There’s an previous saying that “writing about music is like dancing about structure.” It’s supposed as a dig at music criticism, however beneath that, there’s a deeper reality: Music is intangible, subjective; it’s common but nonetheless deeply private. And whereas science and math are concerned in its creation, there’s something undeniably mystical about it.
Laraaji is a 80-year-old pioneer of so-called New Age music and somebody who’s been sitting on the fringes of the music world for many years — although, final 12 months, he joined Andre 3000 onstage in Brooklyn.
When he was younger, Laraaji experimented with performing, together with a job within the landmark experimental movie Putney Swope, and frolicked within the Sixties standup comedy scene. After that, he grew to become inquisitive about religious communities, found the autoharp, and devoted his life to creating music. He’s been a very prolific artist ever since.
I just lately invited Laraaji on The Grey Space to speak about music, meditation, spirituality, and the therapeutic energy of laughter. As all the time, there’s a lot extra within the full podcast, so hear and comply with The Grey Space on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you discover podcasts. New episodes drop each Monday.
This dialog has been edited for size and readability.
I’m so intrigued by all of the inventive pursuits you’ve had in your life. You’ve performed standup comedy. You’ve performed performing. Clearly, in the long run, you gave your self over to music. Did the expertise of performing and doing comedy make you a greater musician? Or is it simply creatively a very completely different factor?
It’s the identical factor, Sean. It’s wherever I select to open and provides expression to. I’m training the artwork of surrendering and spontaneity.
I feel that’s why I’m a awful musician. I’m too in my very own rattling head.
I say observe your physique language when you may have your subsequent orgasm.
I don’t suppose anyone — together with myself — needs to see that!
Severely, take a look at your breath. Take a look at your physique language. Look how targeted you’re into surrendering to this energetic expression. And I see a few of that expression carried over into the way in which folks sing pop music, rock music. They get into the extra orgasmic, passionate stage of launch.
Do you consider your self as primarily an improvisational musician for these causes?
I rely extra on improvisation than I do on set scores. I discover that improvisation is aligned with what I name my religious perception that each second is new. And to belief that what I would like on this second is right here.
Musicians all the time speak about that, feeling extra like a conduit than an writer. Is that what it’s like for you on stage?
Sure, and it’s magical and mystical and a transportive place since you’re one way or the other past linear time circulate. You’re within the midst of native time, however you’re additionally witnessing an unbroken, fixed current time. It’s talking via me and it’s talking as me. I’m sound, I’m house, I’m timelessness. That is like music I can dream up. A part of my artwork is figuring out when to get out of the way in which, methods to arrange a musical circulate or a musical occasion, after which to step to the facet of it and let it converse via.
You additionally sing nevertheless it looks like a part of the music, like there’s little distinction between the devices you’re taking part in and what’s coming out of your voice. Do you consider your voice as one other instrument and never one thing separate?
Sure, I do like doing every little thing on the identical time. Spontaneous, unified circulate.
Create a circulate with a number of devices on the identical time, utilizing the voice with out calling the psychological course of into linear pondering. And utilizing a voice as an emotional expressional instrument. That’s what I’ve been exploring, particularly with meditation or deep contemplation of contacting altered planes of acutely aware current time. And so to speak about it’s to take the thoughts out of it.
Then there’s sounds of ardour, passionate immersion. The voice can be utilized to specific witnessing inside an awe-inspiring notion. So the entire physique turns into the voice and the breath and the motion and turn out to be a conduit.
Invented or improvisational language may be the proof of an individual or practitioner in whole immersion, whole submission, getting concerned with a complete notion that’s past linear description. So the mind is given a trip, and in that trip or place, it could be freed as much as have another space-time expertise. And that could be the message the artist needs to convey, that there’s another approach of being acutely aware right here and now.
I’ve heard you speak about music as a instrument for whole presence. Why do you suppose music has that form of impact on us?
