How music has aided my spiritual development

Early last night, I once again did use music in PSI, and saw ways others might. But just as new mathematics builds on foundations which are essential which not everyone knows about, I must start with background. Just as an example -- in 2009, I found myself sitting next to Klaus Nobel, in a fancy meal at a high ranking restaurant in DC. Klaus spoke about how he was the real force behind the "Nobel prize in Economics" which, he said, is not officially a real Novel Prize. but his real interest was on what I call PSI, the development and use of psychic or spiritual capabilities. I assured him that I was just as deep into that as he was, and that I have been working in my own way. He arched his eyebrow and was clearly skeptical I could really mean that. "IF so, and if your interest is real, what music do you use?" It is clear HE viewed that connection as fundamental. It reminded me of people who wrote about groups in Switzerland whoview mathematics, music and mysticism as entangled fields, which only reach full expression when working together. Now it reminds me of jung's Red Book, which discusses the importance of multiple modalities, not ONLY words. For me, I did not even BELIEVE in PSI until spring 1967. I forcibly rejected the possibility of PSI, for reasons I have repeated often enough. But I did not reject music. In one year of my life, when I was twelve, I lived with my mother, brother, sister and a beagle in a row house on Graver's Lane, in the Chetsnut Hill part of Philadelphia. In the same year, I commuted by train to the University of Pennsylvania, where I took the junior advanced calculus course under Professor Schub. That same year, I scraped up $100 to buy a used upright piano, which I used for the usual kinds of piano lessons. I felt some affection for Mr.Conkey, the music teacher in my school, who made sure we knew the standard music theory and heard lots of classical music. In his class, and on the radio, I heard a good amount of classical music, and echoed the disrespect we had for popular music of the time. It certainly was an activity consistent with the spirit of mathematics. I even "composed" a few things in little blue music score books; Mr. Conkey nodded his head in vacant approval, with a few suggestions, but no sign of greatness or such. For two years, 1962-1964, I attended a boarding school, the Lawrenceville School, which radically changed my understanding of music, in a way which set the stage for PSI. I did not listen to classical music much even on the radio there, but I often went to their music building, which had great pianos, and where I could even start improvising. As I put more of my real energy and feelings into it, it seemed to go somewhere, and I even remember a music teacher walking in and showing some real interest. More important, in the second year, I met "the other smartest kid in the class," a new kid from New York. Actually, late in the first year, I already went through a radical change in viewpoint. As I was taking Alonzo Church's graduate course in Princeton on mathematical logic, I gradually realised that pure deductive logic, no matter how perfect, simply doesn't provide enough basis to answer the basic questions of ethics and purpose which I had been interested in since I was 12. That was when I said: "Stop asking what you SHOULD do; ask what you WOULD do if you were wise. You need to better understand the "YOU" (the I)," which implies what I now call first order sanity, which calls for full openness to first person inputs. But did I realize it yet that year?? In my second year, that kid from New York loved to listen to Mahler, which I even listened to once in our school library. Yes, I had listened to a lot of music, but he said I was not REALLY listening. I needed to learn how to really feel the music inside me as I was listening. I needed to learn how to listen to and feel the whole thing. That turned out to be really important. In my three years as an undergraduate at Harvard, 1964 to 1967, I did not believe in PSI at all until spring 1967. But I did believe in classical music, and even in its value in strengthening my first order sanity, my full awareness of what was around me. (You might call it a kind of "mindfulness.") My parents bought me a stereo as I started school, and I bought a few albums of classical music, and listened hard for my whole time as undergraduate. Stravinsky, Prokoviev, Shostakovich, Bartok, Faure, maybe Bolero, a few others. I would rest back in a comfortable leather easy chair, and let the music totally roll over me, and fill me. And at times I used that as a prop as I prepared to concentrate hard on issues involving neural networks, economics, political systems, and other such things. In my second year, I even took a course from DeVore on primate behavior (to help me understand how brains work), where I saw the classic video by vanderPost (whose name I did not notice at the time) on the "Bushman dance," which I immediately understood as a key to where humans languages really come from. Music and dance BEFORE words, the foundation on which words are built. And so, I believe that these efforts were a crucial part of what CAUSED me to have the unsought-for dramatic PSI experience I have often written about, in the spring of 1967, which forced me to reconsider PSI quite seriously. I describe that already in the published, open papers I link to at www.werbos.com/religions.htm, and in what they cite for more detail. Serious interest in US-China relations and interest in observing