By Aaron Halevy
Life on Earth has faced many extinctions in its past. These extinctions are recognized to be on a scale of magnitude at least as big as our galaxy. What force could oppose such an immense fate? So far no life on Earth has figured out the solution to avoid such a crisis. But since mankind is not only a living being but also the only known cognitive species, our exemption from such a fate will be in appreciating and acting on this unique difference.
Basement member Sky Shields has recently posed that the belief in the Euclidean-Laplacian-Newtonian versions of “time” and “space” is a mathematical fantasy, and that a higher, inseparable “space-time-matter” of reality is a more valuable understanding of the real universe, as Riemann, Einstein and Vernadsky would agree.[1] Now ask yourself, if this is the case, then what is it you are really looking at when you look at yourself in the mirror? If time does not exist in a linear fashion, where past, present and future are not separate but fully connected, then where is your spouse? And can you say when your grandfather died, as you look to his grave at your feet? These questions are not as existential as they might seem when you keep the fundamental issue of the nature of mind investigating itself in “space-time-matter.”
In Part one [2] of this two part report, I outlined some of the development, from the 19th to the 20th centuries of the concept defined by Vernadsky as “the Noösphere.” To review: this domain is ubiquitous, and just as living organisms are inseparable from the biosphere as a whole, mankind and the entire Noösphere are absolutely inseparable. It has been shown that this domain is a purely creative domain and one participated in and connected to every human being of past, present and future generations. What are the ways we can self-consciously understand this domain of mind? What are ways we can understand how we interact with other living human beings on this higher basis?
The question becomes more subjective when you ask: if this domain is ever-present around us and within us, where then is my identity? Can mind efficiently exist beyond the body? The modern version of this question might be called the “mind-brain paradox.” Is that which we call the soul just a set of memories and neural connections firing off in the brain, as automatic responses to the complex set of sense stimuli entering the body, or is there something more? From what point does this sense stimulus enter into your mind? The immediate fallacy is in the direction of the investigation. We must begin with mind first, and only from that bearing can we investigate what the brain is that the mind is ostensibly “in it.” [2]
If Vernadsky understood the space-time of minerals by their crystal formations, and looked to understand the space-time of living matter by its several evolutions upward of its transforming envelopment of elements and their isotopes, what might be a beginning point where we can gain insight into our own selves in this highest domain, could we look down, as if from the outside of our species? Where would a human locate identity?
Therefore if the mind lives in such a reality which can be said to be “outside simple space and clock time,” then what one should look to prove this, rather than the experience of our universe as presented to the senses.
A perception of ones self or others, “outside the normal sensuous readings of the world,” more specifically, the feeling of being outside of space and time, is often treated as the outermost of human experience. Any close examination of this phenomenon might disturb our “sense” of ourselves, it might cajole us out of our comfort and security of habit as to what it means to be a living human being. Yet, peeking down the rabbit hole, with the right standards and directionality, could provide us the window through which we might receive a prescience of this real world, outside assumption, which is waiting to be further explored and utilized by our conscious minds. The subject of this paper is to bring some such unique reflections to the table, and to begin to poke for a higher comprehension.
It is essential to outline the boundaries to our investigation by excluding all reflections of the oligarchical principle in the human experience. In the effort to cattle most of the human race into submission for easier control by the few, oligarchic escorts from Bertrand Russell to Adam Smith to the Delphic Cult of Apollo have repackaged the same methods of mind control in the past, and most people have fallen for it, again and again. The model is earliest known to Aeschylus as a design to bring mankind away from his inherent Promethean fire: a design to brainwash mankind that he and she are only sensuous beasts and can be pleased only by sensuous pleasures and entertainments, and thus convincing them that they have no creative mind and therefore no business fighting against the supreme will of the gods of mount wall-street or wherever, who control “the way the world works.” [3] It is true that such evil people do exist, but the tragedy of humanity to this day, is that we have accepted this self-induced slavery. Therefore, excluding such means of control foisted upon modern society by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the Tavistock Institute, we can neatly put aside such experiences as drugs, pop-music, video games, loveless sex, television and movies, from our current examination.
