Laraaji

Well, I’m flattered that you think I’m a grown up. I did that scene in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. That’s about 25 miles from here. A coastal town, a very ethnically diverse one. I went to a school with a diverse student population, grew up in the Baptist Church with parents who were respectfully religious, and taught us to be that way. I could look and see an oil refining plant in Woodbridge. Sometimes we’d get sulfur fumes walking into the government housing project where I lived. I’d also see other government housing buildings, like row buildings. It wasn’t quite suburban and not hardcore city.

There was a bridge called the George T. Outer Bridge, which crossed from New Jersey into Staten Island. The house we lived in was almost under that bridge. Constant sound of traffic moving over it. Hearing traffic, hearing my mother cooking food in the kitchen. She'd be humming some gospel or spiritual songs while she moved around the house. Then I would hear the faint sounds of a Polish wedding in progress several blocks away—it seemed like every Sunday in the summer there was a wedding at the Polish community center across the block. And then the sounds of cousins whenever we got to visit with relatives. We had the silliest sense of humor, we could get each other into the laughter zone so fast. So laughter was very present, laughter and respectful tones of voice.

It was an escape, transport out of the dimension of being a child trapped in an adult world. It was my space transformer, my energy transformer. It was also for dance, for the good dance music scene. Music from Philly or New Orleans or Motown. Dance music was a large part of my younger years. I think it took me out of the relativity zone of thinking, “I am a child and that's an adult.” Music took me into another kind of mental activity. I used to choose music that would be joyous, enchanting, romantic, gentle, luscious, spacious—not locked into any locality. Feeling is a non-location. The non-location.

About two years ago, to honor my mother's transition. I noticed there was no crying about my having been away. The city had seemed to go on without me. My visit was pretty much focused on church and the funeral parlor. I didn't really get to look over the wide area. But I remember seeing the housing development. Places that were open—the clay banks, the wooded areas—had all been developed. And development goes on. Always.

The first was after a house fire in Perth Amboy. My family, attempting to get back on their feet, found it necessary to take us three boys and let us stay with our grandfolks in the backwoods of Virginia, the rural South. That was a very intense immersion in nature. The smell of earth, drinking water from a well, the taste of iron in the water, the soft misty mornings over the fields, the uneven roads we'd travel on, seeing chickens and pigs and mules up front, cows, touching them. My grandfolks gave each of the boys a long row of dirt in the garden and we planted peas, tomatoes, watermelon. That was my first real observation of nature at work, going out after every rainfall and seeing just how much things had grown. It was real, made it real to me. Not just getting food on my plate and there it is, but actually seeing it happen.

Yes. And the sensual experience of walking through rows of tobacco or corn, skin brushing up against leaves, the sound of the texture of green gardens and flowers—neighbors who were into flowers too. The country was pregnant with nature's voice.

The activity, the business, the hectic urban life sure finds a way into my musical expression, but it can also numb my memory. I go to Whole Foods and get food—I don't think that it once grew in dirt. If I see dirt, “Oh, that's dirty.” We forget where it all comes from. But in New York, I appreciate the parks, especially in Brooklyn. I very much enjoy going to Prospect Park, Central Park, Riverside, to lounge in the sun and watch the river. The water bodies, mirrors, and ponds. The reservoirs, trees, and flower gardens. And for the last 15 or 20 years, they’ve restricted traffic through Central Park at night, which turned it back into a nice place to be. No fumes, at last. At night in Central Park, if I'm lucky, I can catch a family of raccoons moving about. Reminds us we aren't alone.

In my early years of playing on the sidewalks in New York—I didn't call it busking at the time—I would be guided to areas to set up and channel music, and it soon became a flash income. And a way to test the impact of my intentional meditative states, how much of it could be communicated through improvisational music. In the woods it's quieter. I'd allow for subtle space between notes, maybe come down to very gentle, soft passages and then up to more roaring presence. On the sidewalks of New York, staying subtle didn't work that well. But out in nature, I could get into what people call a wall of sound: harmonics washing through, representing a field, whether at the beginning or the end of the composition. I'm using nature effects lately that convey a sense of the impersonal nature of nature.

