Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Laraaji

Episode Date: December 27, 2017

Laraaji was discovered at Washington Square park by Brian Eno and they produced the album "Ambient 3: Days Of Radiance.  He creates ambient music as a way to conduct the energy of the timeless into our part of the time space continuum.   We talked about channeling energy, the sound of angels singing, and reasons for making music.

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Head over to Squarespace dot com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Hello dear friends, it is I D Trussell and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell family hour podcast. And if you happen to be one of the very few Americans or earthlings who didn't have a great holiday season and that does put you in the minority based on a recent study by the American Patriot Guild, 99.9% of all Americans had a joyful holiday season this year. They sat with their families and expressed love for each other.

They sang Christmas carols together. They opened beautiful, thoughtful presents and spent a long time with each gift, looking down at the gift, looking up at the gift giver, looking the gift giver in the eyes, smiling, bowing, thanking, expressing gratitude and love and always saying this present is wonderful but you mean so much more to me. For 99.9% of American families spent the last few days in a state of pure, blissful, nirvanic love. Joy rang through the hills.

Feelings of such sweet lightness filled every single American except maybe you if you didn't have a great holiday season with such buoyant and magical love that many people achieved the state known as Samadhi. They actually transcended their physical bodies and merged with the cosmos filling the entire universe up with their radiant love blasting out of their heart chakras like nuclear energy flying out of the Fukushima reactors after that Japanese earthquake. I'm sorry I'm being sarcastic. Look a lot of us had shitty holidays you know I'm I had an okay holiday I spent it by myself

and as inviting as that might sound to some of you who feel like you just spent a weekend hanging out in a putrifying elephant carcass with a family of hyenas it actually you know you're still you can't really escape the holidays no matter no matter what you do whether you're with a family or not with a family whether you're with a group of people or by yourself there's this feeling of being like a foie gras goose with getting festivity jammed down your throat by some kind of decentralized dark energetic system parading as the opposite of what it actually is. So there's a real weird weirdness that comes over a lot of us during the holidays and you

might be one of them I don't know maybe you're a new parent you actually enjoyed it so forgive me I don't want to sound jaded I don't feel jaded I just don't like holidays I don't like enforced celebration like I I like when celebration kind of happens naturally where you're walking down the street on some random day and you see some beautiful flower and you think wow man what an incredible flower that is and your heart lifts up and and you realize whoa what a great life this is but it kind of happens random I don't like the enforced holidays but that's probably more of an indication of my own blocks you know regardless if you had a bumpy holiday season I know a lot of you did this episode is going to be a real palate cleanser for you this this is

my favorite way for podcasts to happen which is just the universe sort of gives them to you it just they appear in front of you like an angel and that's exactly what happened I'm hanging out at my friend Doug's house and he texted me and said that his friend was in town with a musician named loraji who at the time I had not heard of so I looked him up and started listening to his music and he's incredible he was discovered by Brian Eno in a park and so I told Doug yeah let's set this thing up and then within a day I'm sitting across from loraji who emanates a very similar kind of energy that comes from ramdas or comes from anybody who's got a spiritual practice it's an enlightening energy as in it lightens everything up not just internally not just like you get

around these people and internally you feel more buoyant but literally like colors around them get brighter and the world seems filled with more possibilities and we are reminded of something CS Lewis said which is the gates of hell are locked from the inside meaning you don't necessarily have to be broiling in that cauldron of succubus diarrhea you can climb out anytime you want dry yourself off and walk into the Garden of Eden we got a great episode for you today friends we're going to jump right into it but first some quick business this episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Squarespace.com head over to Squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use the offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain Squarespace

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it seems like it must be a mistake and the moment I say it it's going to be gone I'm sure the first person to listen to this episode is going to hit pause go to squarespace.com and buy this immediately using offer code Duncan to get 10% off get ready friends honestly this is like I kind of feel like the way whoever came up with Google probably felt right before they uploaded it when they're like oh you know people need a way to find stuff on the internet I'm going to call it Google and I bet whoever thought that I bet at that moment time froze a crack in the time space continuum opened up the flower of life emerged weeping Jesus's fell out of the ceiling and they bought Google.com but in the same way when I announced this I'm sorry if it's already gone you didn't move fast

enough one of you guys is or gals is going to get this and you're going to you might you know what you might as well do before I even say this you might as well pull up Zillow and look for a million dollar homes and wherever you live because you're about to buy one of them once you hear this domain name that's available this is truly truly like me giving away a thousand bitcoins right now just to get I should in a weird way I want to stop and buy this domain name I can feel all my greed all my selfishness inside of me like coiled nests of poisonous snakes writhing inside of me I can feel it inside of me I could feel all the thousands of lifetimes of making selfish decisions millions of selfish choices all of them pushing me like some wave right into a beach made out of the

