There’s probably no greater cause of war throughout history than religious differences.  The only thing that comes close to it is greed.  I choose to stay as far away from the human element of religion in my spiritual practice, which, of course, is rather impossible, but, for me, preferable.  We humans (and I count myself as one) have confused the study of God, consciousness, reality, our world, matter, thought, spirit and the universe by dividing into groups and along the way, shutting doors and windows to alternative thought in an effort to protect our own.

It strikes me that religions often are more limiting than creative.  They often force the thinker into a box and essentially say, “think this, study this, here is the only truth – shut the rest out.”

If there is anything that I’ve learned in my life’s study of spirituality, it’s that nobody has a corner on truth.  Truth is truth.  Everybody has access to it. Every religion I’ve ever studied captured and illuminated much truth for me.  The only thing that really ever got in my way was the differences in language or the various definitions of words that are tossed about.  Most religious differences I’ve found to be based on a confusion of semantics.

So I choose to call myself first a spiritual seeker rather than a religious person.  I hope this does not offend you as I approach the writing of this post with the objective of unifying thought as opposed to dividing it.

Wikipedia states, “A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge.  In a more restricted sense a scientist is an individual who uses a scientific method.  The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science…  Some perform research toward a more comprehensive understanding of nature, including physical, mathematical and social realms…  This is distinct from philosophers, those who use logic toward more comprehensive understanding of intangible aspects of reality that lack a direct connection to nature, focusing on the realm of thought itself.”

If we’re to accept these definitions put forth by Wikipedia, then I suppose I’m sort of a scientist/philosopher, a combination of both.  I do engage in a “systematic activity to acquire knowledge” and also I do “use logic toward more comprehensive understanding of intangible aspects of reality…, focusing on the realm of thought itself.”

All said and done, I prefer the word “scientist”.  I find spirit to be actually quite tangible the more I study it and matter to be less and less the reality.  So I call myself a spiritual scientist.

If I am pinned down to name a life religion I admit very freely to being a Christian Scientist.  For those who need a specific religious definition of the way I think, that explains it as well as I know how on the religious level.  I grew up a Christian Scientist, attended the Christian Science Sunday School and learned the principles of the religion.  In my late twenties and early thirties I decided to explore beyond and commenced a 20-year journey of examination of many of the world’s great religions.  This journey was primarily the result of some very serious and thoughtful research I participated in the first couple of years of that journey using the drug, LSD.

The controlled research that I and a few friends took part in certainly opened our minds to many things never before considered regarding life, consciousness, reality and matter and launched me into even further study of spirituality in areas that did not include drugs.  It became very clear to me that drugs were not the answer, but I will say that they did provide me a fascinating starting point for exploration and launched my bark into immediate waters of wonder and matter/mind-blowing thought.

I then spent a few years as a practicing Hindu and found that religion to be immaculate in its conception, rich in thought, radical in approach and full of truth.  Ultimately I found it difficult to practice it as a western capitalist trying to build a career in show business in NYC.  I don’t know whether that would be true for me today, but decades ago I then moved on to Buddhism.

For a couple of years I studied the Dhammapada, generally accepted to be the words of Buddha, and found these verses to be elegant truths that rarely differed from the teachings of Jesus Christ.  Studying Buddhism was a joy for me because it further substantiated my understanding of the basic truths of Christianity.  There were, of course, many unfamiliar words that in the beginning would scare me and actually put me off until I learned to simply explore the meaning of the word.  Always these strange words constructed in foreign languages revealed to me truths that I already believed and understood when translated into my own language.  Through these studies I learned not to be fearful of words that I did not use or even know and rather look at their strangeness as opportunities to shed new light on spirituality.

I finally came to understand that human language is insufficient to explain the world of spirituality.  It simply was not invented for that world.  And so looking at spirituality through the various lenses of language became a plus rather than a minus.

I studied Confucianism, Jainism, the Koran, Judaism, Taoism, and Bahá’í through those years of seeking and honestly found that basically, they all said pretty much the same thing, but used different words.

