“Don’t Die with Your Music Inside You!”

…is something my father used tell me.  And I must have taken it to heart, as I’ve spent a great deal of time listening to my inner words and getting them out and down on paper.

Recently, I’ve been approached by folks with books or projects in various stages of completion, asking for my help and my editorial guidance, and its been my joy and my delight to read their work and help them to make it even better, or to take it to the next level, whatever that may be.  For some, it means starting a project they’ve been visualizing for years; for others, finishing it — and all the stages in between.

One recent collaboration was The Call of Sedona: Journey to the Heart by Ilchi Lee, a book I named and, working from a Korean translation, put into clear, idiomatic English. By February 26, 2012, it was listed as Number Two in the Paperback Advice & Miscellaneous section of The New York Times best seller list. Now, after having sold 70,000 copies, it’s been picked up by Scribner and will be released this summer.  And this is a book about meditation and energy vortexes in the hills around Sedona, Arizona by an almost unknown author, printed by an even less well-known publisher!  It even has it own IPhone app!

Nicest of all, the publisher, Jiyoung Oh, of BEST Life Media, has been very generous in her praise of my work, saying, “Yes, the book soared!  We owe you the success of the book.  Thank you again.”

“So Don’t Die with Your Music Inside You.”  Whatever it is.  If some work of words are asking to come out, give us a call.  We’re skilled, respectful, and experienced midwives.  It could be a novel, a book of stories, a children’s book, a book on spirituality or astrology, a business plan, your auto-or biography,  a family history, a speech you’re preparing to give next month or your take on some topic about which you’re knowledgeable and passionately opinionated!  We can do everything from helping you sort out your material and find your story to assisting with or editing the writing, or even ghosting the whole thing.

As every mother knows, the birth-pangs are well worth it.

The Call of Sedona, edited by Peter Hayes, #2 on New York Times Bestseller List

The Call of Sedona, a book I freely edited and entitled from the Korean translation, continues its seemingly-inexorable upward climb.

The Call of Sedona: Journey of the Heart by Ilchi Lee was listed as number two in the Paperback Advice & Misc. section of The New York Times best seller list for February 26, 2012.

It also recently reached number four on The Washington Post Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction and was included on the USA Today and IndieBound bestseller lists.

Ilchi Lee is the first Korean to be listed on four bestseller lists simultaneously.

The Call of Sedona, edited by Peter Hayes, Makes New York Times Best Seller List!

The Call of Sedona, edited from the Korean by Peter Hayes, continues to make its unstoppable upward climb.  After making it on to Amazon’s top ten last month, it now just made the New York Times best seller list!

http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2012-02-19/paperback-advice/list.html

The Only Way to Play Guitar

What can I say?  Not only is it a lovely, jaunty little melody, well-played, but it just goes to show there’s more than one way to do things.  Reminds me of Sonny Terry who plays his harmonica upsidedown, because that’s the way he picked it up and taught himself to play it.

The Call of Sedona, edited by Peter Hayes, a Top 10 Overall Bestseller on Amazon.com

Rated by readers 4.9 out of 5 stars

One of my most recent and interesting projects was taking an English translation of Ilchi Lee’s Korean manuscript about his spiritual experiences in Sedona, Arizona and turning it into clear, compelling, idiomatic English prose.  I even helped to name the book: The Call of Sedona: Journey of the Heart.  Though Mr. Lee’s previous 33 books had reached a limited audience,  “… in a matter of hours,” according to the PRNewswire, “the book shot its way up to the #8 ranking overall on Amazon.com, not far behind Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs ranked at #2. The book was also ranked at #1 in four categories: Health, Mind & Body; Religion & Spirituality; Memoirs; and in Movers & Shakers… Overall, between November 8th and the eve of the 9th, the book sold an unprecedented 9,000 copies online….”

Hear Petey-Boy Live Next Friday Nite

Petey-Boy is appearing at Phoenicia Phirst Phriday next Friday, November 4th.  He shares the bill with Thomas Earl, a fine singer-songwriter and guitarist in the Gordon Lightfoot tradition.  The show begins at 8 pm and there’s an open mic at 10.  Tickets are $3 at the door and the proceeds go to charity.  Come on by, have a listen and say hello.  To hear some of the band’s music, click Petey-Boy.