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early editions of the d t f h commercial free episodes like this episode loraji there's also another one sitting there with ragu marcus whenever i record these interviews i just upload them to patreon with no commercials no opening rambles just the conversations themselves so you can listen to uh early releases of the d t f h also there are long rambling opening monologues not attached to any interviews so if you want to just hear extra opening rants that didn't make it into the main feed they're all there for you also music and a lot of other weird stuff it's where i interact with a lot of the listeners and it's just it's only the silken inner chamber of my heart if you want access to that all you got to do is go to patreon.com forward slash d t f h and you will

become my patron you will become my master you will become my mistress i'll have to do whatever you say whatever you want oh goddess oh god i am your whimpering simpering slave patreon.com forward slash d t f h and much thanks to those of you who use our amazon link this is a great way for you to support the d t f h all you got to do is go to dunkintrussell.com slide through that link buy yourself some kind of musical instrument you're going to want that after you listen to this episode with loraji and start making some beautiful music just go through the amazon link they'll give us a very small percentage of anything you buy and it will cost you nothing finally we have a shop with t shirts posters and stickers located at dunkintrussell.com now without further ado today's magical

guest has collaborated with brian eno he's produced over 55 albums of beautiful mystical life transforming ambient music and he seems to have entered into this dimension from some realm of sacred healing music everybody please welcome the angel currently calling himself loraji welcome welcome loraji hello dunkin welcome thank you so much this is a miracle that you're here it's a la trip for me to be here to last minute and here i am on a podcast interview fantastic it's wild and i'll tell you it's the strangest thing because i think it's a miracle of miracles because i've just recently gotten addicted to modular synthesizers what i just showed you and you for your entire life

have been producing some of the most incredible ambient spiritual channeled music i've ever heard so the fact that you just randomly are sitting in front of me is a little miraculous to me well i will be sitting in front of somebody right now and why not you brian eno to found you in a park yes he did and uh washington square park around 1979 78 79 at playing electric zither through a small amp sitting in an cross leg position with my eyes closed the northeast corner central of washington square park that was my favorite performance area why why that corner because there was a cobblestone circle about maybe 15 feet in diameter with a tree in the center and benches circle benches on the peripheral of the circle

where people could sit and so i would set situate myself in the center of the circle cross leg position my back against the tree and radiate music there and people would come and sit down and bliss out or bliss in i saw pictures of it and it it does look like people are it's it looks it reminds me of pictures i've seen a probapod standing harry christian in the park where the energy just drew people to him and people were meditating around you in the picture that i saw wow just vibing out with you uh yes uh that's it i've never saw a picture like that well most times my eyes were closed in fact they were closed the night that brian left me a note to contact him which started our collaboration on the ambient day of radiance you were so in a trance

when you were making music in the park or whatever i made it meditative state yes that you didn't notice that brian eno had been watching you for a while probably before he dropped that note no i don't notice uh i'm aware that people are present when i take a break i'll just make eye contact with people but generally my eyes were closed and head bowed and and i'm tuned in to and a unified field a cosmically pervasive field and that was experimental too just to see what would happen if i could drop in to trance and operate a musical instrument you know and i learned the performance style of such you your nervous system functions differently you're in trance and so the music is like a uh the electrodes on your

body that it records or registers where you are and so the type of music that would evolve out of that kind of performance state was what some people call ambient sometimes i just call it field music or vertical sound presence do you consider it a form of channeling i used to say channeling then the period i shied away from it because i didn't think people were getting my idea of channeling as if you're bringing something from another dimension i believe that uh channeling i use the word running running energy you're running you're running energy and you can use word channeling but channeling might to some people sound like you're going outside of yourself and coming from a foreign place yes i say running energy you're

running what's already where you are you just might shift your awareness to realize that instead of just local new york manhattan energy you can shift your awareness be aware that you're also in a cosmos you can channel you can run cosmic energy i mean you're aware of a cosmic field cosmic time cosmic space and running the energy means giving it attention and letting it find expression through your conscious behavior what is cosmic time versus earth time cosmic time you could call it no time or nonlinear time or the eternal present moment cosmic time is the eternal present moment i would feel that anybody who's dropped into transfer dropped into some good herb notices that the uh what they thought were hard fast boundaries of

time linear time just they're not there you see the clock on the wall you see the calendar on the wall but your head and your your awareness is buzzing beyond it all you're in a like a suspended suspended time flow and constant present time this for me is cosmic time that uh everywhere is now now is the uh all-pervading cosmic time linear time is suggested uh mind or reasoning or thinking mind suggests that yesterday i did this tomorrow i'll do that and the line between the two is the the progression of linear time you can call it earth time perhaps if you're on mars or jupiter that kind of experience might flow differently but beyond or in the midst or before it all is this unified field is omnipresent nowness and i call this the universal