Water trickling down a stream or crickets at night, they're not doing it personally for me. You can feel that you're not being targeted—unless you step on something that doesn't like you stepping on it. The idea of being in nature, surrounded by an impersonal force, allows me to drift out of issues I have on a personal level to experience impersonal nature. Maybe you feel that with pets and little children, it’s personal. But the music I feel is cosmically impersonal. That's where I get to, so that the listener can feel not targeted racially, not as a group, not as male or female, but can maybe feel a final unity with everyone else present. Because this is not directed personally to any group. My cosmic homies, as I call them.

I remember taking my electric zither acoustically to the beach, walking along and interacting with the surf and waves to bring more liquidity, more water movement, into my performance. I decided to do so after hearing a quote that the oceans are the neutralizers of the planet. And I said, if I can get the ocean to play in my music, then my music would have a neutralizing impact on the listener. And it proved to be so. Water movement, buoyancy, whirlpool, waves tiding.

The oneness is something that is present all the time—a unity field that doesn't come in parts. You could say it's a current of energy that somehow precipitates into a rabbit over there. But if everything dissolved out of the thinking mind—that I'm a car, that I'm a Volvo—and just stayed in present time, I believe that unity would surface into the awareness. And the awareness might not have a language for it. It might just feel awe, or just wow, or stoned on the now. The best way to talk about the unity field is to talk as it. And to talk as it means to use a spontaneous linguistics—tone, color, and sound. To me, sound—the sound of a gong or the sound of polyphonic music—represents everything in the universe vibrating simultaneously. So in the simultaneity, there isn't a Volvo or a rabbit. In this vertical moment, as I call it, there's no differentiation. And I've heard it said that we drop in and out of that every split second, but we don't know it because we don't have the language to hold onto it. That's the mystical side—we're in and out of it. And perhaps the use of certain ethnobotanicals or meditation or spiritual work is to expand the amount of time we're consciously in the zone and reduce the amount of time we're out here in the distraction zone. Have you heard of Vipassana?

It’s a practice of learning how to expand our receptivity to the oneness, the silent unity as it's called. And it's always here. I can point to it with sound and maybe with art, but I can't make someone know it. And if they don't know it, they could be in the separation field—protesting, angry, upset, looking outside, waiting for something to happen, waiting to fix what seems to be broken. But if they were to drop out of the thinking mind altogether—I think you'd get a different diagnosis. A different universe is here—perfect, complete, and whole. Unbroken.

Linear thought. That's the battlefield. And a temporary way out is to put a bandage on it, to fix that over there, to appease someone over there. But the underlying cause is that we are vulnerable to thought. As long as I attach anything to "I am," I'm going into partial self-awareness. And in partial self-awareness I can get irritable, angry, insulted, disrespectful. I can get into private possessions. If I were to practice stillness, whether for 20 minutes a day or two-and-a-half hours, I would walk around with this resonating inner stillness and be in the presence of voices coming from separation, but I would be more understanding. I would also see that what they're looking for can't be found with the way they're going. What you're doing is looking for an answer that will be just temporary, and then you'll need another answer or another fix—until you learn who the self is that's having this experience. Clear "I am."

If I dropped to pure "I am," I would see the innocence of the animal world and the innocence of the plant world more clearly. If a black mamba was coming by, maybe I would communicate with it on a level I couldn't while I was in my thinking mind. I would like to think that something could happen on a planetary level to cause a spontaneous flash migration into the unity zone—perhaps hanging out there for 60 hours or 21 days—and everyone would emerge with a different sense of personal agenda. They wouldn't have to effort at love or sharing. It would be automatic. That's where we want to get: where we don't have to think or effort at doing the right thing, it just happens automatically. But if that happened I'm wondering if it would become boring. Automatically nice, automatically sharing—without any anxiety.

This is due to our identification with the body and the use of separatist language. The language that infers that Russell is sitting three feet from me, or that we're on the fifth floor—this is all linear field language. If we could all learn the vertical field language, the language of the continuous now, to me it would be a vibratory language, a humming. Maybe the bees have it. Maybe the crickets have it. Maybe the cicadas have it. Where everyone is vibrating on an infinite current, knowing our role in it. Perhaps this would be satisfying so much of what we've been trying to get satisfied in other ways: possessing things or power, establishing family wealth. Of course, that logic won't fly with everyone. What could happen if it did? Our behavior would be sensitive to the fact that we're all the one, the temporary family of now. We're superposing. I don't talk to you anymore. I vibrate as the same feeling we are sharing. A radically different use of language.