I then, while in my mid forties, began to have a number of serious physical problems for the first time in my life.  As I had never been to a doctor, taken medicine or set foot in a hospital, I decided to tackle these physical problems by healing them rather than using the medical route.

I visited a Christian Science Practitioner to elicit his help.  We commenced a three-month series of meetings – one a week – where we systematically did a “spring cleaning” on my thinking.  One visit we would discuss business ethics, the next, self-confidence, the next, sexuality, and so on.  Each week he would correct my thinking and adjust my consciousness of right and wrong.  He was merciless and I dove into this cleaning of my attic with him.  During the week I would practice what he taught.

After 3 months of these meetings I was a better man – mentally and physically.  We never discussed my physical problems at all – only my mental insufficiencies or confusions.  I cleaned these up and committed to a better way of thinking and practicing that thought – a better way of living.

In the course of those three months all of my physical problems cleared up and went away.  I was healed.  There was never any difficulty moving through this experience.  It was all completely positive and I enjoyed the challenge of cleaning up my mind and watching the physical ills disappear as a by-product of that mental purification.

I became a practicing Christian Scientist once again.  However, Christian Science was then the basis of my thinking, the central core, though not the circumference of my thinking.  Since then I have borrowed helpful corrections to thought from all the sources I studied over those years countless times.  Again, truth is truth and I had a myriad of ways to investigate it and look at it.

I have never found this mixing pot to be confusing to my practice and demonstration of truth.  My spiritual seeking continues to this day – probably more than ever as I grapple with life, and become more conscious of my own spirituality.  The more I learn; the more there is to learn.

In the last ten years I have chosen music as my central tool of exploration.  As a life work, music is probably what I’m best at.  I’ve spent a lifetime practicing, so why not use it as the means to explore the objective of utmost importance.  Exploring spirituality through music is really fascinating because music is such a universal language.  It is not limited by spellings and strange words, but is appreciated and loved by all mankind.

Music too is a fascinating science.  Again, the more I learn; the more there is to learn.  The two, music and spirituality, seem to go hand in hand for me.  One complements the other.  I am a more spiritual man when I’m creating my music and I’m definitely a better musician when I approach the creation of music spiritually.

I am also always at my best as a person when I am in the studio writing, arranging, orchestrating, etc.  There I am the happiest, the most fulfilled and the least stressful.  Trouble just seem to fall away when I walk into my studio and I find myself doing everything I can in life to get to work musically.  On days when the rest of life gets so hectic that I can’t do that work, I struggle.  On the days that I work, I am fulfilled.

Still some things to be learned here… )

So I am a spiritual scientist/philosopher/musician.  Being a human being is far too often a struggle.  Here is where I need to improve and learn to manage life.  Here is where I’m still stuck – earthbound.  Both The Missus and I now discuss daily how we can approach these issues of humanity more gracefully and productively.  Here is where the problems lay.  Here is the next plateau of concentration.

In the meantime, however, I have my joy life, my world of peace, creativity and fulfillment to enter into and explore.  My gratitude abounds for this space in thought.  I am divinely fortunate.

I don’t know what I can accomplish during the rest of my time here on Planet Earth, but I do know that I am committed to this one endeavor only – scientific spiritual seeking through music.  Everything else pales in comparison.  Eating, sleeping, the laborious minutiae of everyday life all are just things to work through so that my true commitment can be practiced.  The human experience is a stepping-stone to the divine.  We’re trying to make those steps shorter every day.

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Fact of the matter is that it’s one of those few things in life that is black and white.  It’s either the truth or its not.  If it’s not, it’s not truth-full and so the part where it’s not the truth, is the lie.

A white lie is often told to protect someone’s feelings – like when your wife just spent $250 at the beauty parlor and had her hair cut and the goofball ruined it and she comes home proudly, but looking like somebody else, you say, “Hey honey, you look real cute.”