universal present time whether you choose to call it cosmos or call it the pure i am or just call it now i see be here now on your uh computer yes and that was baba ram das's uh famous book and being here now the now is the cosmic time and if you suspend your thinking mind that uh no thought no linear thought you're automatically in present time uh awareness yes do you how often do you stay in that place do you find yourself coming in and out of that or i do it's my dominant this is my dominant place i come in and out of it in order to get the subway across the street in new york yes but i'm in it most constantly but i take time to go into central park and grab a nice space and do some conscious tai chi chuan which is called running cosmic energy or running chi and tai chi

or backstage before performance i'll tune in to expand my sense of the deeper deeper timelessness what what method do you use to tune in uh several one is breathing uh they might do seven 20 rounds of deep breathing and connected breath i might do uh drop my center of awareness down from my head in through my heart into the tanti and just below the navel uh another practice is i'll do some hatha yoga backstage just to um move energy and open the breath another is the mind science called where you just issue suggestions to yourself you know i am not the body i am in other words to drop out of this over tight identification with your names titles and classifications as a matter of fact that was a primary one when i started having good success with meditation

because i'd sit in an easy chair do some breathing and then take off all the titles that are being used or have ever been used for me all of them i'm not a husband i'm not a son i'm not a grandfather i'm not an american i'm not a negro and just sit with what's left after all the titles i'll relax and i discovered that anger um jealousy a worry all of those yummy things don't belong to me they belong to the titles wow cool and when i got that awareness i could sit in that easy chair for five hours and without any anxiety about rushing to do anything or contact anyone or to forgive anybody or to fear anything because i was beyond the personal linear identity and i knew i was having success with meditation i grew up in the baptist church and read the bible but not the bible

bible didn't make clarity sense to me until i was having these deep meditative experiences and i could sense that the bible can be read spiritually that you must that i feel you must have a expanded sense of yourself as being spirit that you read from a spiritual sense of self rather than a physical carnal sense of self and so uh when i was having the deep meditative experience uh i started attracting other experiences like hearing cosmic music and i didn't call it cosmic music i just knew it's whatever that was i wanted to do that and i realized that i couldn't do it because as i went to do research it's music that has no ending or beginning it's called the soundless sound yeah it's all pervasive and one teacher suggested to me

that we don't hear this sound with our ears eardrums and we we discern it through our cerebral cortex as a vibration as a pulsation and we translate it into music because that's the language we use to say oh i'm hearing music but the music i heard or didn't hear i'll explain what i'm saying there that it was all pervasive and it activated say dormant cosmic understanding that everything is going on now everything is simultaneous and eternity is now and at doing that experience uh i think i came close to tears because it was such a deep ecstatic blissful beautiful sense of homecoming it's like you know if you've ever been taken by your parents to visit grand folks you've never seen before and you just feel a kinder

connection and your heart breaks open i felt like i was just pulled into this awareness of the whole universe in a reunion an infinite family reunion wow yes and it must last at about 10 minutes now i talk about it as though it happened and i catch myself and recall that the teaching in this is that there is no past tense so it didn't happen it is happening and when i come to a place of meditative alignment i i rejoin that stream of of uh feeling and experience but even now i tap into the memory to uh it it it it pushes me it it compels me to reach for the kind of music i reach for on this side of the veil do you you know you hear and obviously you shouldn't take it necessarily literally but you hear things about i think it's a really quite beautiful

how the angels sing to the creator and um sometimes i wonder if that is actually people trying to describe that sound that you're describing which is we're listening to the infinite sort of awe yes of sentience as it becomes increasingly aware of the profound beauty of the creator oh yes um each individual might have that experience in the way they can best uh understand it in my case of course i've been through uh the College of Fine Arts Music School at Howard University and had a classical background so this music that i'm talking about i experience it as a classical brass orchestra okay weaving this most glorious textual harmonic feel wow and someone else might hear it as ocean surf or conch shells or a choir of angels

or crickets or a buzzing of bees there are basically 10 different ways that an individual can have this experience and i would say that your nervous system is vibrating in an altered way whether you call it cundalini is rising up through your your spine your nervous system and causing you to function as a different kind of filter or non-filter for information filter yeah not a filter versus antenna i don't know if there's a difference antenna may call calling bringing uh uh information antenna well antenna is a useful word you become an antenna uh at the same time thinking that the you we're talking about there's a you that's infinite and eternal then there's a you that's a little human beanie so if you think you're a human

beanie then you think of this is all coming out from outside of you but if you know that the pure i am you is the stars and the planets and the galaxies are all unfolding inside of you i got you yeah that's beautiful oh that's so funny because that's the eternal one of the eternal psychedelic conversations is is this inside me man like when you try dmt or have like a profound mushroom trip you think am i seeing something real or is it inside me and what you just said answers the question it's both it depends on where your head's at and that question is it real well if it isn't real or is real probably doesn't matter anymore if you've taken the experience and done something with it and use it to inspire your art your your words your lifestyle suddenly