Human experience is wide-ranging and varied, so our keystones here shall be those with the participation in a larger social activity, and a connection to a healthy self-consciousness in the activity. Looking at some of the anomalous phenomenon of experience, from a wide range of individuals in recorded anecdotes, speeches and interviews, one finds that there does exist a common thread of such unique experiences. And as we approach the final section of this report, which by no means limits the upper boundary of such phenomenon, we should not be surprised to find that these experiences land on the shores of what has been called by the poets, “the realms of gold.” Also known by its fruits: classical poetic and musical composition, and their daughter, scientific discovery.
Forget not that individuals’ relationships to any facts are hypotheses, and are initially culturally conditioned. That this factor influences thought on any given subject or phenomenon is easily illustrated, as in astrology or quantum physics for example. Therefore, to investigate any anomalous and often misnamed “mystical” phenomenon which lie at the boundary of thought, we must leave sense perceptions and cultural habits of “established opinion” at the door, while we think critically as scientists upon what could be the truth hiding behind such shadows.
“Mysticism is foreign to me, but I am aware that vast domains of consciousness are unknown to us, and are, however, ultimately accessible to scientific investigation, lasting generations.”
~Vladimir Vernadsky [4]
1. Life after Death
The documented anecdotes of those people who have experienced the phenomenon of a so-called “life after death” will serve us well as an introduction to the discussion.
In the book, Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death by psychiatrist Raymond Moody,[5] 150 people were interviewed who had near-death-experiences, many of whom were “declared dead” for some period of time. What is most interesting of such testimony, beyond the meeting family and seeing paradise, are those experiences which are related to us about a different sense of time and space and a super-sense of communication to other still living-human beings, which people in this “near-death” or “after-death” state try to express in such situations.
One woman put it thus,
“Now, there is a real problem for me as I’m trying to tell you this, because all the words I know are three-dimensional. As I was going through this, I kept thinking, ’Well, when I was taking geometry, they always told me there were only three dimensions, and I always just accepted that. But they were wrong. There are more.’ And, of course, our world-the one we’re living in right now- is three-dimensional, but the next one definitely isn’t. And that’s why it’s so hard to tell you this. I have to describe it to you in words that are three-dimensional. That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s not really adequate. I can’t really give you a complete picture.”
Is this a fantasy? Is this something which people are just coming up with in a state of mind outside of control of their body? There is extreme physical stress and yet a continuous self-consciousness, but it is a self-consciousness reminiscent of dreaming. Unfortunately not much else can be really determined from such experiences, because it is highly personal and often incommunicable. Dr. Moody comments that,
“… almost everyone remarks up on the timelessness of this out-of-body state. Many say that although they must describe their interlude in the spiritual body in temporal terms (since human language is temporal), yet time was not really an element of their experience as it it in physical life.”
Dr. Moody explains it further as a problem of language in the conceptualization of the individual in coping with the extreme situation.
“The events which those who have come near to death have lived through lie outside our community of experience, so one might well expect that they would have some linguistic difficulties in expressing what happened to them. In fact, this is precisely the case. The persons involved uniformly characterize their experience as ineffable, that is, inexpressible. Many people have made the remarks to the effect that, “There are just no words to express what I am trying to say,” or “they just don’t make adjectives and superlatives to describe this.”
Must it be that the language used was wrong, or could they have meant really what they said? Why can’t it be communicated? For now we shall leave this phenomenon to further research and speculation and move on to the second example.
2. “The ZONE”
“Ninety percent of hitting is mental, the other half is physical.”[6]
Mind-body paradoxes often leave us only to grope around through unique personal experiences, like the claimed religious experience of the baptist revival, it is most often a case of, “you had to be there to believe it – you had to feel it yourself!” Could a broader socializing of one’s activities likely increase the possibility for such experiences?