Fibs are harmless lies that really don’t matter like telling your neighbor that you didn’t come to their party because you weren’t feeling well when you really went out to a movie instead.  Fibs and white lies both fall under the same confusing category.  The term “white lie” is pretty laughable when you think about it.  Does the word “white’ make it OK?  Is the lie more pure because it’s white?  Is it cleaner?  Pretty confusing.

And then there’s exaggeration – a fault that I’ve been accused of probably too often.  I like to say when accused, “Well, I’m in show business.  Think of it as promotion – making the success or the adventure or the story just a tad more interesting or dramatic or even a bit more heroic.  But truthfully, I’ve learned to see that they’re all just a bunch of lies and that, essentially, if we slow down and think things out and live higher and more noble lives from moment to moment, we do not have to lie.  Lying is just really a bad habit.

And then there are the inveterate liars…  These are the people that have a disease – a dis-ease with the truth.  They lie so often that they lose consciousness of the truth and lose the ability to discern between the two.  Their lying becomes so habitual that they lose their connection with the reality of the truth and lie so often that they begin to believe their own lies  — in essence, they lie so much that they even lie to themselves about lying.  A vicious circle.

In my life I’ve suspected several and absolutely identified two.

One was a man who I worked with for many years.  He was a fine musician and we had a great partnership in music, a great musical simpatico between us and a terrific collaboration that always resulted in powerful production.  I loved him like a brother and we were joined at the hip.  But I began to watch him lie and not know what to do about it.

Confronting a liar is very difficult.  It’s easier to confront a thief or a murderer.  With a thief, you point out the stolen money in his hand and if you catch him red-handed, you’ve got the material proof.  With a murderer you’ve got the body or the gun or the fingerprints.  But with a liar, it’s all a bit nebulous, and usually a liar can and will back up his original lie with another ten to do anything he can do to wiggle out.

Even the experts say that confronting a liar is a near impossible thing.   It’s very hard to make it stick and ruins the relationship and destroys the moment.

With my male friend, his lies became so obvious to me after a while that I would be embarrassed by his effrontery – so much so that I could not even protest the most obvious of lies.  I would stand and listen to him unravel his whoppers and be so flabbergasted that he would actually think that I was dumb enough to believe him, that I could not say anything in retort.  To challenge him would be so difficult that I would just say nothing and walk away shaking my head.

Of course, the more he “got away with it”, the more he did it.  It grew to such proportions that it absolutely destroyed our relationship.  I lost my trust in his center.  I never knew when he was lying or truthful because he didn’t know either.  To him, it was all the truth and to me, they were all lies.

In the end, I stepped away from this friendship and never worked with him again.  I’m not sure he ever really understood.  I think he was very hurt by my pull-back, but I could have never confronted him with the enormity of my doubt and the absolute reality of what I knew to be true.  I’ve realized that I got trapped in his consciousness and, by not nailing him, actually took part in his avoidance of the truth.  In the end he made a liar out of me.

It was an extremely difficult situation and, to this day, I don’t know how I could have fixed it – and so I walked away from the entire mess and never went back.

The second habitual liar that I’ve encountered was a woman that I employed.  She was extremely bright and could have been hugely effective in her job, but she too was such an inveterate liar that she even believed her own BS.  At first she would lie about the things she had accomplished, the promises she had made and the hopes that she offered me.  When none of these came to any reality, she would always have ten more in the ready.  As the lies began to pile up, she couldn’t remember her own lies and would change her stories and when I would question her change of story she would get angry and lie her way out of the confusion.

Because not everything was a lie – there were actually occasional truths mixed in – it took a longer time to see and be able to identify the patterns, but within months, I had seen enough and heard enough.

No one wants a lie to be a lie.  Lies are told to right a wrong, not wrong a right.  Lies are told to make something OK or better or even wondrous.  And so we too want them to be true, but after a while, when we finally see and understand the patterns of lying and suspect, and then know that we’re being lied to, we simply stand demoralized and wait for the next lie to appear.  When it appears, we see it immediately.

With this lady (she was no lady), as much as I wanted her to be successful, as much as I needed her to be successful, ultimately she was hollow.  There was no real substance to her.  It was all false fabrication.  I kept wishing it weren’t, hoping that some of the promises made would come true, but ultimately she was simply ineffective because she was so distant from the truth.