you're off and you just like is jesus real and it doesn't matter if just being exposed to the concept of the idea of a character like that has propelled you to explore deeper into your connection with the supreme being suddenly you know it doesn't matter if that was real or not real it you're making it real for yourself do you think we live that this is heaven where we're at right now i can think that i can choose to think that i can choose to forget that then heavenly alignment uh if you're awareness my awareness is in heavenly alignment my emotional nervous system is in heavenly alignment that's alignment with the infinite the cosmos then heaven on earth means i'm bringing timelessness here i'm not just walking on earth i'm walking on a cosmic

field and i've transformed this local isolated personal experience into a universal all-pervasive experience yes so we call it holographic i'm i'm here but all of timelessness is here all of my uh all of my relatives are here this is i'm carrying the wholeness to walk on heaven on earth is to walk each moment i am in the moment of now and each moment i'm touching the fullness of the field can you talk to a little bit about the sun the sun yeah well my my early suspicions is that the earth is encrusted sun that we are cooled down the sun the sun is a brilliant being a model of selfless service and my suspicions are that the sun is conscious and can respond to an individual's praise of the sun and acknowledgement of the sun cool yes how do you praise the sun well you can

not look directly at the sun you can in the morning or bow toward the sun or when you see sunlight just stop for a moment stop being in linear time and just notice oh sunlight just feel it and own it be thankful for it uh do you know how long it takes for a photon to get out of the sun have you ever heard this before if it's stuck in new york traffic a while but supposedly that's amazing because when we see the sun it's not where we see it it's in other words the amount of time it takes to travel here right but still that's a long ways away yes and just think if that implies how far away the sun is and yet we on this planetary orb travel around the sun yeah that is we'll be traveling yeah yeah where we were when i came

into your studio this morning we're probably maybe millions of miles or thousands of miles away from where we'll be when we finish this podcast yeah wow that's and that's an important thing to remember it's so easy to forget that and and the photons i have just read this and you might find it interesting every photon every particle of light that's hitting us apparently it comes out of the mantle of the sun and it takes millions of years for it to be born out of the sun it has to push its way out of the mantle and then it so in our in our eyes are eating photons basically like a photon lands in our eyes and gets converted into chemical energy and that's it for the photon so our eyes are just gobbling up these little sentient beings that took millions of years to get born

out of the sun which is to me that is something that seems really quite beautiful because our eyes are sort of like black holes for these little little light minnows that are yeah yes there are that's that's fresh new insight for the sun i do know that if you close your eyes don't do this with open eyes close your eyes and look up directly into the sun with eyes closed and if you can create a strobous stroboscopic effect with two your hands kind of washing against each other yeah that i've done this and notice wonderful images geometric forms sometimes a suggestion of another parallel dimensional life situation going on do you think do you think that's that there is a a potentially another universe simultaneously overlaying this universe that is populated with

entities that we can't see in this dimension i have no reason to doubt it and i would believe that the sun emitting or certain frequency of sunlight hitting us could trigger dormant hormonal activities that if activated could allow us to break through into another dimension of realization but i accept that there are parallel dimensions intersecting or permeating where we are now and we could drop into them and drop out of them i guess sleep is they say sleep is a heavy-duty drug yes sleep the body is a drug too here but you can shift your awareness of what's going on now so you go to sleep have a dream and suddenly you're on a boat on a yacht and you're drinking your favorite root beer and a shark comes up and says make my my little my little sweetie pie

the classic you wake up really quick you went to wow but the idea of simultaneous parallel universes i have no reason to doubt it but once again whatever i think there is ultimately it's all going on inside the bigger me the pure i am right and i think that's one way to cure stress paranoia and fear is to have a practice of diving into and re-identifying with the universal i am to take the edge off the fears that we are subject to if we just think of ourselves as a limited individual mortal subject to the with the flings and arrows of life misfortune a beanie yes i am really interested in your spiritual history because it seems like you have had some pretty intense teachings and from what i've read online coming from gurus do you currently have a

guru a guru means the speller of light a speller of darkness and bringer of light and i'd say that i suspect that i have what you call it anonymous gurus right and mentors that have worked through my dream states and have worked through seemingly homeless people mumbling something while i'm walking by them on the street yes yeah dropping deep into shamanic trance and having realizations i mean one of the most beautiful i think guru hit was doing ayahuasca at one session and having this experience of being in an extraterrestrial museum and looking at this jewelry of this glistening exquisite geometric jewelry and it was so beautiful and at the time i could make the connection that staring at beauty and drinking in beauty opened my heart and that beauty contemplating

beauty is a way to open the heart and the way to get love energy flowing to run love energy yeah yeah yeah sure so that gurus there was no physical person there doing that to me and then i've had the pleasure of being in the presence of people that were called gurus yes and i'd be in the presence of people who were calling that person their guru but i resisted calling anybody outside my physical self my guru i may say my mentor or a teacher or a model and the person that came close to being called a guru would say i'm not your guru says drop into deep trance and go within and once you know your inner guru you'll see the reflections on and those out there who are reflecting your inner guru to you when i'm

