Sparks from the Fire

I’m not particularly big on the word “religion”.  I find it to be oft times restrictive, non-inclusive and all too often divisive.  Though I have studied the world’s religions all my life, it’s not a field that I find myself associating with very often.  When anyone asks me if I am a religious person I often answer, “not particularly, but I am a spiritual seeker.”

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. (more…)

The dictionary defines this in simple terms.  “Someone who denies the existence of God”.  It’s from the Latin: atheos which means ‘without God’ or ‘Godless’.

I’ve always been curious to meet an atheist.  Whenever someone announces themselves as one, I always try to take a moment (or often many more) and discus their atheism with them.  I like to first start with the obvious question, “Define God?”

I’ve had this opportunity 15-20 times in life and it’s always been the same experience.  Once they’ve explained their definition of God to me, I’ve always found myself saying back to them the same line: “Well then, I must be an atheist too because I don’t believe in that god either.”

Often the definition portrayed is archaic, anthropomorphic, and usually something taught them by confused parents or Sunday School teachers, but always ideas that I find equally hard to swallow.

Can this be the most misunderstood word in the human language?  Quite possibly so.  I’m not here to rectify that.  I have had an evolving, ever-changing struggle with the concept of God for over a half a century now.  I’m not at all sure what God is, but I do have a feeling for what He, She or It is not.

A guy in the sky with a long white beard?  No.  A He or a She?  No.  A Father/ Mother?  Sort of…  An infinite and eternal concept?  Probably.  Love, Life, Truth, Being, Interconnection?  Yes. (more…)

Money may not make the world go around, but it does help gather people together sometimes to give it a little push.  In this day and age of the music industry blues, sometimes that little push is needed.  In the case of Inspirational music the time is now.

Consequently we have begun a 30 day Kickstarter.com campaign to raise money to complete and promote a CD project that I’ve been working on now for over a year and a half.

It’s the making of new CD called “Goin’ Home” and a subsequent National Tour around this CD.  It involves an inspiring blend of great tradition and cutting-edge new music and deals with a very important aspect of each of our lives.

It deals with the experience at the end of our lives that we each face eventually that I like to call “transition”.

In the words of Jenny Burton, one of the project’s stars, “It’s a subject that, at first, we walk away from, but will walk towards one day, so why not walk towards it informed and without fear.”

I, personally, would like to go through that experience, when it comes, fully aware and alert, expectant joyful, and filled with spiritual curiosity.  When it comes to that transition, we Americans tend to look the other way and pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I don’t want to be like that.

What better way to prepare than to write about it.

So Goin’ Home is about Heaven and beyond.  I’ve thought from childhood that the much of the world’s perception of Heaven, though certainly idyllic, was really rather like a fairy tale or a Santa Claus story.  In a song entitled Heaven on the CD I write the following: (more…)

“Ouch, my arm hurts” you might say.  But you’d be wrong.  It’s not your arm that hurts; it’s your brain.  “Whoa, them’s fightin’ words.  It’s my arm.  I oughta know.” you retort.  Sorry, wrong again.  You’ve been duped – duped by a 5000 year-old misunderstanding of the origin and practice of pain.

It’s amazing the lies we’re taught and then live by for all our lives here on Planet Earth.

In a recent and most enlightening article in Sports Illustrated entitled The Truth About Pain: It’s In Your Head by David Epstein the old theories of pain’s beginnings in the injury itself and then traveling through the body’s nerve to the brain are trashed and re-theorized by modern medical science.

Relating to athletes in pain, a number of fascinating stories are told of athletes overcoming pain to complete their events, and these studies show conclusively, one after the other, that pain originates, not in the broken bone or the pulled muscle itself, but rather in the brain and not the injury. (more…)

It strikes me this morning that we live in a world beset by confusions of principle.  As I mature (I prefer this term to “getting older”) I am more and more aware of evil’s influence in our world and the discord that it brings to our world.  I live in an industry that has been dominated by greed for decades and has consequently failed.  Inspirational music may be one shining light in the ashes of its decline, but sometimes I wonder how such a pure and noble idea such as music can be so riddled with chaos.

Stepping back as I have done over these last 5 years of Watchfire Music and investigating the whys and wherefores of this demise has taught me that it was an industry that needed to fail because it was in many ways corrupt.  Greed was king.  Artists were treated horribly by the people in power and money took precedence over music so much that the industry became a jumble of confusion.