Even when I would confront her with the hollowness of her words and the failures of her so-called efforts, she would weave such a tale of falsehood to get out of the trap that she had gotten herself into that there was nothing I could do except relieve her of her duties and ultimately her job.

The saddest thing about the whole mess was that she was so caught up in her lying that she absolutely believed herself.  That was what was so wondrous to me.  She would say things that we all knew were wild fabrications of the imagination and absolutely believe them.  She was so used to lying that she instantly bought her own lies lock, stock and barrel.

I know only one way of healing such a condition.  To pray about it.  Stepping away from the person , as I did in both cases, let’s be clear, was not a healing solution.  It rid me of the problem to a great extent, but it did not heal the error.  A habitual liar has a mighty problem to deal with and it’s tougher, in a way, than a cancer.  A cancer you can see, you can feel.  It becomes something you have to deal with.  It confronts you.

Lying, on the other hand, is something that when confronted, the habitual liar simply lies their way around and lies their way past.  Ultimately this is a problem for a power greater than I.

Perhaps if I were a sharper judge of character and could nip it in the bud in the beginning that would help.  But we don’t want to start new relationships that way – looking for the untruths.

Perhaps if I were more centered myself and closer on a more consistent level to the absolute truth moment to moment this would help.  Sounds like I got something here…

Identify more with the truth.  Live the truth more fully.  Attract the truth.  Raise the bar.  Set a higher standard of truth around you.  Purify the atmosphere.  Demand honesty both from within and without.

Dictionary definition of lying: To pretend with intent to deceive.

Pretty damning…

Physician, heal thyself.

NOTE: You have just read Peter Link’s 400th Blog Post.  Cause for some form of quiet celebration among readers… )

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• The Atheist
• The Changing Scene
• Send A Signal
• Through An Open Door

And it’s a good song.  I know it is, because it’s been running around in my mind for several weeks now.  I wake up singing it and wonder for a moment where it came from and then realize, “Oh yeah, that’s that song!”

The client keeps coming in when I’m finished with my latest iteration and she sits and listens and nods her head as I play it for her and then when it’s through we nod and agree that we’re not there yet.

In the original session, her pianist and writing partner came in and recorded the piano and she the scratch vocal.  They were kind of ornery with each other when usually they’re a happy team.  I stayed pretty quiet as he kind of ran roughshod over her as they worked and he laid down the piano part and she sang the scratch vocal.  It was not an inspired session.  At one point I remember exclaiming kind of in fun, “Boy, you two are like an old married couple.”  The session was more about their momentary troubles than the song itself and the song was basically a love song!

As he got more and more depressed and actually meaner to her, she became nervous and hurt, embarrassed and withdrew into an uncustomary quiet.  But we were getting the work done.  He’s a fine pianist and though he was not particularly inspired that day, his playing was solid and mistake free.

When the session was over I was relieved to move on in life.  I began, several days later to orchestrate the song using his piano track and her scratch vocal as a base and it all seemed to go downhill from there.

It has seemed that no matter what I tried with this good solid song, I could not seem to capture the spirit of the love relationship in the song.  I’m sure, by now, you’re all thinking, “Well, no wonder, Pete.  There was no love in the song’s performance.”  True, but there is a lot of love in the song’s writing.  The song comes with huge armloads of love generated by the lyric, melody and harmonies contained therein.

I woke up yet again this morning.  The song was on my mind.  I lay there in my half sleep as it drifted through my mind, free from its troubled past, centered in its character and intent and simply expressing its original concept of one loving another.  Then I got it!

The recording I was working with was too fast!  The tempo was simply going faster than it really wanted to go.   I knew this because the tempo in my head this morning was about 10 BPM (beats per minute) slower than the track I’ve been working with.