Because the terms are a little more generalized, many people can recognize that they have already experienced something akin to the out-of-body experience, in the realm of sports! There is a well known phenomenon among athletes that there exists an extreme concentration of mind which heightens physical performance. On the training level, and in youth sports competitions it seems to be a fairly common and openly discussed goal to achieve.
The phenomenon can be connected to the mental side of the so-called runner’s high, i.e. when someone is running a marathon or long race and they are physically exhausted, and then, as if by miracle, they are able to rise above the pains of their bodies and are able to force it to continue on for much longer, turning the pain into a pleasure of sorts. Although the mechanism to explain this has been reduced to body chemicals and endorphins, it can not explain the state of the mind in any such case. The mental aspect of these athletic miracles is sometimes referred to as getting in the zone.
The most famous case of the zone is the 1992 NBA Finals Game of the Bulls against the Blazers, in which Michael Jordan was in “the zone” to the witness of millions of screaming fans. Yet Jordan could not explain it at all, “my threes felt like free throws…” [7] that is, the space was altered.
A few professional athletes, like Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, speak of the zone as a “mystical feeling“ that would, on occasion, lift the action on the court to the level of time-bended hyper-awareness:
“At that special level all sorts of odd things happened…. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball in bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, “It’s coming there!“ – except that I knew everything would change if I did. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me.”
Former NFL linebacker, Dave Meggyesy said that,
“… the zone is the essence of the athletic experience, and those moments of going beyond yourself are the underlying allure of sport.”
Several psychologists have studied this more broadly as mind enhancing, or surpassing the performance of the body by some extreme self-conscious concentration.[8] Taken as a general phenomenon, the psychologists would say, these experiences exemplify an innate human tendency to surpass one’s limits. More broadly one can find that many eastern sports, medicines and religions speak of self-consciously heightening one’s self through meditation, an enlightening, or separation of mind from body.
There seem to be many factors in achieving “the zone” and its relative experiences, and although the effects on one’s performance can be witnessed, it still is mostly personal to the one experiencing it. Is the athlete reaching back in time to achieve his or her supremacy over the limits in the body? Not really. Is the connection between the athlete to the other players reciprocal? Possibly. How about to the audience? Definitely not. Now we have paved the way for the bulk of the discussion to follow.
3. Classical Artistic Performance
There is a place, where the experience is highly social, whose effects can be transmitted to all other participants, whose success begins in the mind and is something which is uniquely human, and that is the realm of classical artistic performance. Returning to Vladimir Vernadsky, in developing his concept of the Noösphere, he makes this short diary comment in the year 1932:
“Discussed with Ivan [Grevs] on religion. I think that penetrating deeper than anything into the understanding of the universe is music and those states of mind connected with creativity – and for me, scientific creativity. What may give rise to such moods may even be of a philosophic-religious character, if these are expressed by the words and the formulae of our social life.” [9]
Without assuming endorphins or some chain of mechanical causes, what happens to those people who are subjectively involved in the performance of such classical music or science?
In the midst of singing, or using an instrument of some kind among the very best artists and performers there is often described an “out of body” like experience. Among them, only those artists who have struggled predominantly to re-animate the classical compositions of the greatest minds such as Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, Verdi, et. al. are capable of describing in the richest metaphors, the phenomenon they subjectively experience within their participation with such composers and attentive audiences.
Magda Olivero, born in 1910, is a famous Italian Soprano of the verismo-school of singing. In an interview she made the following comment about what it is like for her to sing on stage.
“For me the notes are not just notes, but moods, expressions of the soul. And it’s wonderful to enter this marvelous – magical world. Each time I went out on stage and the music started, it was as if, in the middle of the stage, a halo opened – I called it a magic halo – I would enter the halo and only emerge from it at the end of the opera.”[10]
What happened? She is totally conscious, there are no drugs involved, and she was able to perform an entire opera in this state of mind? How could this happen? Where did she “go”?