Music generated or channeled by the fitting musician or artist? The artist is in a state of contemplation or meditation or a suspended time consciousness. And within the languaging that happens with their instrument, their interplay with their instrument and with their voice can convey this repurposing of the human instrument, repurposing it from a conveyor of native human-based emotion to a conduit of exalted emotion, direct notion inside this timeless current second.
It’s all the time accessible. Sure sounds. Drones can do this. Music that’s very spontaneous, that may pull the thoughts out of linear thought, may enable the perceiver, the listener, to instantly immediately discover the truth of everlasting time and the infinite house.
Sound can level to the invisible and sound can counsel the flowing of power, the flowing of blood, the flowing of breath. It may counsel the mixing of seemingly separate and discordant. Within the case of a harp, all 36 strings are vibrating on the identical time and producing this synergetic tonal occasion. So, as you say, that sound can throw a suggestion. It may level to the invisible, it may well level to the transcendent. It may direct the emotional physique out of heaviness so {that a} lightness, a extra ethereal resonance may be immediately witnessed.
As soon as we begin speaking and utilizing phrases, we’re already on the earth of concepts and abstractions. However music is extra main than that, proper? It touches one thing in us that existed earlier than we invented phrases.
Sure. Music would possibly be capable of say greater than what speech can say. My basic mode of operation is to organize earlier than a efficiency or recording via simply dropping right into a refined sense of the meditative discipline. Do some yoga postures, some respiration workout routines, some optimistic affirmations, after which sculpt this discipline or level to this transcendental discipline and let it transmit itself right into a sound repetition via me. When this occurs, I are likely to name it a sound bathtub. A celestial sound bathtub. It’s an immersion expertise. And as soon as once more, right here we’re away from the phrases and we’re into the pure impacting drive of sound.
Do you really discover a significant distinction between music and meditation, or is all of it simply completely different manifestations of the identical apply?
My final reply is that they’re one and the identical, which means that within the second of deepest meditation, I take into account meditation to be the very best romance and that romance is the very best meditation. This meditation is simultaneous with music. It couldn’t be separated.
When did laughter turn out to be such an essential factor for you?
It shifted the energies of the bullies in my neighborhood after I was younger to make use of humor. I wouldn’t be so afraid of their presence after I may use humor. And in church, we use humor as a result of it may get so boring. And since I used to be in the fitting place to make use of it, we’d use it to get different friends to chortle in the midst of a critical sermon. However I discover the ability of laughter to change, to interrupt the sense of rigidity and separation. I started writing scripts in highschool and doing state of affairs comedies for expertise reveals as a result of I loved seeing folks lose it to laughter. The household I grew up in, the uncles, aunts, the cousins all had been laughter pleasant, so laughter was all the time on the menu. I can’t keep in mind even a funeral the place laughter was outlawed.
You actually do see it as a transformative drive?
Properly, after doing standup comedy I made a decision to let standup comedy go for some time and simply concentrate on music. It was a ebook by Rajneesh, Osho Rajneesh, that helped me to comprehend that I may entry the laughter expertise with out doing comedy, and that I may information different folks into the laughter zone and benefit from the deliciousness of laughter with out utilizing humor and on the sacrifice of one thing.
And now, via laughter — play retailers, I name them — we use laughter to get folks into the play zone and to get them into contact with their interior baby and to get them into deep rest. Yeah. And I actually get pleasure from laughter now as a result of it may well come up out of individuals with out it having to be nervous. Yeah, your complete physique can get entangled. The whole breath may be open, and it’s getting sweeter and extra scrumptious each time I do considered one of these.
So laughter is one other approach to transcend the pondering thoughts?
Sure. Rajneesh identified that whenever you’re laughing, actually concerned with laughter, that you just or us or whoever is laughing will not be pondering, they’re not concerned within the thought strategy of linear thought. That could be so in case you’re into pure, open laughter. If it’s a nervous laughter the place you’re aware of a threatening state of affairs, that might be a unique state of affairs. However actual, full physique, cathartic laughter, you’re releasing sooner than you possibly can suppose. So there’s no thought course of processing what it’s that’s being launched. It’s only a yummy, open, nurturing launch.