The intent was rushed on the recording because the performers were not centered, the pianist really wanted to finish and go home and the singer’s mind simply wasn’t focused on the love of the song, but rather the awkwardness of their present relationship.  At the time the song was new to me, so I was more focused on the technical – watching the meters, getting the piano recorded correctly and laying down the vocal with no distortion.  The rest of my mind was struggling with their troubles and my concentration was divided.  Besides, they wrote the song!  They ought to have a good feel for the right tempo.

But they didn’t.  That morning in the studio, they weren’t centered in love, they were both in a hurry to get through and out of each other’s presence and so the real “doing” of the moment produced a rushed, unfeeling track and confused vocal performance.

Art reflected life.

Going too fast.

How many times do we say that to ourselves?  “Slow down, Pete, you’re going too fast.”

It all got me to thinking…

I’ve been working on a life.  It hasn’t been working.  I’ve tried several different approaches – and nothing I’ve done has seemed to bring this life to its realization supporting the meaning, content and intent of the life.

And it’s a good life.  I know it is, because it’s been running around in my mind for many years now.  I wake up singing it every morning and wonder for a moment where it came from and then realize, “Oh yeah, that’s my life!” 

In the original concept, the life was laid out ahead of me in a pretty clear plan and the basic construct of this plan worked well, but as I’ve gotten more and more into it, it’s taken on a much bigger picture – probably bigger than I could handle.  And things have started to go south for me. 

So many projects, so much to do, so split in my daily activities and so often behind the ol’ eight ball.  It (the life) was exciting and the accomplishment was demonstrable, but the happiness was only found in the song writing, the music making.  The rest was far too pushed, far too rushed trying to get a massive list of things finished so I could keep up with the massive list accumulating every day, every hour, every minute.

I woke up yet again this morning.  The life was on my mind.  I lay there in my half sleep as it drifted through my mind, free from its troubled past, centered in its character and intent and simply expressing its original concept of one loving another.  Then I got it!

The life I was leading was too fast!  The tempo was simply going faster than I really wanted to go.

The intent was rushed in this life because the performer was not centered, the doer really wanted to just finish and go home and simply wasn’t focused on the love of the life, but rather the awkwardness of the rushing from one moment to the next.

I’m going to slow it down now and get back in the groove.  This life is a love song and that love has to be reflected and can only be reflected if first I am centered and in the moment, not in a hurry, not caught up in the madness of the scramble, but rather in the true rhythm of the moment. 

I’m going to find a new tempo.

Life reflecting art.

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“I want all of you to get up out of your chairs.  I want you to get up right now and go to the window.  Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’  I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’  Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to … stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Back in 1976, newsman Howard Beale, played by actor Peter Finch in the movie Network, uttered these immortal words that, for those of us who saw the movie and Finch’s riveting performance, have stuck with many of us for a quarter century.

Back then it was a grand idea as, in the movie, thousands rushed to their windows and did just that.

Today it’s really happening.  And it’s a good thing!

Bloggers now take down selfish companies.  Egypt’s people stage a peaceful revolt and take back their government.  Bank of America abandons its plan to charge customers a $5 fee to use their debit cards for purchases. Only a month earlier, the bank had announced the new charge, immediately setting off a huge uproar from consumers.  The Occupy Wall Street movement grabs the attention of millions and whether you’re for it or agi’n it, you have to value it as the great American dream of free speech in action.

Netflix‘s video subscription service lost 800,000 customers in the third quarter —the biggest exodus in its history— even as its earnings rose 65 percent.

The losses were larger than management had previously warned. The unwelcome surprise, contained in financial results released, was compounded by a forecast calling for millions of Netflix Inc.’s DVD-by-mail subscribers to cancel the service in reaction to dramatic price increase that took effect last month.

The bad news bruised already battered stock as the shares plunged by more than 26 percent.

Netflix lost its luster among consumers and investors by raising prices as much as 60 percent in the U.S. and bungling an attempt to spin off its DVD-by-mail rental service.

