Sparks from the Fire » spirituality

Spiritual Scientist

Peter Link — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:09:27 +0000

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.

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.

Even More Inspiration

The Atheist

Peter Link — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:58:47 +0000

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.

I saw an amazing video presentation on my TED app last week by Alexander Tsiaras called “Conception to birth – visualized”. It’s a talk showing human development from conception to birth and beyond. Mr. Tsiaras is and associate professor at Yale and presents a beautiful and compelling talk and video on birth. In it, he states that, as a scientist, before he explored this project, he was essentially an atheist, but that in the course of working on the project, he realized the absolute necessity of a higher power.

As I watched his wondrous video, I too saw the absolute of God. The biological mechanism that produces each of us, the mathematical structure that forms the fetus from the two cells of egg and sperm, the absolutely miraculous evolution of egg into human person he explains is mystery, magic and divinity. The intelligence behind this marvel called birth is so staggering that it can only be the result of some higher power.

Now I’m not sure where to put all this material result of matter molecules forming human beings, because essentially I see this human experience as an illusion – like a dream – and basically unreal in the first place, but here is a most compelling drama played out for thought.

Where does all this material existence come from in the first place? Or is there a first place to begin with? If it isn’t, then it didn’t come at all and isn’t really here. Whoa… Getting pretty deep here, Pete. In so deep I’ll never get out.

But simply looking at this material existence – at the wonders of the human body, the infinity and scale of the cosmos, the organization of nature, the breakdown of matter into its relative nothingness, the wondrous, unexplainable and inconceivable concepts that we pass through daily and take so for granted, how can anyone with a thought past themselves not see that there is something out there, in there, everywhere that is not controlling the organization and ebb and flow of these staggering concepts.

Something is in control of all this even when things seem out of control in our own lives. Something is still in control of the building and sustenance of life, of the evolution and organization of nature, of the revolving of our tiny planet around our small sun, (much less the creation and disposition of the many universes around us).

It is all so far beyond us, so far beyond the confines of our limited thinking and understanding – even our own brains that we carry around in our own heads are pitifully understood. And yet it all goes on working.

I sat in an airplane last month and watched the cars below all stay in their places on their side of the road and not run into each other – thousands, millions of cars all staying in their lanes – millions of drivers avoiding instant death moment to moment driving home after work. Something else was clearly in control. Sometimes one of these millions breaks the rules and swerves out of control, but trillions of moments go by as the universe works and inside each of those cars sits a man or woman focused on something totally different than staying alive – their love affairs, their shopping lists, the music on the radio. They all naturally stay in their lanes within the laws of organization and only rarely does the system break down.

From my perch in the plane, all those tiny headlights traveling at 70 miles an hour, all making it home to dinner spoke to me of God in control of His/Its universe.

And so I say to all of you self-proclaimed atheists out there, “Redefine your god concept. If you don’t like the name, call it ‘dog’. I don’t care, but open your thought to a higher power, a universal organization, a force of nature – something beyond yourself that is perchance in control.

We do not live in chaos no matter how chaotic our lives. We live in the immaculate organization of matter molecules and constituent masses so perfectly organized around us that we take the whole thing for granted moment to moment. To whom do we owe that?

Next time you take a breath. Next time your eye blinks. Next time your heart beats. Next time you smile. And on and on and on…

Even More Inspiration

Words Of Wisdom

Peter Link — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 23:26:08 +0000

Even More Inspiration

Kickstarter.com Campaign – I

Peter Link — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:48:57 +0000

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:

I don’t believe in Heaven
As a place up in the sky
A place where all the angels sit
As the clouds go passin by

I don’t believe in Heaven
Dressed in white and gold
A city in a world upstairs
Where all of our wings unfold
And a God sits upon his throne

I see it more as a state of mind
Since my body gets left behind
I see it more
As an open door
To a life of another kind

I don’t believe in Heaven
As a place this side of Hell
A place where all the good folks go
A place where the spirits dwell
An’ ol’ Peter a-rings dem bells

I see it more as a holy space
A place to pause
A spiritual base
I see it more as an open door
To a kind of a quiet grace

And when all is said and done
I think that Heaven
Like earth
Is what we make it
It’s a moment in the sun
It’s a cleansing time
In a state of grace
It’s a place where laughter reigns

Oh it’s Heaven
Heaven
It’s Heaven
Oh it’s Heaven

So this CD and eventual concert tour explores the eventuality that we all face at one time or another.

But it’s also an experience about music and great songs, and uplifting and joyful singing. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s rich in its depth and it definitely rocks the house.

Goin’ Home is written as a Gospel Cantata. A cantata is simply short for “a musical composition for voices and orchestra based on a spiritual text.”