Girl with the Moon in Her Hair

This blog is supposed to be about words and music.  So far it’s been mostly about words.  Maybe we can rectify that.

Many readers were intrigued by the close correlation between some English and Sanskrit words and suggested several others.  One of these is loka, the Sanskrit word for “world” which is so similar to our word location.   It may in fact also be related to the Norse God Loki and the word “lucky” since luck is being in the right place at the right time.

Shiva Nataraj with the Moon in His Hair

Another connection is between the word atman, meaning the inner Self and our word “atmosphere,” which comes from atmo-, comb. form of Gk. atmos ”vapor, steam” + spharia ”sphere” since one of the many meanings of atman is “breath.”  It also means the Oversoul.

This calls to mind the Anthropos or Cosmic Person or Macrocosmic Man.  The great American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes in Nature:

Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high… Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it.  

“The living creature is a world order in miniature,” Galen writes, claiming this opinion isn’t just his, but “that of the ancients versed in natural philosophy.” This same perspective in India is stated: Yatha pinde tat brahmande; “As with the Self, so with the Universe”

The inverse of this is that the Cosmos is a Person, a concept that may be more familiar to us than we know.  One derivation of the word “world” is that it’s from the Germanic wer and ald.  Wer- is a variant of vir, meaning man, as in our word virile.  As a prefix before wolf, it means man-wolf.  Ald is old.  Therefore the wer-ald (and I’ve heard country Brits pronounce the word exactly so) is literally the “Old Man.”

In other words, if humans are made in the image of God, then the world is made in the image of both.

“Oh King, the rivers are the veins of the Cosmic Person and the trees are the hairs of his body. The air is his breath, the ocean is his waist, the hills and mountains are the stacks of his bones and the passing ages are his movements.”

The cosmos is a single living entity, and all that makes it up is part of one body.  Love’s body, Norman O. Brown would say. This single living entity is depicted as the Purusha, or “cosmic Person”, in the Vedic teachings, and as the Adi-Buddha, or “cosmic Buddha” in the Kalacakra teachings, according to David Reigle.

From His mind the moon emerged,

the sun from his eyes,

Indra (Lord of heaven)

and Agni (Lord of fire) from his mouth,

and the cosmic breath, Vayu (air)

arose from his prana.

Salutations to the infinite lord who has infinite forms, infinite feet, eyes, heads, thighs, and arms.

Salutations to the eternal person of infinite names,

who supports millions of cosmic ages.

Om.  He has eyes and mouths on all sides. 

His arms and feet are everywhere. 

He gives arms to men and wings to birds. 

He is the one Lord who creates both heaven and earth. 

Being a devotee of the Mother, the Shakti, the universe seems to me feminine rather than male and so I wrote this song in Her honor: Girl with the Moon in Her Hair.

Words & Music by Peter Hayes    Harmonica and vocal: Peter Hayes    Guitar, bass, synthesizer, vocal and production: Robert Raposo

Please click here to listen to:Girl with the Moon in Her Hair on Luxury Wafers

Or here to read the lyrics, as well: Girl with the Moon in Her Hair with lyrics

Space Is the Body of God

In an earlier post we compared the Self  to a mirror.   Akasham shariram brahma: “Space is the body of God”.   And in fact, the Self, Consciousness, is very much like space, as well.

Space, like Consciousness, holds everything, yet is touched by nothing. It is pure and unwasting, never becoming more nor less.  We say colloquially, ‘There’s no space in the car,’ but that’s not really true.  There’s the same amount of space in the car there always was, it just happens to be occupied, something that becomes apparent when everyone gets out.  Similarly, if the car is full of buckets of manure, the air in it may reek; but the space itself is not so perfumed.  Though space holds all, like Consciousness, it remains pure.

The Tattirya Upanishad declares:”From the Self, space arose; from space, air; from air, fire; from fire, water; from water, earth…

Many of our cosmogonies begin in this fashion, with the separation of heaven and earth, and with it, the creation of space, for without this initial opening, there would be no place for creation to occur.

In Nordic myth, we read:

Of old the age | when Ymir lived;
Cool sea nor waves | nor sand there were;
Earth was not | nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap…

Similarly, in the Biblical Book of Genesis:

… God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament….

