I N S T R U C T I O N S F O R L I F E
from the Dalai Lama
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
- Respect for self
- Respect for others and
- Responsibility for all your actions
Written by Peter Link
I think about truth a lot. It’s fast becoming my life’s greatest interest – far out-pacing money, music and the Yankees. Daily dealings with all the various concepts of the word “Inspirational” seem to focus my life more and more on the spiritual, and I know that’s a good thing. So I’m not resisting it; in fact, I’m opening up to it. And it’s certainly opening up to me.
We’re in a spiritual age. Looking back through history, these ages come in cycles. This is the next one. Go into any bookstore. Books for seekers abound. Christian music is the one genre of music that has actually grown during this terribly trying time in the music industry. Oprah announces discussions with Eckhart Tolle on line and millions show up to partake. Never before has content for seekers been more available.
The short and incomplete history of a seeker
I am a seeker. “What do you seek?” you may ask. Perhaps first let’s get on the same page with what it means to seek. Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary says, to ‘seek’ is, “to search, to pursue, to explore, to try to learn or discover.”
What do I seek? I seek truth. Again, our dictionary says that truth is “the real or true state of things.” So by definition a seeker is an ‘explorer’ of the ‘real or true state of things’.
Many people seek through their religion. I do too, but I’ve learned in life to grab it any way I can from any place it comes – as long as at its center there is truth.
When asked how he could possibly break through and smash the traditions of music with his historic and monumental work The Rite Of Spring, Igor Stravinsky said that in order to break the barriers of music, one has to first have studied and know all of music to begin with.
And so, as a seeker of truth in music, I listen to the likes of Bach, Mozart, Tshaikovsky, Copeland, Gershwin, Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Stravinsky among many others. As a seeker of truth in life, I listen to the Bible, Confucious, The Koran, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Krishnamurti, The I Ching, and Lao Tsu.
Posted by Peter Link
The singer stands at the microphone in a recording studio and performs an inspirational song to a beautiful orchestration. The sound of the voice is picked up by the microphone, run through a cable into a large console which then sends it on to a digital converter which converts all the parameters of the sound of the voice into digital numbers — a series of zeros and ones, which are then stored in a computer to be later reconverted back into the sound of the voice for further usage.
Months later, you or I place the CD in our CD player and listen to the performance. The laser beam reads the zeros and ones and converts them back into beautiful music. We are touched, moved emotionally by the inspiration of the singer’s performance. The music has been captured digitally in strings of numbers, each string a symbol of a pitch, timbre, vibrato, etc.
Watchfire Music: Why have you chosen music as your instrument of communication?
Lew Doty: I don’t think I chose it; it chose me. I expected to make music my career, but in my twenties I lost my passion for it, and totally gave up playing and writing, even sold the guitar, and pursued another career.
Twelve years ago when I became involved in the New Thought movement, God, disguised as an aging hippie musician, entered my life and handed me a guitar and told me to start playing and writing again.
Soon music became the means by which I could process the information I was learning and express my own understanding of it. Suddenly there was no way I could stop writing and playing. The passion had returned.