It’s performed by a mostly African American cast of top New York Session singers – great friends that I’ve worked with many years now. In future posts I’ll tell you much more about this amazingly talented group of artists.

“So what is Kickstarter.com” you must ask.

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.

All or nothing funding. On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

We’re giving ourselves 30 days to raise the necessary $9500 of funding. Those 30 days started October 3, 2011 and will end November 2, 2011. I urge you to participate in this drive to not only support Inspirational music, but also Watchfire Music, the CD’s record company and on-line place of purchase. Most of all, I ask you to support the uplifting idea behind the project. Its purpose is to open our eyes to the timelessness of our future.

Your contribution, whether large or small, is critically important to the success of this endeavor. Every dollar counts. If each person on our mailing list just gave one dollar, we’d get there and beyond.

We’d love you to be a part of this very special event.

To learn much more about this endeavor please go to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/174116135/peter-link-goin-home-cd-and-concert-tour

Even More Inspiration

The Center and Circumference of Pain

Peter Link — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:52:13 +0000

“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.

Neuroscientists and psychologists now state that, “…the brain is not a passive recipient of pain information but rather an active gatherer of relevant data from the skin and organs that has ultimate say in dispensing pain as it sees it. If the nerve fibers compose a web in the body, the brain is the spider at the center, using the web as a data-collecting extension of its body. Each vibration of the web reveals the location and site of the intruding sensation and sets other strands vibrating that the spider must collectively interpret to decide on a course of action.”

It goes on to explain that it is the brain that makes up the pain to alert other parts of the brain that there is a problem in the body, and that the pain actually originates in the brain itself. Then it goes on to explain that pain killers actually do nothing to the injury itself, but rather simply fool the brain so that it does not make up the concept of pain in the first place.

It also gives some classic examples of people who have lost limbs and yet still feel the pain in their missing toes or feet or limbs.

The article is long, well documented and very compelling to one who studies the illusion of matter and thinks daily on the unreality of the human body trying to overcome and re-examine the lies we’ve been taught in this earthly experience.

It made me recollect my own enlightening experience with pain.

I sat in the dentist chair awaiting the onslaught to both body and senses. My friend, the dentist, asked, “Would you like some gas?” The oncoming assault was, this time, more than just a simple drilling and plaster job, but something far more intrusive – the pulling of a tooth. Yuck! Yikes!!

I agreed to the gas – whatever it took to help me vacate the premises while the invasion took place.

The gear was strapped on and the gentle hissing began. I closed my eyes and began to breathe in the strange mixture of oxygen and foreign stuff.

I found myself scrambling up a steeply inclined road inside my head and I sat perched in the middle of this road and looked down, eyes still shut, at the proceedings. Part of me was aware of the dentist instructing the nurse, calling for the ‘yanker’ – probably not the term he used – and fitting it around my damaged tooth. I heard his grunt as he pulled. I heard the crackle of bone and tooth as he broke it loose. I heard him mutter his favorite curse word as the ‘yanker’ slipped from the tooth and then I once again experienced his second try at extraction.

I remember that the corridor that I peered down into was solely red of color – dark and tunnel-like – perhaps what it might be like looking down into my throat. I sat perched and fascinated, elbows on knees, chin on hands, quietly wondering what would happen next.

And then I saw it.

At the end of the red corridor, there slid across the space before me 4 letters, slowly, somewhat like a ticker tape news flash you might see on a building in Times Square. The four letters spelled out “P—A—I—N”. The letters hovered there in space for a moment and then passed through the tunnel on by through the side wall. Then they were gone. I heard the dentist say, ”Got it!” I then said to myself with a chuckle, “Oh, that must have been pain.”

I never felt any pain. I never had an ouch or a jolt or a stab. I only read it on the wall of my mind. My brain, so confused in its drug induced state, warned me of pain by sending me a letter – or letters. It had to do something. The normal function of communication was out of order. The phone lines had been cut, so it sent out an email a decade before the Internet had been invented.

When I came to, (Came to what? Came to another reality or unreality?) I laughed through my mouth of cotton and numbness and muttered my story to the dentist. He looked at me knowingly, smiling knowingly, probably considering me still a bit loony. But I was not loony. Rather I was smarter for the experience.

I had seen through the lie of matter into the truth about pain. It was clearly something my brain had made up and presented to me in an alternate form. I felt no pain. I saw, in a silly way, that I was supposed to be having it and I suppose I entertained it, or rather it entertained me.

Nonetheless it was not anything to fear, to sweat, to anticipate. It was a strange joke on my mind perpetuated by a confused brain sending the wrong signals.

Pain is rarely a big issue in my life. Oh yes, sometimes I succumb to the illusion and fall to its supposed power, but I do believe that my growing understanding of the truth of pain is my protection against it.

