, fresh from their villages in the deeper matrixes of nature, are the next octave Gaian Dreamtime songs.<\/p>\n These melodic missionaries have purposes that we can join with our own. . This includes regular practice singing the songs, and revisioning and reliving our lives to allow the Ways they teach to move out into the world.. \u00a0Of great benefit to this process, is to\u00a0collectively receive, work with, and disseminate such songs. \u00a0An enjoyable and efficient way to do this is create events that bring these songs and the humans that sing them together for a focused period of time to teach and share.<\/p>\n Before going on to suggestions on how to produce such an event, let us touch into a terminology for these songs in their 3-D forms. \u00a0We will for the rest of this treatise, refer to them as Gaian folk-songs. \u00a0This term can be understood as ‘Gaianfolk songs’, referring to humanity as a ‘people’, a single nation with many ‘clans’. \u00a0 The ‘folklore’ of the Gaian nation is all about the journey of\u00a0realizing oneness with every other human, and with the planet. \u00a0 It can also be termed ‘Gaian folk-songs’, which refers to songs abiding in the creative -commons (communally owned, held, transmitted, and evolved) of the folk-song genre, a living tradition. \u00a0These songs are in service to the rapidly rising awareness of the earth as a living organism and our identity in service (love!) to its (our) well-being.<\/p>\n On Creating a Gaian Folk-song Event Spreading the word (promotion) happens thru circles of people who are either already running a frequency harmonious w\/ the next octave song village, or are on the verge of doing so. \u00a0The natural tribal connectivity of such a ‘soul family’, which reaches thru all genders, races, and ethnicities, forms the seed DNA of the event. \u00a0 This connectivity is carefully tended as the event grows. \u00a0 This means quality (an atmosphere of trust and intimacy) over quantity as a guiding principle. \u00a0 A Jerry Garcia quote speaks to this perspective, in a comment he made about his first solo album, ‘my friends liked it, and thats all that really matters to me’. \u00a0The familial quality is more easily maintained when great numbers don\u2019t have to be attracted to make the event financially viable. \u00a0This means overhead is kept low. \u00a0Over time the inherent vigor of the gathering will create its own support system. \u00a0Thus strengthened, further outreach can be made into the greater world of those hungry for the experience.\u00a0 This vigor comes thru living the teachings of the songs, thereby \u2018incarnating\u2019 them, and giving them, and ourselves as singers, more power and presence in the world.\u00a0 This then naturally radiates out in acts of \u2018seva\u2019, of selfless service.<\/p>\n Living the teachings is of course, living life as ceremony. \u00a0Though we may \u2018learn\u2019 to invoke ceremonial time and space, it is really a remembering of what we do naturally when brought out of the dream of separation.\u00a0 It then follows that a Gaian folk-song event should be careful to not replicate the dominant culture and its ways any more than necessary, no matter how familiar or normative such ways may seem. \u00a0For example, a tendency of the industrial-growth paradigm is to professionalize and commoditize inborn human abilities, such as the capacity to heal oneself or others, or the ability to sing. \u00a0This tendency is however counter-intuitive, for to not pro-actively explore one’s potentials shuts the door of self-knowledge, and with it access to the deeper wellsprings of intuition and creativity. \u00a0Tho do so is contrary to foundational assumptions of a Gaian folk-song event, which suggests that we claim our ability to sing, for we are a singing species and are all born to sing in our various ways. \u00a0As the African proverb goes, \u2018if you can walk you can dance, if you can talk you can sing\u2019.<\/p>\n Some Differences between F<\/em>estivals and Gatherings<\/i> Without vendors, the eating experience can be a communal one. \u00a0Eating together is a simple and enjoyable way to foster community cohesion. \u00a0The kitchen becomes a hub of shared activity, and provides ample opportunity for attendees to participate. \u00a0 This can happen by bringing fruits, produce, or homemade edibles to share from one’s own household, by helping receive and organize such donated foods, or by preparing, serving, or cleaning up meals. \u00a0Participation extends to all the other tasks needed to make the ‘village’ life run smoothly, such as setting up or taking down the event, registration, circle recording, attending the children\u2019s space, peace tending, attending to safety and wellness, potty perusal, altar tending, cleaning up, running errands, etc.