Universal Consciousness, Joe

I said I can't see it, and she said I wasn't looking close enough.

I said that it sounded like noise, and she said that there was noise but that there was also the music within the noise. Look deeper, she said. Rhythm is there, just not on a plane our human minds can comprehend. Think of it like fractals of rhythm, then fractals of fractals, and fractals of those fractals, into infinity. It wasn't the rhythm that stretched forever that was beautiful, but the fact that it could, and did. Beauty in the infinite. That the infinity didn't stretch outward like the universe but inward, infinite pieces and then infinite more, disassembling and reassembling infinite times. To touch the rhythm here is to touch a human soul.

She said to take that infinity and let it wash over you. Don't fight it, she said. Fighting it will only make it worse.

This is how we touch god, is what she said after she took a puff and slowly exhaled. There are no words but words are not needed. The words have been within us the entire time, and it's the tones and textures of spiritual free jazz that unlock the cage of our minds. It's called "free" jazz, not because of the jazz itself being free, but in the way free jazz frees us, ourselves, the listener. She said we're lost. She said we're confused. She said we need guidance. She said that Coltrane's jazz can act as a conduit so that we can find our best selves in the reflection. She said god is holding her mirror up to us.

I said that the drum solo was pretty sweet, and she slowly closed her eyes and didn't respond for almost a minute. When she finally opened them, it was if bubbling to the surface from the submersion in a dream, and she said that it was important to eschew all earthly material needs and wants when entering the sixth dimension. There was a place for a drum solo but its place is that of illusion. We see what we want to see and we hear what we want to hear. A drum solo had the power to connect but that power was limited in range, and flickered terribly. To move into the universal consciousness, we must move past the "drum solo" and into what we could not previous hear or see or experience, into the new. I asked if the new was the old and she said maybe, if that's what the higher power deigned to tell us.

Then I asked if I should be afraid, and she didn't respond right away to that either. She let the question linger in the air for a bit, hang over the trick-or-treaters in their cheap plastic masks like a plume of smoke. When she spoke again, her voice was lower, and she said: yes, I think so. She said that maybe new experiences can or even should be scary, especially when they lead to enlightenment. Enlightenment, or wisdom about oneself and others and how we are all connected, means stripping away previous understandings about how it all works, and there's of course the residual pain. Fear like the moment before a Band-Aid is torn from a hairy forearm. Spiritual free jazz can be exciting and it can be scary and she said that sometimes she can't even tell the difference.

I asked if this was even music, and she said yes but also more than yes. That this was music but also a means to something more than music. I asked if music that makes sense musically could still achieve this purpose while also acting as, ya know, good music, and she said that I'm missing the point. Free jazz was music in a technical sense but "not music" in a spiritual sense. She said that pedestrian music on this earthly plane could make you feel something within you, but that only spiritual jazz could make you feel something outside of yourself, and that while it's important to understand yourself, the next level is to understand the other, and that only through this ankh do we achieve self-actualization, since we both know ourselves and feel ourselves reflected and refracted through the entirety of our species.

Listen, she says. Close your eyes and really listen. Hear what the spirit is trying to tell you. Feel it move you. Feel the rhythms that lie below the surface. Feel the rhythms split and split again, forever. Feel infinity. Feel it tear you apart and then render something new, something alive this time, something that can feel as we are meant to feel. To live. Listen and hear and feel and live. Through the universal consciousness we might become one with the best versions of ourselves.

This is all that she said, and I don't know if I believe her.

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5