And God called the firmament Heaven….

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 

And God called the dry land Earth.

The need for space at the beginning drills down to even the most mundane levels.  The first thing we do upon starting an enterprise is to rent office space, or at the very least, clear our countertop, desk or mind.

This need for space at the beginning of creation also arose in 20^th Century physics.  Cosmic background radiation, the legacy of the Big Bang, is of a uniform temperature in every direction, strongly suggesting that the universe was once extremely compact, with each part in close proximity to every other.  However, when the Big Bang is run backwards (mathematically speaking), the universe never gets close enough for long enough for its heat to be evenly exchanged.  Watching the universe collapsing inward, we find that at less than 1 second ATB (After the Bang), parts of the universe are still more than 186,000 miles away from other parts.  Since nothing, including heat, goes faster than light, there isn’t enough time for the heat in one part to affect the temperature of another before the rewinding film — and all of space, time, and existence — ends.

In 1979, the physicist Alan Guth proposed a rider to Einstein’s theories that addressed this problem by allowing the infant universe to inflate drastically and exponentially.  In The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, we’re told:

During a tiny window of time — around 10^-36 to 10^-34 seconds ATB — . the universe expanded by a colossal factor of at least 10³⁰….  This means that in a brief flicker of time, a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second ATB, the size of the universe increased by a greater percentage than it has in the 15 billion years since.  Before this expansion, matter that is now in far flung regions of the cosmos was much closer together…making it possible for a common temperature to be easily established.  Then through Guth’s momentary burst of cosmological inflation — followed by the more usual expansion of the standard cosmological model — these regions of space were able to become separated by the vast distances we witness currently.

Space then in myth, yoga and science is both the first element and the last: that from which the “four elements” that make up the universe emerge and back into it they eventually vanish.  Lao Tsu says in Waley’s translation:

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; 

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house;

And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.

Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

The World Navel: Chapter 1 Part 2

This is the second part of the first chapter of THE UNIVERSE: A LOVE STORY. In the first part we described the North star, Polaris, around which the world turns.  

As one can imagine, the axis running from this central starry point down to Earth was viewed as a crucial one.

The Arabs of old regarded Polaris as a hole in the sky in which the Earth’s axis found its bearing.  The Norsemen saw Polaris as holding the universe together.  Moguls call it, “the Golden peg”.  In Damascus it is called Mismar, a “Needle or Nail”, and Al Kutb al Shamaliyy, “the Northern Axle” or “Spindle,” the pin fixed in the under stone of a mill around which the upper stone turns. 

Since life for our ancestors was often difficult, they may be excused for viewing their position as between the original “rock and a hard place.” Like us all, they must have sometimes felt themselves grains caught between two cosmic millstones: the upper runner stone, Heaven; the lower bed stone, Earth. Shakespeare drew Hamlet from a Danish myth about just such a stone, Amleth’s Mill.  The turning of this millwheel, which we call time, grinds to dust and then to nought everything: men, beasts, empires and angels; so it is said, “The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.”

The question that naturally arises is:  If existence is like going headfirst into an extremely slow food processor, how does one avoid that?

And the answer is … drum roll here … one of the many things we’ll be exploring in these pages.

Another conclusion that apparently arose on those nights when everyone still had widescreen TV and could sit up late watching the stars cavort for free was this: heaven and the earth were synchronized.  Like the dial on a modern washing machine whose turning triggers different cycles, so the movement of the sky dial brought the fall of night, the break of day, the spring muds, the migrations of the herds, the salmon runs, the autumn harvests, April showers and May flowers.  Heaven and earth were two ends of one thing, so that whatever occurred there affected what happened here – and vice versa.  This point of view is expressed with a wonderful concision in the Hermetic sutra:

As above, so below. 

And though this perspective is sometimes viewed today as “esoteric,” it’s at the heart of much ancient thought.

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

Hallowed by thy Name,

Thy Kingdom come

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in Heaven…

The Shiva Sutras, a seminal text of Kashmir Shaivism, one of the several philosophies that support yoga, puts it this way:

Yatha tatra tatha’nyatra:

“As here, so elsewhere.”

Adding the corollary,

“What is not here is nowhere.” 