<\/p>\n There is a DIY (do it yourself) ethic to a gathering, a propensity to volunteer, which tends to empower people by letting them experience and share the results of their labors. \u00a0 It also fosters interpersonal relations as you often need help and\/or advice to accomplish tasks. \u00a0 This contrasts with the usual festivals which have most of the work done by paid ‘professionals’ (e.g., performers, speakers, and staff). \u00a0When an event has a high degree of dependence on paid professionals, it tends to narrow the scope of participation by an attendee into that of a consumer. \u00a0 One is then set up with expectations to receive, rather than give anything more than the likely high admission price which has paid for such services.<\/p>\n When name-recognized personalities are advertised to draw attendees, it also touches into the culture of celebrity, with its various heirarchies, and ‘us and them’ dynamics. \u00a0 Such advertising, like that for any product, also creates knowns so that one can make more informed decisions on whether to purchase a ticket. \u00a0 In contrast, gatherings are more dependent on word of mouth, on reputation, to attract attendees. \u00a0They set up another kind of expectation, one more mysterious, and risky. \u00a0It rising from the possibilities of the soul tribe coming together to make it all happen, to create the magic. \u00a0And when there is event ‘lift off’, our faith in ourselves, in each other, and in these Ways, grows yet stronger.<\/p>\n Song Narratives of Mythic Renewal Clues to this narrative of mythic renewal can be found in an overview of songs sung at Singing Alive events.\u00a0\u00a0 These can be grouped into themes, which strung together, progress the archetypal journey of human spiritual evolution. \u00a0The themes of this story include: \u00a01) \u00a0forgetfulness of one’s origins, with its attendant sufferings (homesickness), 2) the beginnings of remembrance (the inbody experience), 3) \u00a0identity crisis (initiation), 4) transformation (soul gain), and 5) re-emergence into an expansive awareness, a maturity (culture of peace).<\/p>\n Homesickness<\/i> The Inbody Experience<\/i> \u00a0Initiation Soul Gain<\/i> Culture of Peace<\/i> There is, lastly, an underlying urgency to their calling, for we are in hazardous, transitional times.\u00a0 As Rumi advises:<\/p>\n Sit, be still, and listen, The Care and Feeding of Songs There is otherwise much that can be done to help a song fulfill it purposes.\u00a0 An obvious place to begin is your own health.\u00a0\u00a0 The stronger and more flexible you are in body, mind, and spirit, the more vigor is imparted to the song.\u00a0 It is also good to start a free-form voice practice.\u00a0 This means spending time doing breathing exercises, and pushing the limits of the sounds you are capable of making.\u00a0\u00a0 Experiment with creating a primordial broth of sounds, of melismatic syllables, languages twists, melodic thoughts, audible breaths, animal utterances, plant whisperings, and elemental fluctuations. On the physical level, this develops the vocal apparatus, allowing more ease in the navigation of consonants and vowels, giving more polish and presence to their expression.\u00a0\u00a0 On the imaginal level, it excavates deeper layers of coding in language and culture, surfaces intuitions and bodily understandings, clears blocks, cleanses the vibrational palette, and can get you on the ‘felt’ wavelength of the Gaian Dreamtime song villages.<\/p>\n Songs can be charged, much like crystals. \u00a0Therefore recognize and take advantage of situations in which you can raise the vibrations of the songs you carry. \u00a0Here are song examples: \u00a01) \u00a0You have climbed to a mountain top with an expansive view, and are filled with awe at the beauty around you.\u00a0 Bring some songs out and sing the beauty thru them. \u00a02) \u00a0Go to a waterfall, stand near or under it, and sing to clean and clarify your songs in the cascading energies. \u00a03) \u00a0You are in the presence of a high or self-realized being, maybe receiving darshan. \u00a0Run your songs thru this vibration, even if you have to do it under your breath, or silently. \u00a04) \u00a0Songs sung in medicine circles likewise carry the healing effects of the ceremonies, and sung outside of such circles, they allow the medicine to do yet further work, and naturally create an ambience of life as ceremony.<\/p>\n The great advantage of caring for your songs in these ways, is that you too, as a singer, are likewise charged and elevated.\u00a0\u00a0 This deep symbiosis empowers us to go into the shadow places, of ourselves, of society, to heal the past with harmonics of compassion for what has been, and vision for what can come.