Flutist Sheryl Cohen, in a book on technique wrote,
“In 1991, the National Flute Association honored Jean-Pierre Rampal with a Lifetime Achievement award at its national convention in Washington D.C. For the gala concert in his honor, I was invited to perform Mozart’s Andante in C accompanied by flute choir. Rampal was seated on the stage directly in my line of vision. As he heard the opening chords of the music, his face took on the emotion of the piece as if he were performing it himself. Simply seeing the expression on his face instantly transported me away from the physical aspect of performing before thousands of flutists and into the world of music. At that moment, I completely forgot myself and became Mozart’s Andante. “ [11]
Jason Robards, an American actor was interviewed on his long work on Eugene O’Neill
“… We did eight performances a week of [O’Niell’s] Moon For The Misbegotten and it’s a three hour and forty five minute play and we didn’t cut - we didn’t do any of that stuff. And we played it out, the whole bloody thing and it was a fabulous, fabulous play. … And you get to a point doing a 3 hour and 45 minute play where you say we’re doing eight a week and you say between a matinee, “Jeez, I don’t know if I can make it, … I’ll give you everything I got but I don’t know if I can get the full emotional value come late in the play, in the latter half of the play“ … But sure enough, I got halfway into that, I was just going along and all of a sudden a hand came out and it came right in the middle of my back and just gave me a push, like this. Up and soar, everything was there. And it was O’Neill; it was his writing and his hand and it was him. And I know that he filled me with that. And it happened again on the evening performance, that I felt, “Well, I really gave…“ and then I never worried about it again…”
…That’s the eternal triangle: the writer, the audience, and the actor, where they join. And here’s the thing, when this hand comes up and pushes you, you go in there to a three hour and forty-five minute performance or five hours, like in The Iceman and if it’s going right, it seems like about 2 minutes. You break time and space and time. Ralph Richardson said, “Every time we go on the stage at 8:30,“ when we used to be in the old days, “we break time, if we do it right, we break space and it’s our time to dream. We dream, we have to be able to dream.“ What a line, he says. Is that unbelievable?” [12]
In 2010 this author had the great opportunity to visit Italy and to participate in a week long musical masterclass series. There were singers, pianists, guitarists, accordionists, cellists, and violin players – all the students were between 15 – 35 years old. In the night, the groups would get together and have joint performances. It was a really fantastic opportunity, because one could visit the other masterclasses which were all ongoing at the same time. As a singer I was interested to see how a cellist must learn to bow the instrument, how a violinist must breathe, and how a pianist must sing.
In auditing the last day’s piano master class, led by Maestro Carmassi, the creator of the week-long school and an extremely passionate teacher of music, I was provided with yet another example of the magic of classical music. The student being taught was a depressive looking kid, I would guess that he was probably 16-18 years old. He had long dirty hair which almost covered his eyes, he was very skinny and had a raspy smokers voice, but underneath the veneer he was still very young and innocent.
After working on a piece familiar to him, Maestro Carmassi asked the student to work on a Mozart sonata which the student himself had somewhat forgotten. He knew it enough to play it from memory, and so as he was playing, while still remaining relaxed, he was committing to the expression and he was breathing just right, allowing the piano to sing as if for the first time. Just then, he moved to a minor passage, which Mozart beautifully resolves to major, and I saw a smile begin to blossom from the hair hidden lips of the student. He was beginning to giggle as he played. Then he stopped and said, “I don’t know what is happening, I feel funny.” Carmassi asked him to describe what had happened, and the student stuttered to say how the resolution surprised him as he played it, that he didn’t see it coming, and it was living through him as he played: a ghostly presence. Carmassi slowly nodded and looked at him and said, “this is Mozart.” He paused, and told the student in a comforting voice, “Now play it again with this. Not with yourself, but this, as Mozart.” By now the student was welled up in the face, his cheeks were red and his eyes began to moisten. Thus overwhelmed and impassioned he declined and asked if he could step outside for a little while and rest. It was truly a beautiful moment in which I was glad to be human.