i did a years ago the first time i met baba ramdas because he does these skype calls and i couldn't believe that he would do these skype calls and i signed up for one and there he was on my screen and i was just so shocked and what i when i said to him was uh are you my guru any response he gets his you know ramdas he gets his beaming smile on his face and he goes sure i'm your guru now what well some people need to say you're my guru in order to help pull them out of being overexposed to maybe dark heavy energies in their life right and they need somebody to model the the the the positive upward direction yes yes now but but you in many in many interviews

you when you talk about yourself it's obviously correct me if i'm wrong here it sounds as though you're implying that you chose this incarnation or that this is uh you you decided to manifest is this being that you are right now i have a feeling that there was some intention and some design for my being here in this earth experience at this time at times like a glimpses of the fact that my being drawn to music is a carryover from previous or another preparation life stage somewhere i was once told by my mentor who refused to say that he was my guru say that i'm from jupiter in a guru planet and i didn't know what to make of that at the time but he just smile he says you're from jupiter wow and and now we have these beautiful images of jupiter have you

seen them my god they're just amazing like we have these it's in such a living incredible planet it's just you know well you know as you we're talking now i'm getting a realization that my uh the music hearing experience i talked about may have been uh the planetary sending me waves of reminder because it woke me up to a music form that was much bigger than i'd ever experienced before and it it informs the kind of music i reach for now which is more vertical music or music to lift consciousness out of over identification with limited life yeah i want to talk about how you create your music because i as i'm listening to it it and how and loving it and experiencing it i keep thinking to myself how much of it is

composed beforehand and how much of it is just flowing out of you in that moment and to to add to that question when you what was the process when you were recording with brian eno in studio with your electric zither how organized was the process well i'll tell you i did go through a period of intense organization just in college and i was composing that was my one of my dreams to become a composer and i would sit at this large manuscript and write out music near to the piano and hum it and then i would send them off to the library congress to be copyrighted so i went through a period of composition intentional notes chords here and there and not much ever happened to that music but when i started running energy through sound or channeling music uh that music got recorded

and got distributed and uh heard by more people that music is comes out of my compositional skills or transformed into not composing notes but composing tunings for the zither 36 string zither so composing modes or scales that have a atmospherical uh energy and emotional uh suggestion were you when you're tuning a 36 string zither how i i read i read that in an interview i was just how are you doing that or do you have did you have something like tuning forks to help at that time there were not guitar tuners how was i tuning i think i was tuning it maybe there was pitch pipes uh but i would of the 36 strings typically i would be going for a chord either pentatonic would be a five note chord which means that of 36 strings those 36 strings have to be tuned in such a

ways that many of the strings are doubled and tripled so that no strings are outside of that five note chord sometimes i would tune just a heart feeling i would just pluck a note on the zither and then feel where the next note would be and it would be feeling heartways and if i was which wasn't the case most times be in meditative resonance the kind of tuning that i would accept as a final um composition would would have juice to it it would suggest maybe mountain valleys or intergalactic star systems or it would be kind that would allow me to express a sense of simultaneous cultures either around the planet around the universe that are dancing and celebrating so the kind of images that i would look for in my tunings would be those that were in harmony

with an unspoken consciousness of that you know it gets vibrated through meditation you get a higher sense or a meditative understanding and so the kind of tunings that i would compose would have a story in them and then i would then improvise through those tunings to release the story and energy so that way of composing is less rigid you you you select the terrain or the medium which is a harmonic field and then you go into it and let it show you where you can go with it yeah so that's like day of radiance i think there were two or three different harmonic fields that i tuned the instrument to on ambient number three day of radiance and just in the studio do some breath work and tune in to remind myself of the self beyond the

limited self and when i catch that wind then inspiration just flows yes you don't have to know what note you're going to play you're about sculpting the field interacting with this subtle all-pervading presence yes sculpting the field it is like clay or something absolutely man why is it like clay well it's there to be done you do what you want with it you can play with it you can wash your hand through it you can call it chi and infinite and do exercise through it you can hug your sweetie pie in the midst of it you can you can do so much with it yeah it's up to you and if you charge it with positive thinking with positive images then you go higher and higher and deeper but if you charge it most times accidentally with negative thoughts negative

feelings and moods and thought forms you might take it to denser heavier so you can take this field and do what you want with it some call it the pure mind that you can it can be your imprisonment or it can be your key it can be your lock or it can be the key you can liberate you into higher realms of personal and planetary existence or it can keep you locked up into density and confusion yes and and i want to ask you what do you think your music is light and it's beautiful and it's it's it's liberate it's wonderful but and i now i can see why but what do you think about musicians who create beautiful dark music music that is it's like they didn't tune into people celebrating they tuned into some hell realm and some part of the universe and have decided to

