VI. La Traviata

VI. La Traviata

I should mention two powers that I realized I had as a consequence of my new level of enlightenment: I learned that I could transmit healing energy through my hands. I have helped my wife many times channeling energy this way, and I do the same thing with my students, communicating my muscle intelligence and inner calm through touching although, unaware of what I am doing, they play better when I touch them).

The other power is even more unusual  I learned how to send healing power to ghosts. Fairly often, while I was in meditation, discarnate souls would come to me for help. There are a huge number of people who die who don't realize that they have actually died; either through delirium, or some mental fixation, they refuse to face their new (or, rather, renewed state, and cling to a past they can never again have). Some are aware that they have died, but, for the same reasons of mental rigidity, they refuse to go on and meet their guardians and friends who are waiting to greet them. These unfortunate souls wander about in the approximate vicinity of their death or near some other physical place where there is some attraction, be it familiarity, or the availability of life force to feed on and find comfort in. Churches are good places for ghosts because, in meditation and prayer, people release vibrations that can feel beneficial to souls who have no way of replenishing their own life force. Anyway, since my meditations were raising me, consciously, to at least the lower astral level, many of these souls were attracted to me.

I will not say that the ghosts who came to me were all sent to me, although many of them were. Most of them merely stumbled onto me. Even so, when this happened, I was not left alone to fend for myself; a teacher was there to

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instruct me in the proper way I should help the individual who had come to me. Most of the time my job was simply to instruct the person to turn around and see the great love and help that was waiting for him. ["Turn around" is a significant expression, as so many people have literally, though not physically' turned their backs on God. To ''turn around" then, in this context, refers to the act of wrenching free of a selflimiting mind set and, in so doing, turning toward the light of God's truth.] Sometimes the method of communicating this message was more unusual than simply thinking the words as I normally did. One time I had a conversation with someone in pure feeling; I had to send waves of love and joy to him in order to get him to wake up to the truth; my feeling acted as a jolt of energy knocking him out of his catatonic lethargy. Another time I had to speak to a person in musical language.

These two healing powers use the same kind of energy channeling, the same perception of meaning or information through nonverbal media, and the same use of imaginative visualization to create a tangible effect. I mention them not for the sciencefictionshock value that psychic phenomenology has on people, but, rather, to lay the groundwork of understanding for an aspect of my music teaching that was to grow out of this enhanced psychic dimension of my personality.

The psychic powers, from my teachers' point of view, were to illustrate a point that it was crucial that I understand before I could go further in knowledge and service: that, in the world of spirit, to think or imagine something is to make it happen. The faith that can move mountains comes from this understanding. The evidence of things unseen is readily seen in the astral plane, and only by seeing the effects of my thoughts was I going to begin cleaning them up and creating the world of my desires. As always, with Jesus, the key to all selfhelp is, first, to

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help others. By showing me how to heal others through the knowledge of spiritual power, He was leading me to an understanding of how I might help myself.

Now, it so happened that my first major performance experience after having met Anton, and having learned so much about spiritual power, was a series of performances of Verdi's _ Traviata. I was concertmaster of this little semipro orchestra. In this context I learned much about dealing with demons and general negativity by channeling love and power into the world. This was the first practical application of the spiritual training I had been receiving.

Verdi has always been one of my favorite composers, but La Traviata was not one of my favorite operas, so, at the outset, I had to overcome some internal resistance before I began to play it decently. As I practiced, I realized it is a very great piece indeed with many, many beautiful instrumental parts, especially for the concertmaster.

Verdi came to me several times to give me direction about such things as phrasing and bowing, but his main point was to contradict the prevailing attitude toward the heaviness associated with grand opera playing. He stressed the idea of playing it like chamber music, thereby maximizing the variety of tone colors and the range of emotional content, especially in terms of intimacy and pathos. He made me dig into the music in search of my own individuality; he encouraged me to transcend the traditional hackneyed interpretations, and find something new. His help contributed to a performance that even my detractors (many of whom were sitting right behind me) had to admit was the very best orchestral playing I had ever done, before or since. I did a nice job.

The hardest part of the gig was dealing with negativity. I had become sensitive to higher vibration through my spiritual training, and was consequently much

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more psychically atuned to the thoughts of the people around me than before. I could feel the thoughts of individuals and of the group as a corporate entity. In fact, the thoughts of a few violinists became an annoying distraction which I had to learn to overcome. This learning process resulted in a major breakthrough in my application of spiritual knowledge to musicmaking.