Carmassi then came over to those of us who were watching the lesson and described what he was thinking at this moment. He said that the reaction of the student was beautiful, but not to be preferred in a performance. You can not be emotionally surprised when you play, you have to create it in a surprising way; its impossible to be this surprised in a concert. But this is the only way to become a real musician, because music is not something only to understand, but something that you should feel, but this feeling is what you have to transmit, you can not be this impassioned in a physical way, otherwise you can not play the instrument. “What you have to do, is create a phantasma of the character. In this case it is a musical phantasma. It is there more clearly in staged drama. The actor on stage is a doorway for a character, they are not the character. You don’t have to be a killer to portray lady Macbeth, or you don’t have to be a courtesan to portray Violetta in La Traviata.”
William Warfield, the great American Baritone and an associate of the LaRouche movement until his death in 2002, gave a speech in 1997 which is highly relevant to the investigation here, and is one of the first provocations to this idea which this writer encountered. His speech is well worth hearing in full but I have selected only those sections for the topic in question because he converges on a generality of such an experience in a way which points to delightful theological implications. Mr. Warfield opened his speech by answering a question posed earlier by an audience member in the conference.
“… it reminds me of a situation in which I was with Pablo Casals, the great cellist and conductor, and we were rehearsing something one afternoon, and it was a Bach cantata. And it was one of those things in which everything happened in the rehearsal, and we finished the piece and we just sat there in silence, with a catharsis of having experienced something great that had come amongst us while we were doing it, and I looked up and the Maestro had a tear rolling down his cheek and he said, “aren’t we fortunate to be musicians.”
I’ve never forgotten that moment, because he outlined for us that the profession that we were in, is a profession of calling and a profession of art and a profession that when you’re in … you are closest to God, I believe, when you are performing, because you are a vehicle for that wonderful thing that we’re getting from on high, that comes through us and makes us a bigger person and makes us the vehicle to transport that to other people. But you have to be, as they say in television, “online” to get it.[13]
Antonella Banaudi, the powerful Italian Verdi-Soprano, in her speech to the Schiller Institute’s July 2011 Conference in Russelsheim, Germany made the most insightful and bold observations that I am aware of to date, on the very point at issue.
“When you sing, you don’t count! 1, 2, 3, and 4 do not exist; the bar line of the measure does not exist. … Going onto stage to perform is already a different dimension, but I have had the experience of “non-time” very often, like an experience of being separated from the reality of the performance itself, even as a character. There are long moments in which we don’t belong to ourselves. It is a magical sensation, almost a super-perception of one’s self.…
…Starting with the first sound, we are no longer ourselves; we are another person who expresses an artistic language, a primary language. We create in ourselves another personality which we will succeed in taking possession of, to the extent that we have forgotten ourselves through studying it.
…The process of inquiry is one of revealing one’s own beauty, that is often greater than we had imagined at the outset. It is our own artistic being, which strengthens us and allows us to express ourselves with art for intellectual enjoyment, but also physical enjoyment, as a singer. At the same time, we will be the conduit for beauty and truth, so that others can enjoy them. Studying is thus a process of knowledge of the true Self, masked by the I.…
…The more we use our real instrument … the more we will transmit all aspects of the composer ’s intention, and we will be able to respect and convey the composer ’s imaginative power and become instruments of creation.”[14]
The Oppressor’s Wrong
Pause and imagine a generation of children without this respect for beauty, this connection to immortality, this happiness and joy in the connection with other human beings on sublime subjects of such art. Imagine these children slowly being denied access to this possibility in their public school music programs because of budget cuts. Imagine that the only thing that there is plenty of access to for these fragile minds is popular music, and popular culture which carries none of these powers of concentration and thought. Some of these children would hate music all together, and some of the children would be prone, in a crisis, to eat each other alive. That is exactly what is happening today and was intended by direction of the CCF.