bring that vibration into this dimension that could be their calling and they can see the beauty in that and or they see the necessity in that or it allows them to feel grounded or feel useful or they're relating to the language that gives them a validation and so i it not even a tendency to want to judge them negatively but uh say that i've chosen not to listen to if a music feels dark for me or it doesn't represent the meditative resonance in which i'm presently vibing then i can choose to not listen right and if i am radiating light in joy and somebody else says i'm not ready to be there i still need some more anguish and and uh dark feelings to identify with yeah and so we're both in the same universe and we're choosing to use the universal energy

in the way that we think we need to do it gotcha now you could you tell the story about the time when you went to pawn your guitar and bought the zither that we were just talking about yes there's a long version at that time i was living in queens new york married at the time and uh queens was near streach and moys meditation community and since i lived that close i would walk maybe a half an hour and visit the meditations at the time and he was a music guru streach and moys i don't know if you know of him i know i don't but anyhow he he had written many books on the power of music and so i had gone to one of his meditations went through the back i'm so sorry do you mind pausing for one second so i can take care of the poodle otherwise

it's going to be distracting please continue sorry about my poodle okay now we were talking about light and dark music we're talking about the what i think was one of the it seems like one of you've had a few miracles in your life oh yes and one of the guitar and but before that you were mentioning this guru a music guru music guru streach and moys and i remember going to one of his meditations and i walked into the house and the room was full of meditators and he was sitting up in front in this trance and i could just feel this etheric glow around his presence and i could feel that the people there were there to get energy or just to be present and something clicked to me i says i could come here to get something from this being or i could

send this being love and light you know why do i think that if you sit in the presence of a guru you just have to receive why don't i dare to believe that i can offer this person something so i just sent waves of love and appreciation and sort of this open blanche card whatever you need from me you can have right yeah and i just dared to love the guru back you know and shortly after then another part of that i remember playing fender rose piano in a jazz rock band and at required loading this heavy cabinet and keyboard onto a van whenever the group played it was the group called winds of change okay and on one occasion i was traveling by train during that period subway train and looking over at somebody who had this neat little small case

and i said to myself this uncle wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a lightweight portable piano something that small and uh so that's number two secondly i had this epiphany the sound hearing experience during that period of uh meditation hearing this cosmic orchestra now all those three together at some point while playing a guitar i felt like i didn't need the guitar at that moment because i'm playing piano so i wanted to pawn the guitar to get some extra cash there in south ozone park queens so i went into the the pawn shop and what caught my eye as i was going in was this instrument the auto harp loosely called the zither that i had seen in the village Greenwich village of new york when i was doing stand-up comedy bluegrass bands would include an auto harp

and it would catch my eye and i said that's an interesting looking instrument that seemed like it has a bigger future fast forward back to this pawn shop i'm going into the pawn shop and i'm pawning my guitar my uh yamaha six still string guitar did you feel depressed pawning your guitars and that a depressing moment for musicians at that time i was into meditation you know meditation takes the edge off yeah so depression doesn't really get a hold of me after that happened after after getting into meditation the right way and yoga yoga helps to keeping your body uh together so anyhow i did feel like i was living the life of the struggling musician but it wasn't attended by a sense of depression thanks for asking that because uh but anyhow well

i just asked because you know sometimes when i when i've been in pawn shops i feel a little afraid to buy the instruments because i think these instruments all might have energies that they represent some potentially somebody you wanted to become a musician and didn't you know had to get some dough and gave up their dream for some cash and there's this feeling of like shit man that's heavy to get these instruments i'm glad you brought that up that's a wonderful dunk in a preface to what i'm about to say is that when i was pointing guitar i expect to come out with maybe a hundred and fifty dollars but the clerk only offered offered me twenty five dollars and right after that clerk made that statement i said oh that doesn't sound like where i want to go a very clear

distinctive voice washed through me as if a great cosmic grand panel and all the warmth and love and advice counseling said don't take money swap your guitar for that instrument in the window and they knew i was that the auto harp so with the loving energy of that voice sort of nullified any negative energy that thought that instrument could have had it was suddenly i'm curious to see where this can go and how did that voice get inside my head but then like i said there was treachery there was my putting it out to the cosmos and looking for a new instrument there was this hearing this cosmic music and not knowing how i was going to use that experience on this side of the veil and suddenly i'm being guided to explore this auto harp so i took it home i got five dollars

along with the deal i made a little deal nice yes so i was still out of money but i had this instrument and i was excited because i was now running the energy of this cosmic guidance that's a that's another thing about following cosmic guidance is that the moment i choose to follow guidance i'm in a different frequency of the universe that's right that is so miraculous and uh yeah what let's talk about that just for a second this different frequency of the universe it it it it can literally seem as though you just stepped through a portal into a completely different dimension you're no longer in the life you were in anymore right the moment you make that choice yes you you you're validating the the idea that there's a consciousness and intelligence