That place where the connecting rod between the twin millstones intersects the Earth was viewed in days past as the omphalos, or world navel, suggesting a newborn child still connected to the life-giving placenta of heaven by a cosmic umbilical cord.

But where exactly is this spot: this earthly counterpoint to the North star?

Well, it’s wherever we happen to be, for if we look up at the nightsky, the axis around which the universe twirls goes right through us, in alignment with our backbones, more or less.  Thus in ‘Voyageurs Anciens,‘ in answer to this question, Eduarde Charton writes:

All people respond with the same naïve assurance, “The center of the world is my house and home.“

Isn’t it true?  Wherever we are is the center of the universe — for us.  The poet Wallace Stevens’ describes this perceptual phenomenon:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

“For the Egyptians the centre was Thebes; for the Assyrians, Babylon; for the Hindus, Mount Meru; for the Jews, Jerusalem; for the Greeks, Olympus or the temple of Delphi, and later, in the time of Herodotus, Rhodes.’

Since then, this axis mundi has shifted: to Rome, to Constantinople, to Mecca, to London, and, most recently, to Washington, D.C.

Another thing we can say about this world belly button, is that it’s both an “inny” and “outty.”  As an “outty,” it is almost always defined by a stone, a mountain, a monument or temple.  At Delphi, this central and civilizing spot was marked by both a temple and a meteorite, later replaced by the carved stone here.

As an inny, however, the world navel was also the main entrance to the Underworld.  Within Apollo’s temple at Delphi was where the Pythia, an oracular priestess, sat upon a tripod over fumes wafting up from the River Styx, for the wide underground cavern in which the temple was set was a vent for the Underworld and could be walked back into the heart of the earth and up to the very throne of Death.

As is above, so is below.  To enter the world navel is to pass through the celestial Stargate. To pass through the celestial Stargate is to enter the underworld and realm of the dead.

Since we’ve come this far, let’s take a moment to read the inscription on Apollo’s temple, as it contains the quintessence of the perennial philosophy that accompanies the ancient system of thought we’re exploring.  As the Delphic Oracle has fallen silent, we could even read it as its final message to us all.

My advice to you, whoever you may be,

O, you who desire to explore the Mysteries of Nature;

if you do not discover within yourself

that which you seek,

neither will you find it without. 

If you ignore the excellence of your own house,

how can you aspire to find excellence elsewhere?  

 Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures.  

Oh Man!  Know thyself,

and you will know

the universe and the Gods.

The Universe: A Love Story

Here’s the start of a new book, The Universe: A Love Story.  It’s a look at the primordial spiritual tradition, and how people viewed their place in the world before the coming of Christianity.  The first half of the first chapter begins below, but you might want to begin with the pic-heavy Introduction which appears here as a .pdf:  Introduction to THE UNIVERSE: A LOVE STORY  

As The World Turns

Chapter 1

If you’ve been in the country on a clear, moonless night, away from city lights, you’ve seen the stars.  Their presence is a revelation, like diamonds and their dust squandered across a swath of black baize.

The Nightsky

If you’ve paused to observe them for, say, 10 minutes or so, you’ve noticed that the stars move.  Like the sun, they rise in the East and, in the northern hemisphere, at least, travel in a south-westerly direction, clockwise, from left to right.

“Right” then is the way the world turns, how the flow goes, how the universe spins, and, therefore, the way that everything in it should be done and run.   Do it right!  You hear me?

While I’m being playful, I’m not unserious.  In the Indian Vedas, this cosmic law is rta, a Sanskrit word related to the Latin rota, “wheel,” and to our English “rotate.”  And, I suspect, to “right,” though you won’t find that in Webster’s.  Nonetheless, right certainly does go with way.  In America, the right way is to drive on the right side of the rota where right away you have the right of way.  In India, the proper manner of entering a sacred space is right foot first.  For the primordial tradition, which still exists, sets great store on auspicious beginnings.  And so, bearing this in mind, let us now in the proper manner, step forthrightly into this chapter.

According to Confucius:

All ceremonial usages, in their general characteristics,

are the embodiment of the ideas suggested by heaven and earth;

take their law from the changes of the four seasons,

imitate the operation of the contracting and developing movements of nature

and are conformed to the feelings of men. 