Every human being radiates a certain vibration. This vibration is rather like a song, like a painting about who the person is. The vibration reflects the person's moods of the moment, but also tells a deeper story about the essence of that person. If you put a group of people together, their vibrations mix and meld into a giant milkshake of identity. When the group's attention is focussed on a single thing, their power is multiplied geometrically, but when there is a lack of focus there is very little to keep the powers of individuals from canceling each other out.

The situation which I had to face was that of a very motley crew of varying levels of competence and commitment, led by a very weak conductor. The resultant lack of focus was like a tornado of confusion on the screen of my newly sensitized perceptual apparatus. My task was to find my own focus in this whirlwind of psychic confusion, and, furthermore, to help focus the rest of the group. I used the techniques my teachers had already taught me, and I discovered some new ones.

One of the first things you learn in meditation is to conquer the socalled "chattering monkey mind", that aspect of intelligence which is uncontrolled and wanders aimlessly from thought to thought distracting the higher mentality from its steadfast contemplation of the infinite. In other words, to raise one's consciousness requires undivided concentration. Early on in life I had developed the ability to concentrate by learning how to keep my mind on the music,

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so it was not normally a difficult thing for me to bend my will and conquer the ''monkey mind'' in meditation. However, never before had I faced the problem of withstanding the distracting onslaughts of other people’s monkey minds.

Fortunately, in learning how to protect myself from Bomo, Chileavera, and other demons, I had learned some visualization techniques which came in very handy, and which I have continued to use into the present.

I began each act by sitting in my chair when the orchestra was fairly well gathered, and, eyes closed, visualizing each player individually surrounded by a halo of pink light. Pink is the color of love, so, through this visualization, I was expressing love for each player in the group. For me this was also an act of forgiveness. For the master to humble himself before the group and to offer his services is the first step in the process of bringing separate souls together into a focus of energy. This technique, or something like it (to be discussed later) always has a calming effect on my emotions and endows me with courage and hope for the task of making music; it also has the ability to draw together wandering minds and bring them to a group consciousness which is higher than individual consciousness.

As we began to play I would purposely turn off my hearing in my right ear (left brain) and listen with all my might with the left ear (right brain). The left brain (right ear) is the seat of the verbal mind (or critical mind), and is responsible for most of the chatter that accompanies the operation of our mental machinery. The right brain (left ear) is the main music, emotion, spatial relationship processing center, and is largely responsible for shaping our aesthetic responses. Both brains are necessary for living, but the ability to control them and direct them to their specialized functions is an essntial skill which cannot be ignored if a person is to stay in balance. My

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problem was that I kept feeling and hearing this chatter going on behind me, my mind's concentration being diverted to this negative information, which, in turn, diverted my emotional concentration away from the music. By turning off the left brain I was able to transcend critical thinking altogether and feel the music from a cosmic center. The sounds became more integral, the mistakes less annoying, the chatter muted into inaudibility, and a profound nonverbal utterance spoke to me and inspired me to join it in celebration of life, in praise of God.

In psychology, this is called a "subjective experience". I cannot say with absolute objective certainty that what I hear is what anybody else hears. I cannot say with assurance that my raised state of consciousness has an audible impact on the group's playing, or even my own. I think it does, but I cannot prove it. I have learned to ignore this problem of subjectivity and accept with humility and thanksgiving what grace has bestowed on my perceptions. I do know that people are operating on many different levels of consciousness at once, and this knowledge assures me that at some point, in some dimension, I was communicating with the people in that orchestra. Of course, this high energy activity was not without its penalties. One night I woke up at 2 or 3 in the morning under attack by several demons. The demons of three of my enemies in town had got together to play a little haunting game on me. I couldn't get rid of them until I figured out whose they were. The night turned into a glorious time of forgiveness: since any demon must immediately retreat when love vibrations are sent toward them or the person they are possessing, I made amends in my heart with about thirty people towards whom I harbored bitter feelings. I visualized the moment from the past when this person had offended me, and instead of remembering anger or hurt, I changed my reaction to love and forgiveness, thereby releasing myself from the bonds of the

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harbored negativity, neutralizing the power the person had over me by virtue of that negativity. We create karmic bonds between ourselves by feeling anger, hate, envy, etc. I released myself from many such bonds that night, reversing the evil intentions of the demons. Since that night, I have rarely been bothered by demons of any kind. The jealous ones still occasionally can jam a frequency (so to speak), but I am pretty good detecting their presence and getting rid of them.

The whole La Traviata experience was groundbreaking for me and started me on a path of unfoldment from which I and all my students have continued to benefit.

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