how things work in my brain were other crucial elements. In my last year there, 1966-1967, I also had access to a great piano in my house at Harvard, where I went back to improvising, and even discussion with serious musicians, whose art does have some resonance with PSI. In 1967-1968, at LSE, my main access to music was hearing OTHER people's music, as in restaurants or the street, but then I did listen to popular music, and realize it is a window into minds around me. From 1967 to 1972 I had a series of experiences, mostly due to my experimentation, which moved me from <1% belief in PSI to >99%. In much later years, I did open myself to a 10% possibility that ALL psi experiences might be caused by a kind of Jungian synchronicity, caused by our cosmos implementing optimization equations which look a lot like an intelligent system in itself; however, as I looked more closely (in recent years, again), that dropped back down a lot. And so, in a post on "Higher states of Consciousnss", I noted how I put huge energy into the main practice I followed from 1972 to Christmas 1978. (I also posted a "poltergeist" story from that time describing the practice.) As I went to bed, I would listen to New Age music on radio or stereo or eight track tape, as part of mobilizing a kind of "qi" and trying various things. But when I went to work for US government at Christmas 1978, I simply could not afford to do that until I retired in 2015. In that time, I mostly dropped out of LEARNING AND EXERCISING Psi, except for the three limited phenomena I described in my post on higher consciousness. (Astral and assumption dreams, and "cosmic consciousness" as I woke in the morning.) Of course, I still OBSERVED popular music, even top 40, as a kind of source of data on what people are thinking. Only slowly have I begun to use music at times in that old way, step by step. In 2020, my wife hung a big flat TV in our bedroom, which I can reach by chromecast from a phone or tablet computer in bed. I found just two groups, Tangerine Dream and Renaissance, which I had used in 1972-1979 which I can get deeply, spiritually into now at night, helping me elevate my soul. Tangerine Dream came first, for several reasons; in a way, it connects to the "yang" side of my life, the sky-connected heavily mathematical side. I previously posted how I could use it to enhance connection with our noosphere, but in truth the sky is even bigger than that. Last night, Renaissance. In truth, I was reminded somehow of a clear song they sang in the early period, when I ALMOST married a woman from Chile. It was SO close that I tend to believe I DID marry her, in another strand of our multiverse. There was a book by Silverberg which described our relation in such detail, and its future, enough to make me worry, especially after a high-PSI person I knew well contacted me and gave me wranings which just happened to fit the book (which he had not read). There was a song by Renaissance back then which fit that strand (in a detailed, earthy, concrete veridical way, the kind of detail any sane PSI experimenter would insist on). And so, as I wonder agaon what strands of the multiverse we may connect with,,, I decided yesterday was overdue to locate their work. So I did. it was not so easy for me, using a phone for chromecast. On the phone, I found only two pieces, Scheherazade and Ashes are Burning. I got deep into a better recording of Scheherazade earlier this year, and it was serious and engaging enough, but I only needed to listen once. (More and more, I just replay by memory in my head.) I still value Scheherazade, which resonates IN PART with my relation with my wife and with the multiverse in general. (Last night,I had a strong impression that Kamala Harris should pay attention to a good recording, which resonates with the Vishnu/Lakshmi/Kamala story she must know about.) But I wanted to hear something more substantive about multiverse, and I knew from the 1970's that this specific group has some real PSI input in what they did. Ashes are Burning was serious, and I really wonder what THAT is saying. One response: in part, those are TRUMP'S ashes in play right now. It echoes that little phrase I heard during CC: "Manifest harder your core, but cleanse and purify your shadows and reflections." Could it be that OUR version of Donald Trump is being cleansed, or is this just a stage in the growth of the best Dondald Trump there is, even as that OTHER Trump who really took office for a second term is dissolved away in the multiverse, just as quantum computers throw out sequences which don't make it to the final show? Was there even some kind of backwards flow of information in this album? (It took other data points to make me consider this. Of course, I do not know, but I do wonder.) But I wondered about that girl from Chile. I hope the multiverse did not erase THAT album which I remember owning and listening to in the 1970s! I gave up on my phone, but a few hours later, rolled over in bed, connected my little samsung tab to our wifi, and used it to find more. I found Prologue, You can Understand, and one other by the same group. No Chilean girl, but much more interesting and PSI-related material. "You can understand" evoked the strongest memory and will and connection. And there was more. All on my yin side, perhaps, but not a restricted muddy kind of yin. And later, in CC, I found most of this written into my brain (bit by bit, a kind of joint venture), along with at least four other homework assignments. And some deeper understanding of what I had heard.