The people spoke.  The people acted.  The people won.  The people sent signals.  They got up off their chairs, went over and opened their windows, stuck their heads out and shouted, “WE’RE AS MAD AS HELL, AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Why is this so possible today 25 years after Network?  Because we now have a tremendously effective network called the Internet.  Instant communication banding together the peoples of the world.  Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and a plethora of other social communities organizing hundreds of millions of people to form a voice of the people.

We’re not always doing it right yet.  We’ve still got a lot to learn, but we’ve now got this amazing tool that makes peaceful revolution possible.

Let’s use it.  Let’s send a signal.  No longer do we have to take it on the chin from big business.  No longer do the rich have to get richer as the poor get poorer.  No longer do dictators have to control entire countries.  No longer do we have to throw open our windows and scream our protests into the night.  We, the people, now have a tremendous meeting hall.  It’s called the Internet.

Use it.  Send a signal.

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Periodically I watched Steve’s addresses to his company touting his company’s new ideas and features with religious anticipation regarding what improvements he would bring to my life and work.  My life centered around the Mac computer both in the studio and at home.  I’m on the computer so much that I’ve learned to mouse equally with both hands – a left-handed mouser in the studio and a right-handed mouser in my home office.

Steve, with his clever wit, cool demeanor and sparkling eyes, was always three steps ahead of the game and out front of the pack.  I didn’t always agree with his choices, but I used them and grew to deeply respect his individuality.  He was the rare combination of artist, inventor and businessman and hugely successful at each — a true American hero.

Recently I read his sister’s eulogy, given at his memorial, and found him again to be leading me in yet another one of life’s endeavors.

As most of you know, I’m pretty consumed with my Goin’ Home – On Heaven And Beyond CD project these days.  In short, it’s about the transition we all face going from this world to the next and the meeting of it head on with open eyes and wonder. It’s about the eternality of life and its various preparations and speculations on the hereafter.

Right in the middle of the climactic phase of the project, my hero up and takes the journey himself.

His sister speaks about his last days in her eulogy:

His tone, his sister said, was “like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.”

“Even as he struggled physically in his last hours”, she said, “there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.”

“He was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.”

With his family surrounding him, his sister said, Jobs’ last words were: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

When I read this on my iPad, I just leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes and smiled at his boyish wonder and anticipation of adventure.  Once again, even after leaving us, my hero showed us the way to live – and the way to die.

I realized that I loved this man though I never met him.  I loved his creative mind and I loved his wonder for life and, most importantly to me at this moment, I loved his open-minded excitement about moving on.

Goin’ home
Goin’ home
I’m a goin’ home
Quiet like
Some still day
I’m jes’ goin’ home

It’s not far
Jes’ close by
Through an open door
Work all done
Care laid by
Goin’ to fear no more

From Goin’ Home
Music and Lyrics by Antonin Dvorák & V.Labenske

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This is our growing community. These are our Facebook friends, our tweeting family, our hands across the world.  The come from Africa, from Europe and South America, from Down Under and all across the U.S.  They are a world uniting to make a better world.

Sounds like a pretty high-falutin’ idea, but, in fact, it’s a reality.  It is organizing and it presently exists through social media, through mutual music appreciation, through spiritual seeking, through friends of Watchfire Music and even through a new CD project called Goin’ Home – On Heaven and Beyond.

It’s an idea that has created itself – not anything that anybody set out to create, but an idea that sprang up from necessity and natural evolution.  I see it coming and I simply try to open the road ahead to let it gain its own momentum in its own natural way.  This community has no leaders and no followers.  It’s a gathering of individuals, of originals, supporting one another with whatever it takes at a time when man really needs to reach out to his fellow man to survive.

I am eternally grateful for this community.  I am a member and I feel its value, its support and its bonding every day.  I watch it grow.  I fan the flames.  I sing its praises!

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• Straight ‘A’s

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• The Center and Circumference of Pain

Alan Smallwood

In an earlier marriage my wife at the time chanted the Nichiren-Buddhist mantra “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo”.  She was going through a particularly rough stretch in her life and she would go off and chant in our guest bedroom every day for a couple of hours.  She would always emerge from these sessions a different person – calm, centered, and quietly joyful.