Let’s hear it for medical science – correcting a wrong that they have perpetuated for centuries. Now all the rest of us have to do is change around a lifetime of thinking and mis-education on the subject and come to a new understanding. It’s probably going to mean a lot of time spent actively watching our thought, correcting misconceptions, abolishing the lies and essentially knowing the truth. It’s probably going to take some real consecrated effort, but wouldn’t it be worth it if we could abolish pain in this mortal experience?

I suggest we all get busy.

Even More Inspiration

Resisting Evil

Peter Link — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 13:33:55 +0000

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.

I worked on handling ego in my own personal life and as a result, the hurricane had very little influence upon my life. In fact, I slept through it secure in thought that its so-called powers were simply imaginary. I’m not being naïve here. A couple of decades ago I was in a hurricane in Antigua that was incredibly impressive and destructive, but, at the time, I received it as an entity to contend with, be frightened by and in the end, hide from. I got sucked into its evil spell and was seduced into its dominance. It was not a fun experience.

This time, many years later, I had the maturity and perhaps the wisdom to see it as it really is – simply ego’s misinformed impression of its own importance trying to suck us all into its illusionary power. I refused to be sucked in. I resisted its spell and refused to give it credence.

The end result was that our lives did not touch. I refused to acknowledge its supposed existence and it could not draw me into its swirl of confusion.

The same principles can be applied to marital confusion, to the sad state of affairs of political confusion in our country today, to financial confusion, to sexual confusion and to worldwide greed.

In the past decade I’ve taken on a new understanding of this word “ego”. In the first 4 or 5 decades of my life it really meant to me little more than a confusion of conceit. However through my readings, mostly of the works of Eckhart Tolle and several others, I have come to understand that, for me, this word and its implications need be looked at and handled on almost a daily level. I’ve understood that my ego is really my confused mortal thinking and really the mind of my own confused material self, trying to dominate and run the show.

It is not I. My ego is my confusion, but it is not I. My spirituality and all that surrounds that and emanates from that comprise who I really am. My ego is trying to be, claiming to be me, swelling up in its self-importance, raging like the hurricane and sucking into its path all the energies it can to stay alive, but in the end will burn itself out in its self-imposed path of destruction just like all hurricanes.

This is the mortal dream. In the end, the ego does die. The ego is really my mortal self, trying to stay alive and run the show, but it’s a hopeless cause. In the end it will die survived only by my spiritual man.

We, as a people, must not be frightened by evil. We must learn to stand tall against it and refuse its presence in our lives. Of course that means that we also cannot give its seductive pleasures place as well. If we are seduced, well then, the simple law of life is that we must pay the piper.

We all like to test this theory over and over in our lives hoping that 2+2 do not, in fact, equal 4, but fortunately this simple law of life is true. The good we do equals the good we receive and the bad we do equals the bad we receive. Life balances out. In the words of John Lennon, “Instant karma’s gonna get ya’.” It’s just the way it works.

So what do we do about it? We resist evil. We minimize ego. We see through the hurricanes to the great truths of life and stick to them.

We consistently spring clean our lives and do periodic mind checks on the integrity of our thought. We re-balance our pleasures and hold to the fundamentals of goodness that we know in our hearts. We wake up each morning with resolve to do it better, get it done, and treat everybody along the way with respect and yes, here comes that word again, love. We love our fellow man and demonstrate it moment to moment throughout our lives.

We give. We give and we give and never stop giving. We give of our energies and our talents, our time and yes, our money. In short, we do positive things. We live positively. This is our resistance to evil. This diminishes the path of the hurricane. Being positive balances this mortal dream and puts ego in check. If we get real good at this and we simply get real good.

Pretty simple stuff here, but not always easy to do. There are a lot of temptations out there, greed being one of the biggest. Need to lose weight? Check greed. Need to improve your financial stability? Check greed. Need to improve your marriage? Check greed. Need to succeed? Check greed.

One thing for sure: Evil always succumbs to goodness. Goodness is ultimately all and evil is nothing. Take advantage of this fact. Goodness works.

Give it a shot. It’s your life.

Even More Inspiration

My Body

Peter Link — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:08:33 +0000

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

I know not where it came from
I know not how it works
I took no part in its conception
Its genius or its quirks
It carries on in sleep
Requiring little of me
It is mine to keep
And cost me nothing

Yes it is the house of my consciousness
For nearly a hundred years
It manufactures babies
And laughter and tears

It’s a miracle of invention
In its breath
In its sight
In its tubes
In its muscle
In its appetite

In its pleasure
In its pain
In its taste
And its touch
In its foot
In its hand
In its amazing ability
To discern Tchaikovski
From Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band

I am not my body
My body is not me
But me and my body
We basically agree
To live, for a time,
On this spec in space
This embrace of mind and matter
This interface

Through this vast universe of illusion
And conjecture we go
For reasons
That I’ll probably never know

Well we might as well make the best of it.