Yet this is not new. Some praised figures from the past with an obedience to brain and behavior over powers of mind have also found themselves distanced from music and poetry, a disgust for the beautiful. Take the following confession from Charles Darwin, the mouthpiece for the theory of evolution by natural selection, who wrote near the end of his life in his autobiography:[15]
“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature”.[16]
It is even more bitter to note that Emma Darwin, Charles’s mother, apparently was a pianist and was trained by none other than the great Mocheles and Chopin. Or take the following comment from Sigmund Freud in his preface to ’The Moses of Michelangelo,’
“I am no connoisseur in art … nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting … [I] spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their true effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of the mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”
Freud’s friend, Theodor Reik wrote that Freud had, “… developed an increasing reluctance to surrendering to the dark power of music.”
Ensemble Performance and the Audience
As the performance of a musical piece includes two, three, four or more people, the relationships become more complex and at the same time much more revealing about the social nature of man and where his mind can “go.” These become of special interest when one reflects on the fact that now the performer is participating in a several mind’s attempt at this connection with the composer and the audience. Anyone who has had the privilege to work in a chorus or an orchestra knows this in some way, when the group of people performing exit themselves and allow this music to flow through them there is often described a moment of connection with the other chorus members, a notion of “that really worked.”
Highly qualified string quartet players have commented on an experience of connecting to the other players in the quartet expressed as feeling that one is playing all the parts at once, and the composer which allows a higher discovery of the method intended in the performance. The great first violinist of the Amadeus String Quartet, Norbert Brainin speaks to this point in an interview done by Ibykus Magazine in 2004. Brainin commented on the difficulty that the quartet had in figuring out how to play Mozart’s string quartets, and in hindsight he described that they were missing something, something about the way Mozart thought, or the way that he wanted his pieces performed, and that they only had to hear Mozart tell them through them.
Brainin: … that is where the major interpretative difficulties lay. The stages through which Mozart moves in his quartets—his intensive study of Bach while he composed the “Haydn Quartets,” along with the notion of Motivführung that Haydn himself had initiated, that was very, very hard for us to grasp. We simply had no inkling of it. Only in the course of time did we begin to understand the actual process of unfolding in each of Mozart’s quartets. Non-professionals will simply not get it; it will be a complete blank to them, because for the layman, Mozart is “just so beautiful.”
Ibykus: How did you begin to understand it?
Brainin: Paradoxically, at first I found that I understood less and less! But we refused to let ourselves be led down the primrose path, and we were intent on “listening into” the music, again and again. Through playing, very intensely, and listening to one another no less intensely, our essential aim was to grasp how his musical thought unfolded. We could not get enough of playing! Finally, we tried the following: I said: “I shall play, and you must follow. Naturally (at the relevant passages) you must play as you see fit, or better said, as it suits, and I’ll go along.” That was a huge step forward in our understanding of the work, and also, of ensemble playing.
Many would tend to think of Mozart’s music as light and agreeable, a view that one very frequently came across in those days—and one would play his works “softly.” I insisted that one should not play Mozart “softly,” but rather with intensity, as there is a terrific strength and dynamic in his music. It took years until we managed to really bring that to the fore. … We wanted to really understand Mozart’s music, and at the end of the day, we did.
Ibykus: Could one say that the Amadeus Quartet learned how to play from Mozart? Was the study of Mozart the keystone?
Brainin: Actually, yes, but not Mozart alone, it was Beethoven as well.
What he is describing is truly amazing: the quartet could not figure out the method and therefore they discovered a way to collaborate such that they could invoke from the past the living mind of Mozart or Beethoven. A hand reaching across time.