\u00a0\u00a0 In such ways we sing in the dawn of a new day, a new era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Gaian Dreamtime Song Village Introduction What follows is a discussion of songs as living beings, as life forms. \u00a0 This includes the cosmology they inhabit, their teleologies (ends, goals), and the potentials offered to us humans when we engage with them in co-creative ways. Songs, as beings highly transparent to their defining vibration, arrange […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/b>Where then do these songs come from? All songs are sourced in the mother of all sounds: \u00a0Om \/ Aum<\/em>. \u00a0Om comes from nothing, the nothingness that contains everything. \u00a0 It is the seed vibration of divinity, the first syllable in the language of creation.<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Somewhere in the refrains of unity moving into diversity and back again, in the circular rhythms of light becoming life, and then again light, and then again life . . . of the universe breathing itself in and out of existence, lies the Gaian Dreamtime, ‘located’ in the subtle stratas of Earthly awareness.<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>We have discussed how everything in the universe is a song in its deep design, a refrain from the great Melody.\u00a0\u00a0 We have also touched on how the theater of evolution is orchestrated from a priori<\/i>levels of consciousness, such as the Dreamtime.\u00a0 In both we have described an evolutionary process in which sparks of consciousness (beings) forget their Divine origins (itself essentialized in their creation-song), which then sets into motion an initiatory ordeal, which catalyzes a remembrance, and with it a renewed, and expanded, awareness of the great symphony of the universe and their contribution to it.\u00a0 It seems humanity is on the cusp of such remembering, of creating and inhabiting a world where we live by what we love, the bhaktisphere.\u00a0 What then is the role of Gaian Dreamtime song villages in this process?\u00a0\u00a0 What ARE these song villages?\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>How to best prepare to receive these songs?\u00a0 Much depends on the state of one\u2019s imagination.\u00a0\u00a0 Is it a busy buzzy hive of thought bees fixated on the plastic flowers of samsara?<\/i>, or is it a garden with space for the deeper reaches of creativity to rise, grow, and bloom, free of weedy resistances to life, to death, to what is?\u00a0\u00a0 A further discussion of \u2018imaginal hygiene\u2019 can be pursued in an article<\/a>of the same name.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of the points touched upon, and others, are summarized below:<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/i>The usual ego-based culture we live in tends to prioritize the visual, and secondarily the auditory, leaving the other senses, taste, touch, smell, and intuition, to play minor roles in assessing the world around us.\u00a0 Added to this imbalance in the utilized ratio of our senses, is their usual numbing via various overloading influences, such video games, junk foods, duty-free perfumes, loud music, etc. \u00a0.\u00a0 Like operating with a corroded and miscalibrated instrument panel, we lose accurate feedback on the world within and without, and so make misinformed, and often dangerous decisions.\u00a0\u00a0 The cure is to restore an even ratio of senses with which to read the world, and to cultivate the subtleties of their use.\u00a0\u00a0 Conscious time spent in nature is the best (and cheapest) way to do this, in addition to the practice of artforms that develop more refined perceptions of beauty (music, painting, gardening, massage, culinary arts, etc.).\u00a0 It is also of great value to both acknowledge and integrate imaginal cognitions into one\u2019s perceptual understanding of the world.\u00a0\u00a0 These include the nonrational, nonlinear modes of dreams, visions, suggestive feelings, and synchronicities.\u00a0 All these give space for the senses to more easily open and receive the currents of creation which carry Dreamtime songs to the surface.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/i>Attention is energy. \u00a0 Where it is placed results in some sort of outcome.\u00a0 How it is focused plays a role in this outcome. \u00a0For the purposes of creating a setting into which high vibration Dreamtime songs are invited to birth, place attention on seeing the potentials for greatness, for best outcome, for whatever is to happen in this world.\u00a0\u00a0 While acknowledging problems and failings as inseparable from growth, focus is on the inherently compassionate, helpful, and altruistic nature of all beings.\u00a0 We in a sense become \u2018health-seers\u2019. \u00a0We ‘see’, visualize, and then hold frequency for what elevates our well-being, for what is needed in the world, and coax it into greater expression thru vocalizing what we are feeling. \u00a0This sets up a resonance which draws songs that are attuned to creating positive outcomes, up and out into the world. Practice makes better!<\/p>\n