working through you by means of you individualizing as you right here and right now and when you have that expanded realization you're walking in a different all of a sudden it's a different world you shed your skin it's you've you've you've climbed out of whatever the nest was that you that you that i guess some invisible mother bird was trying to push you out of yes and now you're like whoa wait a minute i can i think i'm flying here this is and during that time Duncan that's when you uh start to appreciate kindred folks the right community friends who are if they're real friends they can allow you to expand they can allow you to grow they can allow you to shed your skin and in the midst of your relationship there's still that love and caring even though you're

you're in another dimension like your cat your dogs if you were to shift vibrations tremendously and go back to your poodles in another 20 minutes they would still probably lick your hand and they don't care the poodles don't care if i'm jesus or if i'm a stockbroker they don't care they're right that's a true friend that's a true friend because some friends who aren't really friends when you start making the upshift they'll make it you could call them on their position right they feel unstable in their own life into where are you going that's too far out i can't follow you there that's right and others says it can be validated then they're searching for some kind of relief and they said hey i never thought of just jumping out of this frequency into another one and uh of course jumping

out it might not be the right way to put it you want to uh flow out of it or gracefully there's all kinds of ways you can come out of it you know ramdas talks about this a little bit some people uh what happens is they they jump out of it and and they go really far into a higher frequency in there maybe they weren't quite ready for it or there was a you know forget the friends who are like what's going on with you space cowboy where are you at forget those friends think about the part of the ego identity that the moment you're standing in a music shop hearing the voice of the universe telling you hey here's a way for you to move into a completely new incarnation while you're still alive there's a part of you maybe not you but there's a part of me

that you're like uh oh one toke over the line baby here we go i knew i shouldn't have been taken that i took one too many hits of acid i'm losing it i'm hearing a voice telling me to buy a zither i must be spot i'm going to be in a fucking lunatic asylum soon that part of the identity we have those little shitty friends living inside of us who are like no stay here stay like this yes stay where it's safe stay where you're recognizable stay where it's convenient stay where it's boring boring we're so boring did you did you have any sense as when you're hearing this voice that maybe it what no one thing i also um i took it as it was part of my practice at that time it's called new thought new thought religion was one of the things i was

dabbling in and the suggestion is to try something new on a daily basis if you're if you go home from work a certain way try a new way if you walk to the library a certain path try another path yeah put your clothes on a certain way try another way in other words constantly break out of patterns this is called new thought new thought religion if you can think of new thought you can change your life wow and so here was a new powerful new thought me play the auto and i said wow how challenging how but most of all me follow this voice i want to see where this would go and uh because that to me was like robert frost's poem the road not taken yeah this is a path i would not take with my rational thinking mind okay but let me blow your mind first not blow your mind but let

me that poem do you know that poem is one of the most missed that poem actually because everyone thinks this means the road not taken means you you picked a road not taken but if you look at that poem both of the roads looked exactly the same and it's in retrospect that the character in the poem is thinking i took the road less traveled by but both of them were exactly the same but in the his mind he picked the road but it's a sort of the i guess what it implies is it's more of the subjective decision that elevates rather than you could have picked either of these paths but your mind would it is the thing that produces the sense of like oh it actually sounds a little dismal as i'm describing it that way but the point is you this news i want to talk about this very quickly this

new thought that you're talking about coincides with an idea i've been having about the incarnational cycles which is that we live this life over and over and over and over again we don't reincarnate necessarily as birds or buffalo or eg or whatever we we this life is on loop and the feeling of habit is the feeling of the tracks that we've created in all these past incarnational cycles so by doing new things each day you're sort of pushing yourself out of this deep track that you've burrowed into the time space continuum and that thing you're talking about buying the zither it that in that sense of oh this is a new universe it's because it it is you're cycling up spiraling up it's sort of cycling yeah samsara another way of birth and

death or just keeping a cycle up what do you call it a locked cycle yes and to lift up out of it choosing new things choosing new ways or hearing you can you can hear sound that can unlock memory of a higher destination a higher form of selfness they would you call it spiritual music or you call it not them inner sound current which can unlock your memory that you are a cosmos that you are not limited just this incarnation you can you have a body you can use a body but you're not limited to the body but we're picking this body it's attachment isn't it it's like this I would say is we've done something to to allow this particular incarnation to be ours but I can see why you would pick your incarnation why wouldn't you like if I was the universal consciousness

I would want to be you that's a fun incarnation to pick I you know you're you're do you ever this thing you're talking about we must let go of the titles but then not just the titles we let go of the everything and we let go of everything no in the context that we can let go of it in the 10 minutes before dropping into meditation when we come out of the meditation we we want to go forward I would say back forward into our worldly obligations responsibilities even you go back to your husband and you says I'm not a wife he says what do you mean lady but you carry the resonance of behind the wife behind the husband behind the civil engineer there's this undesignated pure I am but let's talk about something crazy you know the story of the