Brainin: … The [Beethoven’s Op. 59, No. 3] was incredibly well-received, as I imagine that in London, no one had heard it played with such life in it. Needless to say, at our début we hadn’t really understood the piece; nevertheless, we had “listened into” the music so deeply, and we had allowed ourselves to be so uplifted and inspired by Beethoven (and by our audience too), that it became a terrific performance, and the audience was inspired.[17]
It is important to review the question at issue here. What we see in this section as opposed to the previous two is that the mind in the case of performing a classical music is fully-aware, is fully connected to the audience, to the other musicians, and to the composer, who is no longer living. The other experiences in sports, in meditation or any other extreme physical stress, have no such eternal connection. In classical music performance, there is also an efficient action of extension of the identity of the individual beyond the borders of the body, through the medium of the music, and into other minds present for the performance. The performer expresses a sensation of an extension of themselves beyond simple space and time. So if this is possible, where is the mind of the performer located? And can this model serve us as the definite case, rather than an exception to the rule?
At this point in the investigation, as inspiring as these phrases may be, we find that these performers are still reflecting on their own experience and ultimately they still are only experiencing it. They can interpret for us what they are doing but these words are still as fleeting and inconclusive as those who experience a “life after death.” They’re able to describe the way their mind is working, but they don’t know how it works, why it works. They seem divinely inspired to most of us, because they are so near to a purely human and creative source. Thus we have relied on the fruit of the experience, but where is the tree which made the fruit? They are the truest shadows of experience, but nonetheless they are shadows. As Shelley reminds us…
“The person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations: for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.”
What then is this domain which is being participated in by the classical musical experience? Could anyone articulate, with any possible selection of words, that which is being counterfeited in these examples?
These questions were the cause of Part I [2] of this report: How can we think of the “space-time” of the growing human consciousness which Vernadsky called the Noösphere? Where can we say it exists? How connected are we as human beings, and is this connection heightened, or more realized during classical musical performance and the act of discovery or composition? At this point, the conclusions are too weak to prove anything, but what has hopefully been presented here, in so many niggling pages, has at least been sufficient to provoke your imagination. [18]
Fly, Thoughts!
When the mind, as Johannes Kepler was convinced, has struggled through to an understanding of the deeper plan of God’s work,
“then he becomes aware that he walks in the light of truth; he is seized by an unbelievable rapture and, exulting, he here surveys most minutely, as though from a high watch-tower, the whole world and all the differences of its parts.” [19]
It should not be surprising to realize that in this investigation of the mind transcending time and space, that we have
climbed the rungs of reflection to reach the peaks of human thought, and find ourselves in the realm of creativity in its purest form: the creation of classical art and scientific discovery. Open any of the great works of poetry by Shelley, Keats, Schiller or Shakespeare and within it you shall find their reflections of such a higher domain known to Vernadsky as the Noösphere.
To the poets, the discoverers, the philosophers and the statesmen, their minds, their words, their dreams and their ideas all live in the future and are made of eternally future substance. They remind us that there is a pervasive principle of mind, and that it is a dominant cause in the entire universe, and we are only now in the beginning of our 21st century, beginning to realize this principle. These men live in such spaceless-timeless-matterless worlds, and it is their encapsulating of such undiscovered countries which broadens the imagination of all mankind and drives the evolution of the entire species. It can be seen in the penetrating gaze of Rembrandt’s eyeless Homer and it can be heard in the silences within the music of our greatest composers. These men are our ambassadors from the Noösphere, this invisible nation of mankind which exists outside the brain and outside of time. As life does not come from non-life, creativity does not come from non-creativity, thus the only true way to study this domain is to recreate the discovery of such future states in your own mind. Only through a culture committed to beauty and truth we can find an Elysium already waiting for us in the future.
People who do not think in the future are paralyzed, like the congress in Washington D.C. or the silly fools protesting in the streets: they go through the motions of life, and do what they’re supposed to do – they function and even solve problems, but they’re not creative. An Empire culture, one which will always tragically end in collapse, destroys creativity by discouraging this future vision, this creative consciousness, holding the mind down with chains of popular opinion.