\n<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/i>Songs of ceremony naturally appear in ceremonial circumstances.\u00a0 It follows that the more one cultivates the sacred in one\u2019s life, the more transparent life becomes to foundational orders of reality.\u00a0 New sensibilities awaken to perceive these dimensions of the psyche, including the ability to tune into the songs that reside there.\u00a0 Among the more potent intersections of song and ceremony are spiritual healing practices associated with \u2018teacher\u2019 plants and fungi, often called \u2018medicine circles\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Such plants and fungi, replete with neurotransmitters (communication molecules) as activating constituents, are yet another line of defense in the Gaian immune system.\u00a0 Humans entranced by the dream of separation act out sufferings in unconscious, destructive ways. \u00a0When human behavior becomes a disordered element in the planetary ecosystem, it threatens the integrity of the whole.\u00a0 \u00a0These plants and fungi can help humans metamorphose out of our dramas and traumas, and point the way home to the ecosystemic fold.<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>What is life as ceremony?\u00a0\u00a0 One way to approach this is to imagine the universe as a great temple, with successively smaller scaled temples nested within it.\u00a0\u00a0 The nation-state in which one lives is therefore a temple, as well as the local ecosystem, your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances, your place of residence, your body, your mind, and so on.\u00a0\u00a0 Then ask, how does one conduct oneself in a temple, in a sanctuary?\u00a0\u00a0 This is for each to an answer, and the reply is thru one\u2019s actions.\u00a0\u00a0 Here are a few suggestions.\u00a0\u00a0 Start with purifying intent. \u00a0Are you in service to your individuated self, asking only ‘whats in it for me?, \u00a0or are you of service to life, of the greater good?\u00a0\u00a0 Paradoxically, serving the great good is the best way to serve oneself, though not at the level of ego-mind. \u00a0And life as ceremony is all about repositioning the ego-mind from master to servant, i.e., servant of the Vibe one is working to cultivate. \u00a0Everyday life provides endless opportunities to practice, for every day one is given choices to act from a place of openness and love, or armoring and fear.\u00a0 Do you extend or contract?\u00a0 Do you look into the eyes of checkout stand person and acknowledge their amazingness, or do you simply hand over your $ to get on with your day?\u00a0 When you come into a room, is it about \u2018here I am\u2019, or about \u2018there you are\u2019?\u00a0\u00a0 As every new situation confronts us with such questions, we can recast, and therefore appreciate, our difficulties and challenges as initiatory tests, guidance on the Path of self-inquiry. <\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>To contrast with our discussion so far, we will now explore the denser (surface) realms of the imagination and the songs that inhabit them.\u00a0\u00a0 To review:\u00a0 in previous chapters of the story of human evolution, we lived much closer to Nature, and learned from its rhythms.\u00a0 This was reflected in our cultural ways, which, to degrees, translated the ways (teachings, or ‘dharma’) of Nature (ecosystem dynamics) into social forms and practices.\u00a0\u00a0 Such teachings, on subjects as varied as respect for species domains, interspecies dialogues, life force and its equitable use (reciprocity), death and rebirth, were often taught thru the recounting of myths, often in ceremonial circumstances involving dance, poetry, visual arts, and song.\u00a0 The resulting culture in turn educated the imagination, keeping it transparent to Dreamtime influences.<\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Among Native American sweat lodge traditions, there circulates an image of a lodge that exists in spirit world \u2018underneath\u2019 the ceremony happening topside on the earth. \u00a0 Complete with participants, fire, stones, poured water, and rising (or falling) steam, this spirit lodge mirrors the one on the physical plane, and the two mutual feed each other with songs, prayers, and offerings.\u00a0\u00a0 A similar scenario is at work in the design of a Gaian folk-song event .\u00a0 The task is to replicate the Dreamtime song village in earthly form and function.\u00a0 This works thru resonance, cultivating the flow between the \u2018as above’, and the ‘so below\u2019. \u00a0Ideally, one would hold such an event in a place of untrammeled beauty, with intact natural ecosystems. \u00a0Infrastructure should be minimal, with just enough amenities to meet basic human requirements for comfort. \u00a0Privacy, and clear boundaries with the outside world are needed to hold space for the event, to create a container of focus and safety.<\/p>\n