You’ve been an expert musician for many years, performing all around the world. You’re entangled with the enterprise and the business facet of music. I suppose I simply surprise the way you navigate that ingredient, of being an expert musician and being a religious individual on the identical time?
Properly, I did a few years in the past get that except I combine my religious nature, I might by no means be completely pleased, content material, or expertise decision as a result of I can’t get it from the bodily world. I’m not hating the bodily world, however issues within the bodily world are short-term and continually we’re reminded that issues come, they keep, after which they go away. And a few issues are simply too lovely for us to just accept that they’re ever going to go away.
And I grew to know that behind the world that’s altering, there may be this religious discipline that if I learn to embrace it continually, even whereas I’m embracing my outer wealth, that when the outer wealth shifts, I’m not bent out of form as a result of I’m nonetheless linked to this interior religious platform that doesn’t get bent out of form when the outer world shifts. So for me, staying fixed and staying with my religious apply permits me to be extra playful and fewer frightened of the bodily world, and fewer frightened of change and fewer frightened of shedding. And so I discover that the religious facet helps me to be extra current, extra experimental, and extra risk-taking with my musical expression.
I’ve additionally heard you say that you just suppose our core religious drawback is our misidentification with our our bodies. What does that imply?
I’m not going to do that. I wouldn’t consider doing this to you, Sean.
Wait, what are you going to do to me?!
I might amputate your leg. Your ft. You’re nonetheless there. Your torso. You’re nonetheless there. Your arms, your elbows. You’re nonetheless there. That’s only a head. And also you’re nonetheless there. Your ears and nostril goes. You’re nonetheless there. Your lips and tongue. God continues to be there. Instantly your head disappears. However you’re nonetheless there. And also you’re saying to your self, wait a minute. I believed I used to be that physique. Look. I’m timeless. I’m invisible. I’m wingless. What do I do with this?
And I consider that identification with the bodily physique, which is start, that lives and dies, and we get connected to it, and we get sentimental with it. And we attempt to get pleasure from its 5 senses, and we overlook, or we don’t entry the enjoyment that we are able to have, the extra expansive pleasure we are able to have via the infinite self that’s all the time right here.
Maybe your buddies have had an epiphany via the usage of sure ceremonies. The place you’re instantly in one other sense of current time and house, a unique sense of expansiveness, a unique sense of how time is unfolding, slower or in no way. And to have this expertise is to be making the most of a unique type of physique. The deepest sense of happiness and pleasure I really feel comes from having an intimate, communing expertise with my everlasting current time-self. The religious presence which is all the time right here, all the time in all places. It simply must be completely current, to dig it in, to catch it and to put on it and to behold it.
You’re 80 years previous. You’ve been making music for over 40 years. You’ve lived such an fascinating life as an artist and a contemplative. As you sit right here now, in the present day, what’s your religious mission? What will get you away from bed every single day?
I’ll undergo what I’ve to do the second I get away from bed. Often what will get me up is a way of a every day agenda, which is completely different every single day. One thing that I’m going to do this day that I’m going to essentially get pleasure from, whether or not it’s music, efficiency, or designing, new tuning or attending to know a brand new piece of kit, or sitting for an additional time frame in meditation, both in lotus place in my home or going for a stroll in Central Park or Riverside Park and sitting on a bench within the solar, stepping into meditation.
What retains me enthusiastically concerned in life and passionately concerned with life is the feeling of an everlasting non-human intelligence that’s producing this factor referred to as creation and is permitting me to take part in it and to co-witness and to co-collaborate with it. After which within the midst of this, it’s remaining invisible and remaining infinite. And I’m feeling it via my reference to it. And so it’s not a lot what I’m getting away from bed for, however as I’m getting away from bed there’s this sense of acutely aware improvisational collaboration inside the divine alternating intelligence. However after I’m doing excursions and I’m put in a pleasant, lovely resort, I’ll fortunately get away from bed for the breakfast.