Have you ever had a prescience of an idea which would appear to the front of your mind months, maybe years later? Have you ever worked so closely with a few people that you begin to share the thoughts of the others? Hearing your own thoughts from their mouth? Have you ever loved someone so much that you can think what they will say, even when they are not near you? That this connection even extends with equal power over death’s cold clutches, whether it’s the words of someone dead, or their music or their effects on the world we live in, this should reveal something about the shape of space of mind, per se, and why Lyndon LaRouche has called mankind “the immortal species.”
It is this resonance of mind with mind, soul with soul, which is a reflection of the domain of the interconnectedness of humanity; the fuzzy, flickering boundary between what we usually think of as separate individuals is gone for just a moment. It is another crack through which you see that your mind isn’t only your mind.
Like a developing language over time, there is an inherent directionality to the human species outside of the individuals themselves. Nothing momentary, nothing sensual can keep that direction from progressing, and woe to those who try. But could mankind bound his own direction? If this is real and it is embedded in a higher conception of physical-space-time, could mankind predetermine the future, in this poetic way, and manifest the future state? How would this be possible? Are ideas really embedded in all substance, or is there a dualism? How could one test this?
A higher position can be gained on these final question here by referencing Lyndon LaRouche’s revolutionary discovery of the true nature of the credit system.
In the handful of discoveries such as Kepler’s and compositions such as Beethoven’s which exist for us today, what can be found is that the mind of the composer travels ahead of the body – or “brain” – through these works, and that the range of effects of such a mind travel from the “past” into the “future” as a incessant entity embedded in the Noösphere. Finite actions exist, but classical-artistic-discoveries are infinite. The classical humanist mind is, as Riemann expressed, a developing, evolving mind, an unfinished conscious thought. The physical economist acts not on the basis of the present, but on the future: he or she is able to act in the future, as opposed to finite time. What we call future society becomes the completed action of these past ideas, that which shall become the future’s present.
Endnotes
1 See Sky Shields’s 2 part series, Is the Past Fixed, on LPAC.com, https://www.larouchepac.com/node/18310
2 For a fuller elaboration of this question see WHAT & WHERE IS YOUR MIND? By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. September 1, 2011. https://www.larouchepac.com/node/19281
3 See Lyndon LaRouche’s report Three Steps to Recovery https://www.larouchepac.com/node/19759 and also my paper The Oligarchical Principle https://www.larouchepac.com/node/19290
4 Small Soviet Encylopedia, 2nd Edition, Volume II. Moscow __3_8_7.1934. Page 375.
5 Life After Life, By Raymond Moody. (Harper San Francisco-1975).
6 This is possibly the only place a Yogi Berra quote actually works as an introduction.
7 Asked after the game, Jordan couldn’t understand it or explain what had happened, “I was in the zone, my threes felt like free throws man. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I was taken ’em, and they [were] going in.”
8 Dr. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, wrote an in-depth study on this “state of mind,”generalizing it to all life experiences. “ Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
9 Excerpt from Vernadsky’s Diary, March 15, 1932
10 The Art of Singing: Golden Voices of the Century, directed by Donald Sturrock produced by Nvc Arts in 2002. The quote starts @1h27min of the DVD
11 The Bel Canto Flute: The Rampal School, by Sheryl Cohen, 2003, pg. 35
12 The full interview can be seen here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/oneill/
13 The video recording of this presentation can be found on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8wwL-yrRE0
14 The Musical Soul, by Antonella Banaudi. A presentation of the Schiller Institute Conference in Russelsheim, Germany (July, 2011) the video of her speech and her performance at the conference can be seen https://www.larouchepac.com/node/18699
15 Both of the following quotes I found first in Dr. Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia in a very different context.
16 From Darwin’s Autobiography, pg 26
17 The full interview can be found here http://www.schillerinstitute.org/music/brainin_interview-2005.html
18 The list of examples from musicians and performers on such a process could go on and on, and in fact, if something comes to your mind which I don’t have quoted in this piece, please feel free to send me you own stories or those of others. Send to
19 Kepler, by Max Caspar, pg. 273
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