\nWhere one draws the lines between an event, and the outside world, to degrees distinguishes between a a conventional festival, and a consciousness raising gathering. \u00a0For example, the former generally has vendors, and so one is never far away from the consumerist experience, and all that comes with it: \u00a0shopping as a leisure activity,\u00a0instant gratifications,\u00a0games of wariness between buyer and seller,\u00a0competition, status symbols, the pecking order of disparate income levels, the tendency to seek for satisfactions outside oneself, the general numbing of the feeling body before the addictive hunger for ever more goods and distractive experiences,\u00a0and so on. \u00a0These tend to displace the cultural elements that foster feelings of community, personal integrity, feelings of safety,\u00a0transparency, and ecological awareness. \u00a0 A gathering would give the whole ‘spending money’ thing a rest thru most if not all the event. \u00a0A marketplace could happen at the end, in which everyone could participate in egalitarian circumstances. \u00a0 The focus would be on sharing and socializing, with choices given between cash exchanges and bartering.<\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Singing Alive is intended to be such a Gaian folk-song gathering. \u00a0 It attracts those who have the skills, or at least openness, to receive and, if needed, \u2018work\u2019 songs from the Dreamtime into tangibility, and from there into circulation among the human family. \u00a0Singing Alive is designed to invoke, and maintain, ceremonial space and time. \u00a0Into this atmosphere arrive all manner of songs called to serve the awakening of humanity from it dream of ego-defined reality, to assist with our conscious engagement in the great Game of evolution.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the common field of vibration from which these songs ‘sprout’, and which they seek to re-create on the physical plane.\u00a0 For this reason, all songs ‘recognize’ each other, as do, at some level, those who sing them.\u00a0 Each song is a thread of a yet greater story, a vast tapestry of teaching.\u00a0 To communally sing these songs is to activate the story, the template of next octave planet earth.\u00a0 This story can then ripen in our bodies and grow thru our lives.\u00a0 As we choose to become the story, we become an offering to the temple universe.<\/p>\n
\nAny gesture towards renewal must begin with dissatisfaction, with a dis-ease.\u00a0 Songs at Singing Alive often express this as a longing for what has been lost or forgotten, and prophetic visions of a better future. \u00a0Or a yearning for a healing, a restoration, a reconciliation. \u00a0This understands the ecological crisis as essentially a spiritual crisis, as a great homesickness for ourselves as whole, interconnected beings.\u00a0 Singing from the heart\u00a0connects us to an innate bodily intelligence, inseparable from Gaian intelligence, that has none of the judgments and armoring, belief systems and self-importance, of the ego-mind. \u00a0Heart wisdom, once activated, can break through habits of denial, surface wounds, and clear them from the system.\u00a0 This then re-actives the feeling body, long suppressed and numbed by the historical dominance of the rational mind, and with it more conscious communication with the greater ‘society of Nature’.\u00a0\u00a0 These songs include slave-era spirituals, gospels, songs of frustration and angst, and bhakti devotionals. \u00a0 Examples: \u00a0Carry Me Home<\/a>; \u00a0 I Call to You<\/a>; \u00a0 Sanctuary<\/a>; \u00a0 White Buffalo Woman<\/a><\/p>\n
\nThis recognizes that the human body and the earth are the same, and that to engage the life processes of one is to engage those of the other.\u00a0 The identification with the body as an extension of the earth, of the greater cosmos, is attended by songs of remembering.\u00a0 These include: \u00a0those that honor the sacred elements, that correspond elemental qualities to human traits, that invoke the fertility circuit (natural cycles and seasons), and our genetic and karmic lineages.\u00a0 To be more full embodied, to know the body as as an instrument of perception and knowing, opens easier access to ecstatic well-being. \u00a0The ecstatic body is a vehicle for expansive consciousness, and this is reflected in the many songs at Singing Alive from ecstatic and trance traditions. \u00a0For example, Sufi songs that accompany Dervish dancing, the kirtan and mantra chanting associated with yoga, and the invocation songs of shamanism . \u00a0Examples: \u00a0 Breathing the Earth<\/a>; \u00a0 Grandmother \u00a0Ocean<\/a>; \u00a0I Come from the Spirit<\/a>; \u00a0 Sufi Healing Song<\/a>; Tumbling Stone<\/a>; \u00a0Twameva<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/b><\/i>The expansion of self necessitates a shedding of previous, constrictive or outworn identities. \u00a0This brings us to the importance of rites of passage, occasions which – ideally in a held space of trust – allow identity patterns to melt away and new self-perceptions to emerge into new forms and functions.