I supported this practice at first because I saw that it worked wonders for her and over the couple of years that she chanted, I grew to love the sound of her voice pealing through the house, its mellifluous vibrations casting its positive spell over both our lives and probably even helping our plants to grow and be happy as well.

I think it was the thing I missed about her most when we parted.

Several years afterwards I began to work with a young musician named Alan Smallwood who came into my life at just the perfect time and brought to me in musical terms exactly what I seemed to be missing in my life.

As a musician, I had no real formal training.  Most of what I knew came from playing in bands, singing in folk groups and conducting student choirs.  I did study drums for several years with a fine teacher as a kid, but that was about it.

So there were many holes in my understanding and knowledge of this amazing world of music and consequently there were many holes in my music.  Alan Smallwood, several years younger than I, filled these holes with his genius, his fascination with the then developing new technology of synthesis and became my musical director and arranger/orchestrator for many of the musical projects that I created.

It’s possible that I taught him a few things along the way.  He would probably tell you that today in his humble, sometimes self-deprecating manner, but what I really remember from the association is all that he taught me.

‘Woody’, as we lovingly called him, was always a flurry of energy.  In normal life that energy would spill out in a myriad of ways sometimes verging on a kind of scattered turmoil; however, when he would sit down at the piano or with his beloved Polymoog Synthesizer, he would turn into a concentrated force of magical wonder as his music poured forth out of his mind and fingers.  He would transform before our very eyes into the boy genius that we all knew him to be.

He taught me how to arrange for a rhythm section.  He taught me synthesis programming.  He taught me how to rehearse a band and get the most out of my musicians and he taught me how to write for musicians and challenge them and trust them.  Did he know at the time that he was teaching?  Probably not.  I learned by osmosis, by watching the kid do his magical thing.

As we both evolved as musicians we began to drift in and out of each other’s lives more and more as I got into the Industrial market and Woody went off to work as a side man with the likes of Lou Reed, Edgar Winter, David Clayton-Thomas of “Blood Sweat & Tears” and also with Marilyn McCoo, Eartha Kitt and Della Reese.

For a couple of decades then we hardly saw each other.  He made the root of his living doing radio and television commercials with a jingle house here in NYC and that was a world that I never really ventured into, so our lives didn’t really touch.

But I always knew we were intertwined through the music that we had shared and especially the understandings of music that he had taught me.

Over the past year, “forces” have seemed to be bringing us back together.  A phone call here, a possible gig here and there that fell through or got postponed, but nothing really concrete.  Just enough to get him back into the back of my mind.

Then one day I received an email from him with a single song MP3.  He, still in his humble fashion, suggested that this piece of music might interest me since I was doing this ‘Inspirational thing’.  It was cut #2, Winds Of Change from his album called The Far Reaching Sound.  I sat mesmerized listening to this beautiful work from my old friend who had obviously grown even more as a musician over the decades.

I immediately wrote him back and said, “Send me the whole CD immediately!”

He did, of course, and Watchfire Music has now added Alan and The Far Reaching Sound to our roster of great music.

Woody’s  CD explores the merging of music with the Nichiren-Buddhist mantra  “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo”.  In his own description, “the mantra is sung in a similar fashion to traditional chanting.  These songs present an aspect of the chanting experience while also taking the listener on exotic musical journeys.”

His description, for me, is totally accurate.  The CD has found a continuous home in my computer for the last few weeks now and gets played nearly every day filling our home with its most special music and beautiful chant.

Many of you, our loyal customers, are Christian-based people.  Here I ask each of you to keep an open mind and an open heart to the truths of existence.  Give this music a listen.  Don’t let ‘religion’ be constrictive.  Expand your thought and stay open to truth in all forms – in language, style and music.  We can all get inspired in a myriad of ways.  Here’s one of them.  Check it out.  It certainly works for me.

Chanting.  Try it.  It’s enchanting.

Even More Inspiration

• Even Now
• Spiritual Scientist
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel
• The Decline of Lyrical Craftsmanship – Part 1
• I Stood In The Wings… Part 4