(Some of this music is from our Homexam training videos, and thus copyrighted; all of my autobiographical videos, however, are expected to be released to public domain.) If you are interested in this, you might want to bookmark this page - it's a work in progress. (The following material is adapted from a forthcoming autobiography, From Fundamentalism, Through Atheism, Toward Realization, by Larry Reavis, Ph.D.
Who Does Write the Lines?
I wrote this many decades ago after a failed teenage romance. I'll spare you the first verses, but perhaps you might find the last verse interesting. After writing the first words, "Sun dips in the sea, the wind is blowing; lights come on, the curtains rise," I almost scratched them out; I wanted to replace them with words that meant something. But I didn't; I felt that maybe they did mean something that I didn't understand, so I kept them - they just felt right.
A few years later I was sitting in an Army library in Korea reading a book by Carl Jung. He was explaining something about what he called the "collective unconscious." Among the examples he gave in support of this notion, he mentioned a number of cultures that symbolize the sun as the male, and of the sea, the female. Instantly I remembered the words to my song that hadn't made sense when I wrote them. Upon reflection, I could not doubt the accuracy of Jung's interpretation - obviously, my lyrics had to do with procreation. But I had doubts regarding the source. Instead of getting those images from some collective unconscious, I speculated that - more likely - the images came to me from instinct - much like the source from which the bird or the lizard shown in the video probably get most of their smarts. (If you don't have a broadband web connection, download and open later.)
Illusion
About 13 years later, a song came to me as I slept, complete with words to the first verse. I immediately awoke and sang the song into a tape recorder. While still under the influence of the dream, I added a second verse. Again, I was rather taken aback at the words "Illusion, my love, please don't let me see . . ." for I considered myself a level-headed atheist with no reason at all to indulge in illusions. (Dial-up connection? Click here.)
Shall We Gather at the River
On a hot afternoon in July, 1864, a song came to a preacher by the name of Robert Lowry as he "was lying on a lounge in a state of physical exhaustion." That song was "Shall We Gather at the River," one of my father's favorite hymns - and mine too, at about the same time that I wrote "Who Does Write the Lines." Lowry's lyrics come from Revelation 22:1-2: "A pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God . . . "
Years after I wrote the above two songs, I read from a variety of sources that the "river" is the stream of energy that pours from spirit and floods all of creation - much like Jung's collective unconscious. In ancient yogic philosophy, this energy from the cosmos comes from the sun and other sources and enters the body via the skin and especially the "mouth of God" - the medulla oblongata in the brain stem (which forms one pole of a binary system with the spiritual eye in the front-center area of the brain). From there it is stored in the cerebrum, to be dispersed to the lower five energy centers in the spine - which, along with the two higher centers in the brain, the cerebrum and medulla oblongata/spiritual eye system - are referred to as the "seven golden candlesticks" in the Bible (see Revelation 1:12).
This creative energy is also spoken of in the Hebrew Bible, ". . . He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live" (Deuteronomy 8:3); Jesus is reported to have said the same in Matthew 4:4. The same concept is translated from the Hebrew Rouch and the Greek pneuma as "Holy Spirit" or "Holy Ghost," and are related to the Latin inspiration, which also can be translated either as the "inflow of breath" or "creative spirit." Ancient texts from India, and other sources, further claim that one can live without eating when one is able to consciously direct that energy into the body.
The Roman Catholic nun, Therese Neumann, reportedly lived from 1923 until her death in 1962 by light flowing in through the glass-roofed room specially built for her and by the small wafer and sip of wine given during mass. (Although urine tests have caused some to doubt her claims, Yoganandaji visited her and personally attested to the truth of her story). Many Indian yogis, such as Giri Bala, who also lived in the 20th century, reportedly lived without eating.
It is said that this energy often is referred to as the "word" (logos, equally well translated as "the sound" *) or "the sound of many waters" (see Revelation 1:14, for example) because of how it sounds to meditators when in a deep state of meditation. The word typically is pronounced as a slowly spoken aum by a yogi, or ah-men when spoken by traditional Judeo-Christian congregations; the Muslims pronounce it amin, the Tibetan Buddhists say hummm, etc. In the fundamentalist church of my youth, we pronounced it "amen, brother!" - with the "a" rhyming with "hay." The ancient Indians say it consists of five currents (once it enters the body), among which prana and apana are most prominent; the Chinese simply refer to it as Qi once it enters the body. Modern physicians, such as the cardiologist Mimi Guarneri, M.D. (in her book The Heart Speaks), and others who think along these lines refer to it as "life force.".
Whether inside or outside the body, it is said to be the intelligent vibration that is the creator of matter and the vehicle of consciousness (or "intelligence" or "wisdom") - according to Paramahansa Yogananda on p. 1585 of his Second Coming of Christ (see the definition given for Holy Ghost on that page). The basic premise of string theory - which holds that the source of all matter is tiny vibrating strings - is similar to the description given to the the aum vibration by ancient sources. Other physicists who wrote before string theory was popular, such as Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel prize, physics, 1945), also saw a correspondence between quantum physics and a universal consciousness (he published, with Jung, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche; also go to www.psychovision.ch/synw/pauli_parapsychology_p1.htm), as did Robert Oppenheimer ("father of the atomic bomb") - who was so taken with ancient Indian wisdom that he mastered Sanskrit (Oppenheimer even quoted a verse from the Bhagavad Gita when the first atomic bomb was exploded - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8w3Y-dskeg). Although most physicists scoff, scores of other physicists, including other Nobel prize winners (e.g., read Brian Josephson's position here), agree with this view. For reasons that exceed the scope of this venue, I now concur with Jung's notion of a collective unconscious, and I see it as essentially similar to the Biblical and yogic concepts described above and to concepts being developed beyond quantum physics. I attribute both of the above two songs to that cosmic intelligence/wisdom that was attempting to expand my understanding - in the same way that it was working through Robert Lowry and is always working through each of us. (Dial up: click here.)
*Note: According to footnotes in Yoganandaji's The Second Coming of Christ (p. 10), the tendency of most churches to identify logos with Jesus is at variance with the understanding of the earliest Christians. For example, according to John Patrick, in his book Clement of Alexandria, "Clement repeatedly identifies the Word with the Wisdom of God" (perhaps today we would say "consciousness of God"?). Similarly, Dr. Ann Pasquier in her The Nag Hammadi Library After Fifty Years states "Philo, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen . . . all associate the Logos with the word of God in the Old Testament accounts of the creation . . ." And, she continues, "The Valentinians do likewise . . . According to the Valentinians, the prologue to John's Gospel depicts a spiritual genesis, the model for the material one, and it is seen as a spiritual interpretation of the Old Testament accounts of the creation." The "prologue to John's Gospel" that she is referring to is of course the first verses that read "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God . . . All things were made by Him. . ." The "Him" in that sentence refers to a personification of Gods' wisdom - a personification that was common among Jews like John at that time and earlier. For example, Karen Armstrong in her A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam states "The author of the Book of Proverbs . . . personifies wisdom so that she seems a separate person" (see Proverbs 8:12 - "I wisdom dwell with prudence . . ."; also see 8:22-23, 30-31).
Riff
No fancy graphics here; not much story either. . . just playing something I put together in the early 70s. Hope you enjoy it. (Click here to download to hard disk.)