It is on this account they are called the Rules of Propriety;

and when anyone finds fault with them,

he only shows his ignorance of their origin.

As the Earth rotates, the night sky and its assemblage of stars appear to sweep a central point, moving round it like the hands of a clock.  This apparently fixed point is the Earth’s axis projected infinitely into space, one which in our day and age coincides with the North Star, Polaris.

Shall we get to the point?  Well, we’re there.  This is it, the father of points, beside which all other points are mere digressions.

And this lone star – as Texans know – rules, for it is “the still point of the turning world;” the only part of the cosmos that apparently doesn’t change, because of which, it’s celebrated in every culture.

To the Polynesians, the pole is the station of the “Immoveable One.”  The Pawnee call it, “the star that stands still” and regard it as the governor of the sky.  To the Hindus, the star is Dhruva, meaning “firm,” while the region of the pole is esteemed as the “motionless site,” the celestial “resting place” of gods and heroes… To the Buddhist this is the center of the cosmic wheel, the throne of Buddha himself.  It is acalatthana, the “unmoving site” or “the unconquerable seat of firm séance,” thus as noted by Coomaraswamy, the Buddha throne crowned the world axis.

As it was so widely revered, it seems likely the model for the Unmoved Mover – a famous philosophical depiction of God.   Xenophanes, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, says:

There is one God, among gods and men, neither in shape nor in thought like unto mortals.

He abides ever in the same place, motionless, and it befits him not to wander hither and thither.

Whether or not this first sentence is true, the second certainly describes the North Star.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar proclaims:

… I am constant as the northern star

Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament 

Thus this tippy-topmost point of the heavens has had a long and venerable connection with stillness, divinity and rulership.

In the Middle East, the root of the word god is El or Il, as in the Moslem name for God, Allah.  In translations of the Tanakh or Old Testament, the word God is most often the Hebrew El, of which the plural is the Elohim, gods.   And before appearing in Israel, El was also the name of the Father God of Sumer and Babylonia.

Another well-known Biblical title of God is Elyon, translated in the King James Version as the “Most High.”  Thus we find in Isaiah, 14.13, a verse that Christianity associates with the rebel angel, Lucifer:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven,

I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:

I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.

The “stars of God,” kôkk^êbê ’ēl ‘n, is an archaic phrase believed to refer to those stars near the pole, while the coveted throne is clearly in the North.

Thus, in English, the prefix el or al continues to this day to indicate “high” as in our words “altitude,”  “elite” and “elated.”   Not surprisingly, it often appears in words that have religious associations such as church “elders” and the “elect” whose status is certainly “elevated.”   It is of course also, the theriomorphic root of such Biblical name names as El-ijah, Isra-el, Beth-el, Jo-el, etc.

Because God’s throne was located here, it was the seat not only of divinity but of absolute authority and power.   The invisible axis running from heaven to earth is the straw that stirs the world drink.  And you can see the stirred world going round and round it, like an egg cream.   It’s from here that the laws governing the universe are made and circulated outward.  Oerstead, the Danish physicist and philosopher, captures the spirit of this view when he says, “The Laws of nature are the thoughts of God.”

This spot then was the place where Big Daddy hangs, the Boss, the Old Man, the Guy Upstairs who calls the shots.  This was the throne of that Heavenly King from whom all worldly Caesars, emperors and princes derived their form and temporal power.  Here was the Absolute.  Everything else was relative, in some cases literally so, since the stars that circled it were once apparently viewed as the sons of God.

For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh,

who among the sons of EL is like Yahweh  (Psalm 89:6)

Even today, we refer to those who have reached the pinnacle of their professions, and have a certain godlike status and luster, as “stars.”

But the Most High’s rulership did not end with the living.  He was Lord of the Dead – or at least of the good dead.   Thus, this starry point was Heaven’s Door, a Stargate, Heaven’s Gate, beyond which those who have gone before dwell as happy spirits.  And so the Greeks identified the circumpolar stars with the Elysium Fields, and 2,500 years later Otis Redding can sing in A Change Has Gotta Come,

I’m tired of living and afraid to die. 

Don’t know what’s up there beyond the clouds… 

And we all know what he’s talking about.

NEXT TIME:  The Conclusion of Chapter 1, The World Navel