Experiments: Volume 1
The "EXPERIMENTS" collection explores the edges of creativity and devotion.
Learn more about each individual track below:
The Bee
- Hari (feat. Ram Dass)
Featured Ram Dass audio thank to the support of the Love Serve Remember Foundation. You can access the full lecture here: Ram Dass | Pt. 4 Methods to Consciousness - 1970
To find more of Ram Dass’s teachings visit www.ramdass.org.
Track art by: Thais Aquino
Transcript:
"For about five days now I have been singing, "engrossed is the bee of my mind in the blue lotus feet of my divine mother. Divine mother my divine mother, divine mother, my divine mother
When I was with my guru and he pointed to the women in the room and said, “Who are they?” and I said “they're your devotees.” He said no. I said “I don't know, who are they?" and he said Ma, they’re the mother.
So I went through that trip, all women are the divine mother. Wow that’s beautiful. I went through a number of changes in my head reregistering and I'm just finishing with that and he points to the men in the room, the sadhus and he says, “Who are they?" I said I don't know. He said “Ma … they're all the divine mother” and I was like “wow.”
So what I’m doing that by singing that… now I’m only singing that because it really turns me on to sing it all day. It gets me very high to keep singing, “engrossed is the bee of my mind, in the blue lotus feet of my divine mother.”
I’m driving on the super highway. And I’m going to Maine, to Colby. And I’m on route 95 and I’m going 90 miles an hour. And I’m looking for police, and the cement is stretching out before me, and I’m looking at my wristwatch and I’m eating life savers or mints, or what ever those things are.
And I’m looking at the trees and all of this and I’m thinking of going to Colby and feeling my back and in the midst of this I’m singing “engrossed is the bee of my mind in the blue lotus feet of my divine mother.
Now as a method, what I’m doing is perceiving all form … all form, in such a way that I am loving and honoring it, what ever it is. What ever it is.
Engrossed is the bee of mind in the blue lotus feet of my divine mother. The divine mother now is the cement road, it’s the police I’m looking for, it’s the feeling of the car, is the body. It’s where I’m going to, it’s where I came from. It’s all part of the divine mother. And engrossed is the beeeeeee of my mind, bzzzzz going from flower to flower, from thing to thing. Mint, drive cop, heat accelerator, Colby, Boston, memory, later, before, the bee of my mind is engrossed in the blue lotus feet of my divine mother.”
Jai SitaRam
KP|RG (feat. ghosti)
Track Cover Art by Thais Aquino at http://www.thaisaquino.com/
This piece came from a 3 day collaboration process between myself and RamGovind (RG). I started with recording for a day in my room in Portland and then sent some of it to RG who was attending a mutual friend's wedding in Florida. We just kept sending parts back and forth and having a dialouge that way. What resulted is a bit more on the side of an experience for the listener, something to bathe your consciousness in, sing with or just breathe to.
I wanted to put those clips of my sister, Ariel (ghosti) talking in the beginning because I feel like she expresses the struggle of unknowingness and the desire to be free that I find so relatable. It was from a phone conversation we were having the day I recorded this, and the juxtaposition of expressed struggle and the notion of 'dying to put it into practice' stood out as beautiful to me.
Also, creating this with RamGovind felt inspiring because it was a total experiment and a mutual exploration of what we CAN create. Since we all met, RG has always encouraged us to explore sound and its possibilities- which we will happily continue to do!
I understand its long but hey, take a break, lay down, put your headphones in and ahhhh
hope you enjoy this!
Hey Nataraj
Pavan Das (feat. Ram Dass)
🎶 Music/Mantra: Matthew 'Pavan' Ceurvorst
🎧 Mix/Mastering: Carl Golembeski
📸 Artwork: Thais Aquino at http://www.thaisaquino.com/
Processed with VSCO with j2 preset
BIG thank you to the whole band:
- Carl for working his magic mastering my messy track
- Thais for the powerful artwork
- Hari for his enthusiastic coaching in the home stretch
- Sitaram and KP for their impeccably timed phone calls of love and encouragement.
The Track:
Singing to Arunachala Shiva I want to immerse the listener in the sounds of that holy place. The ambient sounds you hear are from a temple and marketplace in Tiruvannamalai that I collected in 2016. The photo is the view from atop Arunachala, overlooking the Dance.
Arunachala is a sacred mountain in southern India, said to be a manifest form of Shiva. For ages it has attracted saints, sages, and sadhus- most famously the great saint Sri Ramana Maharshi.
When asked about Arunachala, Ramana Maharshi said that other holy places such as Varanasi and Kailash are sacred because they are the abodes of Shiva whereas Arunachala is Lord Shiva himself.
In the time since RD left his body I’m often reminded of Sri Ramana’s final invitation to his devotees. As they were distraught over his imminent passing, he pacified them by saying, “Where can I go?”
This koan-of-sorts is an invitation into the Mystery, into the Heart, into the Self. When I mention it to RD in my imagination, he just laughs and looks at me with lilting eyes - he’s definitely on the inside of that joke.