Could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, a critical something where enough people have done inner work and contacted the reality of cosmic unity that they're in some kind of alignment. If this alignment were to become massively activated, it would be a shift from the inside out. Now, how is this going to affect Jane Doe on the street? She's not going to meditate. She's going to a protest, she's got no time to meditate. And what good does protesting do? One thing it does is help to unify people. Maybe at a young age, it can teach them to be sensitive to things they should not do when they get into power themselves. But when those in power disagree with us, how are they to be approached, if they feel they have the right answer and we're the ones who are lost?

Someone who stays in the urban inner city just can't fathom some of the gross earth changes impacting elsewhere. Even if you see it on television, the mudslides and hurricanes, it's on the news for 10 minutes and then we get back to our meal. And we're on the other side saying, "How are we going to make them understand that this is not a hoax?" And then we've lost the battle before it's even begun—we're debating over truth instead of allowing people to access it themselves.

Some people say, "This is not an accident. This isn’t bad. This is the chaos that's necessary for the old systems to dissolve and for new systems to emerge." So you could be standing on the sideline saying, "Oh good, new systems are emerging." But that's really horrific—people are dying there. So the question goes on: how do you handle yourself in the midst of very graphic, observable change, unless you're doing inner work and your inner voice to the infinite is saying, "Chill for a while. This is not your business." That's a big sign. Mind your own business. Something is changing, something is fleeting, something is not real although it looks real. Is it your business to fix it, to change it, to perfect it? Or is it your business to stay in your center and work to bring forth the world you want to see? To get in touch with the frequency of the world you feel is ideal. Such a world for me would be a world being revealed spontaneously by spirit, by the unity field. That of course is not going to fly on the street.

Getting paid.

No, it’s a good question. Well, the artist can represent positive states of mind, positive emotions, positive vision. Supporting an internal radiance, independent of ethnicity or gender. A sense of being included in the universal field—that we're not outsiders, we are not accidents. So the role of the artist is to represent the listener as being integral in the flow of the whole cosmos, that the individual isn't just stuck in a local political situation and buried in a local family. But it takes the artist who's doing work on him or herself. So the role of an artist would first be to work on themselves, to be touched by another artist or a teacher or a vision quest. To find a healing vision, a green vision, and to let that vision inspire the direction of their service on the planet. If the planet goes, everyone goes. So to the artists that say, "I ain't got time for that"—you better make time. We’d all better, in our own way.

That's lovely. That's good medicine, to feel invited. The word “invite” is very powerful. You could say, "Would you stop that?" Or, "I invite you to try another way." Suddenly there's the invitation, rather than forcing rhetoric on someone. By suggestion, the artist can focus on what they consider to be relaxed breathing and represent that in their art. You can suggest relaxed breathing, you can suggest a calm mind. In the case of bringing the ocean energy into my performance, to suggest neutralization of subconscious stress patterns. You can suggest tranquility, flow, harmony, effortless release, being present in a state of comfortable contentment. Suggestion, imagery, sound imagery, visual imagery. A pastoral painting on the wall. The suggestion is very powerful. That's how music works, through suggestion. If I'm sitting there playing music and you're walking by, you're going to stop. My head was caught up in so many things, but this music suggests I have the right to be in a neutral zone. The music suggests the listener's right to access peace, where they are.

I consider this to be right. But that person waking up—how are they going to access that art? Are they going to decide to go to the MoMA tomorrow? Where does the layperson waking up in the morning get to be in that field of suggestion, unless they go to a concert or they’re in desperation. “I need some peace and I need it fast! Can you Google peace? ASAP.”

Yes. That's exactly what happened when I was busking, with the random public audience. People come upon me who didn't know I was there and didn't even know they could access a sense of peace and tranquility in their own presence, right here, right now, within this hour. Introducing listeners to the reality that they can access a significant level of peace and tranquility within their own being, in spite of the intense agenda going on in their mental life. But how to hold on to it? Buy a cassette.