Rasulila Krishna playing the flute and the goat yeah and so like the story of the Rasulila if you're not familiar very quickly Krishna goes into a clearing in the forest and plays the flute yeah at night and the music washes and through the forest and the gopy the cowherd women hear the flute yeah the music of God yes and they leave their children they leave the lanterns burning they leave their husbands they leave everything and they go to follow that music until they come to the clearing and there's Krishna playing the flute and there's 108 of them and he splits himself he becomes 108 Krishna's so that he can make love to all of them as their perfect lover so yes but they've left

everything you know they've said that the music was so so absorbing to them that they weren't they didn't think oh you're my husband they didn't they were like no therefore they didn't leave anything they gained everything and in the realization that you didn't leave anything because there's nothing left behind that is Krishna's flute is a metaphor for the inner sound current yeah and it's a perfect lover because it's all permeating it connects you to your whole self there's more than you say a private lover can do you can connect to your sensual body with a with a sensual lover connect to your breath you can feel good yeah but Krishna's flute or that knot in the sound current connect

you to your cosmic presence that that when a lover can do that yo I'll take it and he's making love to all eight of them 108 108 the sound vibration is everywhere so like holographically the wholeness of the field is at every point within the field you can connect the wholeness of the field at every point within the field and so at every one every one of the 108 there was the wholeness of Krishna there's a wholeness and as you make total presence total love total nurturing total validation so the idea is that not leave they didn't leave something behind that's a metaphor what they did they moved their head into everything and in a sense you left you could call it an illusion but that can anger some people that you call it an illusion yes a

temporary sense of reality yeah yeah and do you do you feel like you're not to force you to categorize yourself but do you feel like you're you're a teacher or that you have it seems like you're teaching us through the sounds that you're producing um in the sense of modeling that I am opening myself up to continuously validating and learning who what I am and am not and sharing my learning space sharing my learning space I'm little concerned about taking on students in the formal sense especially followers I feel like in following I'd like to have the the freedom to back up without stepping on anybody that is so cool that is so that's all any of us want that's the most beautiful thing to want yes but in uh I allow my music the

music that I've done has modeled to musicians that I've heard from around the world who have been inspired enough to go along the direction they've already been going on with more conviction and more zest or giving people the ability to think over me maybe I should just keep that meditation a little longer until I make more sense of it I imagine there are many people who are trying to meditate and haven't found their connection to it and I'm feeling that the music that I do or my lifestyle may support them and say oh I'll give it another try yes or I'll go a little deeper for sure that's the sense when I listen to your music that's what it feels like to me it puts me in that something I don't know what you would call it something unique well it's

unique to your music I do you think that music do you think music is alive that is a good question I have the sense that music and light are vertical forms that are conscious being now it's not easy to wrap my linear thinking around that idea that a sound can be a conscious being but a sound can impart wisdom it can lift heaviness it can open consciousness and it can do it in a way that isn't filled with human drama or human demands I have the sensation that sound and light are conscious beings I mean you may call it the angelic realm that that exists probably as continuous present time that can somehow impact the movement of consciousness on this side of the veil I have this sensation yes that sound is a living being you think of when I play the gong

the idea is to invoke the gong the beings who work through the gong to come through and impact us in positive ways disintegrate energy and to lift consciousness into a higher sense of present time thank you so much for hanging out with me for this time Duncan it's been an ecstatically infinite pleasure likewise thank you how can people find you there's a website that I try to stay on top of it's called laraji.blogspot.com and on that website there's my email address there's descriptions of the laughter workshop that I do and hopefully updated schedule of my concerts and ways to contact me and little bit information of the things that I'm up to and if this is too much to ask I completely get it but you have this instrument here and I was

wondering if maybe for the next five minutes or so you could play a little something for everybody let's see I can hold the mic and interesting you just say the way you just said to play it for everybody in african tradition this instrument is played to acknowledge ancestral energy so you're playing for the ancestors so when I play the instrument especially in any music I am mindful of beings who are not totally in the hard fast human body but the energy I'll hold this everybody and beyond bodies yes thank you do all of a sudden it's a different world all of a sudden it's a different

way of thinking all of a sudden it's a different way of feeling all of a sudden it's a different reason why all of a sudden it's a different view all of a sudden it's another you all of a sudden it's another state of mind flowing way of knowing higher way of glowing all of a sudden thank you thank you thank you that was so beautiful thank you February the January the 18th is a release of a new song album highly inspirational called vision songs volume one released by numeral group it's probably already being promoted around the beautiful planet vision songs volume one with loraji produced on numeral group records i'll

have links to that at dunkartrussell.com thank you so much halle krishna thanks for listening everybody that was loraji all the links you need to find loraji will be at dunkartrussell.com huge thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH and thank you guys so much for listening hope you continue to make beautiful music and whatever it is you do i'll see you guys soon with an episode with raghu marcus until then Hare Krishna it's macy's friends and family get an extra 30 off great gifts for her just in time for mother's day when you use your coupon or macy's card and take 15 percent off beauty essentials or shop specials she'll love while supplies last plus star rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at macy's

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