The Process:
We decided on this mixtape idea about 10 days ago and I was all in. I immediately ordered a mic and interface, then waited eagerly for them to arrive.
After receiving the equipment I opened Ableton for the very first time on April 1st. It looked daunting. It was daunting.
I proceeded to spend the next 48 hours spinning my wheels in the mud. Take after take, YouTube tutorial after YouTube tutorial. All my stuff came up - unpreparedness, inadequacy, and impostership - the full curriculum.
Then grace - per usual - appeared as a phone call from my dear brother, KP. After a bit of catching up he started to share his excitement about “Natural affection.” He joyfully expounded that this Bhakti path isn’t something forced, but rather the greatest jewel is our natural affection for the divine. Message received. My shoulders dropped.
I jumped back into the mix. this time with a smile on my face and a dance in my heart. I wasn’t doing this to get the perfect take or to impress my Judge. I was singing out of my love for the Names, and a desire to share that love with other people - natural affection.
When I finished recording I wanted to add some RD soundbites to the mix so I went to one of my favorite talks “Shiva’s Dance of Life” (Seemed apt for a Nataraja chant). And there it is, in a talk from decades past, RD speaking to me Here and Now:
“Either you do it like its a big weight on you. Or you do it as part of the dance - Shiva’s Dance of Life”
Piano Stotram
Sitaram Dass
Track Cover Art by Thais Aquino at http://www.thaisaquino.com/
The Guru Stotram is a river of Grace, an ever-flowing current to the heart of Eternity. These days many of us wonder if we need gurus anymore, and for good reason. It seems that almost every day we hear about new cases of abuse within the hierarchy of spiritual communities. But this is a love song. It is a love song to God in the form of Guru, the Dispeller of Darkness who shows us the path and how to walk it towards the light. It captures the essence of Guru Kripa, or the effervescent Grace of the Dispeller of Darkness.
Just like in worldly relationships, many of us have been in unhealthy or even abusive relationships. Yet the drive to find a good relationship keeps us going. We don't have to keep seeking relationships, but we do. I imagine that many people are done with gurus. There's no reason not to be, but for those of us with a heart yearning for a personal relationship with God, what do we do? The Guru Stotram is a love song about a Sat Guru, or True Guru.
For me, the Guru is how God becomes personal. The Guru shows me that God is not just an Eternal, Impartial, Truth, or even an All-Pervading Essence of Love, but is also a Being who loves me and all of us unconditionally. Before meeting the Guru, I had faith in God, but not a personal relationship. It was the Guru that gave that to me. Now I see that the lines of the Guru Stotram are true: “There is no truth higher than the Guru, no practice higher than the Guru, and no knowledge higher than the Guru.”
For some of us the Guru can take the form of a physical person on earth. A true Siddha, or Perfected Master, is a Being that has no ego. When you look at Them, all you see is the divine radiance of God shining through. God is in all of us as our True Nature, but we have forgotten. The Guru knows, and they help us to awaken.
Such a Being cannot die. Their physical body may fall away, but the God within was never confined to that body anyway. We can still use Their form to connect with Them. We can look at Their pictures, sing to Them, travel to Their temples, and experience Their Grace through satsang with other devotees. The Guru shows us They are still here, often times through dreams, synchronicities or miracles, but always through an inner knowing of the heart.
Of course, if we don’t feel called to a specific form of the Guru, we can still connect to Them.
The Universal Guru is the God within every heart, and we can connect to Them by reading about any of the saints we are drawn to from any of the world's great spiritual and mystical traditions. Each one is a different mask of God, as if They just swap bodies the way we might change clothes.
Some of us might not require any form. Since the Guru is within, if we are truly quiet, we can hear that Still, Small Voice. The moments when I am connected to my intuitive heart are when I can most clearly see that the Guru guides every step of the journey. It is all Grace, and day by we grow into this tremendous and mysterious awakening.
All I know is what I’ve found in my faith and spiritual community. Neem Karoli Baba, Siddhi Ma, and Ram Dass has opened me up to Grace. It’s a GOOD relationship. And so in this song I sing to them out of love. It’s a love song.
Remember Ram
Ram Govind
Track Cover Art by Thais Aquino at http://www.thaisaquino.com/
The seed for this composition was a part from KP's Jai SitaRam, we decided to chop it up to make two compositions.
I re-imagined it in a way thats familiar to KP's track but with a deeper more experimental twist. Since a big part of the seed was KP singing out to the Guru, I thought to invite them in their sonic forms. I took the classic recording of Neem Karoli Baba and processed it with my Kyma system.
The result turns Baba's voice into a sonic blanket that wraps the composition in a smear of harmonics. I then foraged a test recording where I was line checking Ram Dass, and he was kind of joking with us, using some of his go-to phrases and sounds of satiation.
There's also a little Loving Awareness meditation in there from an inquiry where KD, RD, and Raghu were discussing how effective chanting The Name was, as opposed to chanting Loving Awareness. So, eventually it turned into both approaches merging into the one.
The name Ram Ram, along with... I am loving Awareness.
I hope this is a little visit to Soul Land, a reminder of that Love, a "heart bomb," as Pavan Das puts it.