\u00a0 The genre of ‘medicine songs’ is specifically created to work with the ASC (altered states of consciousness) that attend such transitions. \u00a0These songs work with the catalytic effects of such ‘medicines’, to help midwife consciousness through its contractions and releases.\u00a0 As the journey of initiation is universal, there are songs from many ceremonial traditions that attend to, a) letting go of attachments, b) engagement with the shadow<\/i>and, c) tempering of the soul through crisis.\u00a0 The gesture of opening our hearts in song to heal wounds and disharmonies, opens the possibility that we may create these wounds in order to learn to open our hearts. This perspective allows a dissolution of the all to prevalent judgments about ourselves, others, and . . . Empire.\u00a0 This creates space for songs of forgiveness, crucial to any healing and subsequent regeneration. \u00a0Examples: \u00a0\u00a0I Release Control<\/a>; \u00a0Letting Go<\/a>; \u00a0Medicine Hymn<\/a>; \u00a0 Mother I Surrender<\/a>; \u00a0Never Shaken<\/a>; \u00a0Teqsimuyu<\/a>;<\/p>\n
\nThe natural connectivity that asserts itself when the ego defenses relax has a tribalizing effect, and renews our identity as spiritual beings.\u00a0 This re-membering of the many possible constituents of self can result in a kind of ‘soul gain’,\u00a0 the opposite of the ‘soul loss’ that marks the fragmented self. \u00a0Its not that anything is ‘added’ to you, but that you become more transparent to archetypal aspects of yourself, your inherent ‘bigness’. \u00a0The resulting\u00a0personal power comes from careful inspection and management of the self, of the reclamation of our evolutionary heritage, and entrainment with the ever surging creative forces of nature. \u00a0 These forces, ultimately, put you in service to them, to your higher self, to the awakening of all beings. \u00a0This contrasts with the power that comes of control over others, the ‘might makes right’ ethos of dominator cultures.\u00a0\u00a0 Soul gain songs include those that celebrate community, honor our inherent spirituality, merge us with the diversity of life, shapeshifting, and strengthen us with the power of love. \u00a0Examples: \u00a0Burn Fire Burn Bright<\/a>; \u00a0Butterfly People<\/a>; \u00a0Freedom<\/a>; \u00a0Guidance<\/a>; \u00a0My body is a Living Temple<\/a>; \u00a0The Power of Creation<\/a>; \u00a0We are the Rising Sun<\/a><\/p>\n
\nThe re-ecologicalizing of the self that results in soul gain, recreates us at a higher magnitude of awareness. \u00a0We then become an \u2018emergent property\u2019 of life becoming more aware of itself, ourSelf, through the human vehicle.\u00a0\u00a0 This is, in essence, spirituality.\u00a0 Many songs tell of this emergence, often describe it as an awakening.\u00a0 Others give gratitude for the role of nature, or to various benevolent forces, in bestowing these realizations.\u00a0 The equation of a loving heart, and a peaceful world is ubiquitous to the songs at Singing Alive.\u00a0 This suggests a pro-active culture of peace that emerges from within, and then externalizes itself in the world. \u00a0Such a peace cannot be sought outside of self-understanding, cannot be \u2018created\u2019, as it is inherent to our humanity, and can only be revealed by letting go of all that stands in the way of it.\u00a0 The ‘home’ analogy appears in these songs, no longer as a longing, or an asking of guidance, but as a reconciliation, a homecoming.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not a going \u2018back\u2019 to nature, to Spirit, as much as it is a spiraling away, going thru transformations (initiation), and reengaging at another level, the level of the bhaktisphere.\u00a0 This is our new home, the frontierland of our humanness, and the songs are calling us to settle and explore. . \u00a0Examples: \u00a0Deep Within My Heart<\/a>; \u00a0Gaia Peace<\/a>; \u00a0I Find My Joy<\/a>; \u00a0May the Love We Share<\/a>; \u00a0Starlight Vision<\/a>;<\/p>\n
\nBecause you\u2019re drunk,
\nAnd we\u2019re at the edge of the roof
\n<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Once a song has been birthed or learned, you thereafter live in a state of co-existence with it. \u00a0In the early stages of a songs\u2019 life, or its relationship to you, it is useful to hold it as a parent-child relationship.\u00a0 While honoring yourself for having been chosen as a song carrier, your task is to give the song strength thru practice, and guidance thru conscious sharing. \u00a0However, just as you don\u2019t \u2018own\u2019 a child, you cannot keep a song from changing in melody and lyric as it embarks on its life\u2019s journey.\u00a0\u00a0 To do so is like trying to stop teen dating. \u00a0Impossible!\u00a0 It is also an act of hubris, for who are we to know the profound web of intentions and destinies that call a song to creation?<\/p>\n