Record stores closed, new innovations like the Internet were paid little attention, an industry where the creative artist stood at both its center and circumference was run by lawyers instead of creative people and even the artists got sucked into this chaos of greed and began to value the almighty dollar more than the almighty song.

Greed, at this moment of thought, strikes me as the reigning terror of not only my world, but the rest of the world’s confusion as well.  This comes as no surprise to anyone, I’m sure.  After all, it is considered one of life’s seven deadly sins.

Everywhere I look around me I see the influences of evil trying to confuse us into buying into its charms, its energies, its seeming power.  In the last two weeks we here in NYC have been ‘attacked’ by 2 natural disasters – first an earthquake, then a hurricane.

Let’s reconsider the term “natural” here.  What’s natural about all these disasters?  Don’t be duped for a moment into believing that it’s just nature taking its natural course.  It’s thought that controls the universe, not nature.  And disaster is not “natural”.

As I watched the hurricane bear down upon us and prepared both mentally and physically for its onslaught, it struck me that a hurricane was nothing but ego raging across our world, shouting, “Pay attention to me!  I am mighty. I am destructive!” and sucking in its energies from all around itself, running around in a vicious circle of self-destruction and, along the way, destroying everything in its path. (more…)

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to lie in bed at night and make up stupid lyrics to popular songs and giggle into the night.  One was:

My body lies over the ocean
My body lies over the sea
My body lies over the ocean
So bring back my body to me

I warned you that they were stupid.

Now today I’m writing lyrics on the same subject – hopefully with a little more content.  Here’s one drawn from a previous blog post on Sparks From The Fire.  The content, as explained in the post, has been capturing my imagination for months now and it finally all poured out in song form this past two weeks.

Both song and orchestration are now finished and will be presented in Julia Wade’s forthcoming CD, Silk Road, due to be released in early 2012.

Not her usual fare?  Perhaps, but watch for some fascinating new directions from this most special vocalist as she branches out and develops this new Classical/Crossover genre.

This song will be a guaranteed eye and ear opener.  Enjoy!

My Body
Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

I am not my body
My body is not me
I mean to live beyond it
In some capacity

I believe I’ve lived before it
Though memory fails
I cannot ignore it
Everything else
Pales in comparison
This wondrous invention
Of flesh and bone technology
Only belongs to me

Ladies choir

Temporarily

(more…)

I grew up in a family of four.  My older brother, Jim, was five years older than me and led the way in just about everything.  I idolized him just as every little brother should.  In our family, it was always said that Jim got the brains and Pete got the work ethic.  I don’t remember ever thinking much about the “work ethic” part, but I sure wished at the time that I had gotten the “brains” part of the deal.

Jim was a lefty.  That meant, as all you lefties out there know, that when you learn to write longhand, you have to drag your hand across the already written word often in the beginning smearing the ink or even the pencil marks into oblivion.  In order to not do this, you have to lift your hand awkwardly up, losing your controlling leverage.  Consequently many lefties start out as poor hand-writers until they get the hang of it.  My brother, Jim, was just such a monster.

My school district in Kirkwood, Missouri did not go by the usual A, B, C, D, F grading system that most institutions use today.  Instead it was as follows:

S= Superior
E= Excellent
A= Average
P= Poor
U= Unsatisfactory

Why or how I still remember this is beyond me.  Sorta like remembering my first telephone number was “Kirkwood 1084J”.  Another was “Terryhill 31390”.  Those were spoken when the operator came on and said “Operator” – before dial phones.  I guess that oughta date me.

But I digress…

When in the sixth grade, under the tutelage of the feared Miss Cochran, older brother Jim had pulled off the near impossible.  He had, with his big brains, received straight ‘S’s at the end of the year from the toughest teacher at Osage School.  Except for one thing.  He actually didn’t get straight ’S’s because he got an ‘E’ in handwriting – probably a gift from a momentarily generous Miss Cochran who felt sorry for the kid who was so smart but had the dreaded Lefty Disease.  Even in the sixth grade Jim’s handwriting was still unreadable.

But everyone except younger brother, Pete, gave Jim the benefit of the doubt and his straight ‘S’s (except for Handwriting) became the talk of the neighborhood for a season and a high-water mark in our family for what felt like forever.  Every time grades were brought home we were reminded that Jim had received straight ‘S’s in the sixth grade.  (All except for one)

So this became the life objective for younger brother, Pete, not necessarily self-perpetuated, but certainly parent perpetuated.  This became the record to beat for five long years of my life as I waited to try my lesser brains in the sixth grade. (more…)