So let’s dance!
Yeah let us dance
We got to dance now
Work yo’ body
Work yo’ body
Work yo’ body
Let us dance

I am not my body
No my body is not me
But I’m amazed
By both its function
Oh and yes
Its mystery

But I go about my business
Mostly unawares
I sit in thought
I climb the stairs
So little do I think ahead
And tell it what to do
It seems to work just fine

Ladies choir

From its matter-mind

Every blink
Every step
Every breath
Every heartbeat
Every quick reaction
Every wild attraction

I am not my body
No my body is not me
It bears no real resemblance
To my true being

But hey, better make the best of it!

And let’s dance!!!

Tag

Yeah let us dance
We got to dance now
Work yo’ body
Work yo’ body
Work yo’ body
Let us dance

Even More Inspiration

Straight ‘A’s

Peter Link — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 13:40:01 +0000

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.

When sixth grade finally did come along, Miss Cochran had been replaced by Mrs. MacDermott who, luckily for me, was my favorite teacher of my entire grade school through college education. The Jim Link Superior Record of Excellence was, of course, announced to Mrs. MacDermott by Mom at our first parent/teacher meeting – the bar being set. I had never been much of a student, and I think she wanted it for me more than I wanted it for myself.

I limped through the first half of my sixth grade year with my usual “just enough above average grades to not make Dad too mad and ground me” grades. But then came the “either do it or die moment” that I had always dreaded. Final semester – sixth grade. This was it. This was the time I had to do it in order to uphold the family expectations. Here was the one opportunity I had in life to finally beat my brother in something – anything…

I started the semester knowing that I had no chance whatever to accomplish this feat. I had never even come close to straight ‘E’s, much less straight ‘S’s. But then dear Mrs. MacDermott took over my life. Every day and in every way she began to encourage me. I became the teacher’s pet. I got to sit up in the special desk at the front of the class. I was deemed “smart” for the first time in my life. She would often read my “marvelous papers” out loud to the class as examples of great penmanship – whether they deserved it or not.

I began to actually like all the attention I got for being one of the “smart” ones. I actually began thinking of myself as “smart”. Jane MacDermott, simply, by the mere force of her will, convinced me that semester that I could do it – that I had the stuff of champions.

I began to work harder. I began to think that I actually had a shot at it. At midterm, my grades were the highest they had ever been – not straight ‘S’s, but within some conceivable distance of Jim’s mark.

The talk around the table every night at dinner involved only one subject for several months – my quest. Even my brother smugly encouraged me, knowing, of course, that I’d never be able to do it.

I don’t think anybody actually thought I could do it except Mrs. MacDermott. Mom had a passionate kind of wild hope. Dad had a detached interest in the process and the neighbors buzzed about it constantly, but really, the objective just seemed to be a little too far fetched for average Pete.

And then along came June; the end of grade school; graduation. I was the valedictorian of my class and the proud receiver of straight ‘S’s. In the last two months of the sixth grade I had become convinced by Mrs. MacDermott that I could do it and had done little else – not to please Mom, impress Dad or to beat Jim, but to fulfill the dream of Jane MacDermott whom I dearly loved.

I don’t remember a single thing I learned in the sixth grade. I don’t remember what we studied, what math level I was at or a single paper I ever wrote. I only remember that Mrs. MacDermott used to umpire our softball games at lunch and after lunch she would read to us for an hour every day as we sat quietly at our desks. (She allowed us to lay our heads on our folded arms as we listened) She would read great novels to us like Tale Of Two Cities or The Call Of The Wild. I fell in love with the sound of her voice and the images of those great stories. I fell in love with story telling and found my life’s work.

After that year I went back to being a just above average student throughout the rest of my school years. I never got close to having straight ‘A’s again. I never needed to. I knew I could be ‘smart’ when I needed to be and that was enough.

Once in college, when I had already decided to go into show business, I took the most difficult Shakespeare course from the toughest teacher in the English Department. I challenged myself thinking that if I really wanted to excel in show business, then I ought to be able to conquer William Shakespeare. I hauled out my sixth grade smarts and work ethic and aced the course proving once again that I could do it when I really wanted it.

This was the real gift of the straight ‘S’s. The belief in myself. I thank Jane MacDermott for that. Upon sixth grade graduation I never saw her or spoke to her again, but she stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Thank you, Jane. You were a great teacher. You taught me one of my life’s greatest lessons. Wherever you are now, know that I am eternally grateful. Had you not come along in my life, I would surely be a different man today.

But you did. Many thanks.