I used to see that as what I was supposed to be doing. But lately I've found myself representing the chaos of this change, this transition period—chaos in music. But not to stay in chaos, to include it. A moment of chaos to represent systems coming apart, anxiety on the planet. In the laughter work too, if it's the right group of people, I'll open with five or ten minutes of crying meditation — to get in touch with aggravation and anxiety on the planet. Staying in the utopian field can work. But on a street corner, someone will struggle to hear the utopian dream when they're caught up in the anguish of their relatives suffering somewhere else. An artist who comes to represent the full picture, to acknowledge the struggles of the world—that is good salesmanship. You're getting in step with the people listening, so they can say, "You know what I'm going through." Then you can address their situation from an informed place. It builds intimacy, connection. Getting in line with someone creates a place of trust.

My understanding is that there is an indestructible unity field that is too close for an intercontinental ballistic missile to hit. It's too indestructible. It's here and it's now. And the way to it is to stop leaving, which is to stop getting on vehicles that take us out of the now. And those vehicles are the thinking mind—anything we attach to "I am." This is a spiritual lesson that some might not feel ready to take on, because it's too simple. And it's hard to stop identifying with the thought of being who you are. Not “I am the doctor,” “I am a musician,” not “I am waiting for a check” or “I am a Harlem resident.” Just pure “I am.” It is a practice of getting in touch with the calm that is always here at the center. In the music, I can represent it. And my experience is that audiences everywhere can recognize that peace. When I finish a concert, I'm amazed that I can leave five to 10 to 15 minutes of quiet without any sense of people wanting to hurry up and get out. Being introduced to that depth of present-time tranquility gives people a new model of their capacity to inhabit that space. And maybe even makes them wonder, “Hey, how can I get back to this place on my own?”

I consider that this moment is the future. This moment is the past. This moment is a sub-presence of the eternal present. The eternal present is here and this moment is in the presence of the present. So the future is this moment. And when we talk about color—we're talking vibrational, visual-vibrational, or even tone. Color as a tone. What color do I see the future? Fifth-dimensional color. The fifth-dimensional tonality is where we're all vibrating as the same oneness and there's a dropping out of the memory of ever being separate—or it might be a vague memory. But somehow there's a drop out of the anxiety that went with separation, whether family separation, corporate separation, ethnic separation, gender—there is no separation. I think the color—some could call it white, pure infinite white. Some say the sun is really black. But to answer your question as best I can: the color, in terms of a tonality, is the color of infinite resolution.

I was guided. My life is set up to experiment with guidance. I was guided to experiment with orange and I didn't understand why until a spiritual teacher pointed out that I had an initiation trying to surface. And because it was an initiation into a field of consciousness I was unfamiliar with, I didn't have a language in place. And then I was using the language of color, the language of sun—sunrise on a new way of knowing self, sunset on the old way of knowing self. And this made sense: that I was using color as a language, a non-verbal language, to represent transformation.

The way to process it is not through the thinking mind, the linear mind. Go translinear. In the translinear, there's a world of peace right here. I think struggle seems to have led to uneasy peace that you have to stay vigilant to. You have to watch your back. What can we do that won't be affected by change? What can we guarantee we can get and hold onto? The underlying field of soul is always here. So what do we do about anything? Work on our self. Get to know as much as possible about our true origin and nature. Try to find a way to peek beyond the veil. Go with change, practice it enough so that it guides you out of struggle, to gain a sense of trust that creation is unfolding with a divine plan. The same one that guarantees that there's going to be gravity to keep this building in place.

I would probably fast and do deep breathing and drop into deep "I am" consciousness. Just feel the underlying field that will accompany me through the transition. It guarantees me that I'm rehearsing the nature of eternity by doing that. If tomorrow was my last day, it's my last day in this particular embodiment. But there would be this momentum of knowing that through this transition, there is a consciousness that is ready to take on a new embodiment, whether in light or in sound.

A good gross way to answer this: how do you like to see your stool leave your body? You just flush it down—it contains cells that represent a small portion of your body. You trust it to the water, it'll go out to sea, it'll disintegrate. And I'm happy with that. I have no issues with that. The idea of it sitting in a cemetery for someone to get triggered every time they pass it doesn't feel like an honest way to let somebody survive my passing. I'd like the sense that the self is still infinite, all-pervading, super luminous, omni-spatial, and that the body was a vehicle. To let it go—not to remember the facial configuration or the nose, not even the smile, except to carry the energy of what I built forward. To dissolve the physical form altogether from memory, so that each individual is free to dissolve into their formless self.