God
bless Belinda Carlisle! AKA Dotty Danger, first Germs drummer (lasted one day) –
a punk priestess within the delightfully apocalyptic LA scene (1977, The
Canterbury Hotel, Decline of Western Civ
101). Carlisle, co-founded the delightful post-apocalyptic all-girl-band The
Go-Gos whose sugar-encrusted songs and videos affirmed a cheery hollowness Andy
Warhol could have loved : “deeply superficial.”
Belinda then morphed into a “adult oriented” chanteuse who swapped out
campy fun for designer lifestyles. It girl. Cosmo girl. VIP girl. Girl next
door. French Girl. Even Artist girl. And of course Party girl. She awoke from one
cocaine binge back in bed with a Dodgers bad boy as the new owner of a thoroughbred
horse. Like all great Americans her arc from absurd success back down into
wanton excess became fodder for a sobering tell-all comeback (Lips Unsealed, 2011). Chock full of too much “common sense” and not
enough depravity[1] or
even simple life passages such as heartache, the reader can blame the book’s
tactful remove not on some quaint idea of censorship but rather her spiritual
awakening in India. And thus we come full circle (in the sand) to her latest
release – Wilder Shores (due out on
Friday, September 29th, 2017). Once again like a real Forrest Gump,
Ms. Carlisle is at one with the Zeitgeist.
Having
already worked with Kundalini mantra-singing superstar Simrit - including a
shared billed at Sat Nam Fest - Wilder Shores
offers a full album of pop songs built from Kundalini yoga chants. Carlisle was
introduced to Kundalini yoga 25 years ago and has had a “serious practice” for
10. She credits the discipline with allowing
her to control her wildly addictive behaviors around substances including cocaine
and food. Nothing to sneeze at!
Like punk rock, AOR and “tell-all” autobiographies,
Kundalini yoga has become a pop phenomenon. Various programs have branded
Kundalini yoga with a welter of encouraging success stories, merchandise,
online chatter, changed lives, unmentionable ironies, curious indulgences: an
outbreak of peaceful easy feelings.
A yoga practice with a focus on
chanting, Kundalini first came to attention in “the West” at the end of the 19th
century. Flourishing first as a bio-psychological philosophy it is now a daily
practice for an ever-increasing large number of citizens around the world.
As a
bio-psychological philosophy (all the rage in the 19th century
“West”, as found for instance in the radical connection of body & mind in Fredrich
Nietzsche – “Has anyone yet written the philosophy of the stomach?”[2]),
the Kundalini tradition has given “Western” post-Apocalyptic (WWII) thinkers a
way of talking about the fine line, perhaps the imaginary line, between madness
and spiritual awakening, or as one often reads – “bliss or nightmare?” Abyss or
freedom?
Intellectually Kundalini yoga can
be a bit of a New Age bad boy – the energies released can be overwhelming (a
snake uncoiling from the base of one’s spine, memorably described in Gopi
Krishna’s (1903-84) famed autobiography (Kundalini,
Shambala, 1967). People’s heads have
been known to explode with lightening.
Seizures can occur. Heat or
pressure can overtake body & mind. Resembling
a psychotic break, this phenomenon can be called a “spiritual emergency.” I am not aware that Belinda has experienced
any of this; her madness was what Kundalini practice relieved. Her Wilder Shores are behind her rather than
straight up ahead.
In the early part of the 20th
century Carl Jung, had an “intuitive” patient with a “snake in her stomach.” [3]
At first Jung wondered if she was schizophrenic. She was experiencing psychotic
breaks with reality – not hearing her footsteps because she was walking on air,
mistaking a brothel for a salon. The snake -- whose golden head would
eventually come out his patient’s mouth – led Jung deeper into consideration of
Kundalini and the snake as an example of “collective fantasy” – a theme Joseph
Campbell picks up in his examination of Kundalini yoga as a “path to
illumination.”
Of
course none of this is casually connected to Belinda’s newest product. Indulging my
own equally entitled sense of willful disconnect, I have not listened to Wilder Shores for this review. Arguably
reviewing the idea of her content without being prejudiced by the facts might
allow me as a critic to share the proper space wherein Wilder Shores arises from.
If 19th
and 20th century thinkers’ “search for secret India” abstracted a
varied, rich, ridiculous and remote tradition -- “The Orient in The West” -- Kundalini
yoga is now a very present global phenomenon. Within popular culture it has
regained its origins as an embodied practice. Chanting, striking poses and
breathing all center upon activating the body instead of providing mere intellectual
concepts As Carlisle states about the singing of mantras, "of which there are
thousands" - “It’s not just singing, it’s a science” – meaning real causes activate
real effects. Composed in the relatively
new written language of Gurmukhī (1500 AD), this former oral “language of the
gurus” uses different sounds to hit “84 meridian points in the mouth.” “[The
stimulated meridian points] in turn stimulate the hypothalamus which makes the
pineal gland radiate.[4]
When the pineal gland radiates, it creates an impulse in the pituitary gland.
When the pituitary gland gives impulses, the entire glandular system secretes
and a human being obtains bliss. This is the science.”
As with
all things popular the recursive feedback loop of phrases like “this is the science”
can feel mindless or even creepy to the non-initiate. Somewhere along the way
the song becomes karaoke. For example, the popular Kundalini school founded by Sihk
Yogi Bhajan generates a surprising uniformity of information across numerous media
channels despite being called a “sacrilegious hodgepodge.”[5]
Teachers and students alike seem to cleave to the melody and harmonies with an
unsettling uniformity. The instructions and goals are quite specific and
programmatic. For an outsider the singing along appears to supersede finding
one’s inner voice. As T.S. Eliot would say “One man’s hodge-podge is another’s
tradition.”[6]
What might be cynically be called
the marketing of belief and its mechanics, has greatly assisted the popularity
of Kundalini yoga. The message, practice and goals are clear. If New Age
spirituality has traditionally been a hodge-podge of traditions, Kundalini yoga
evidences the re-emergence and interest in what used to be anathema: organized
religion. Just as The Go-Go’s signaled a return from punk noise to identifiable
structure, a kind of elevated Oprah verbiage (refined from various traditions
into something like a pop song) demarcates Kundalini communities through homogenous
theory and practice. So Dr. Jung, why
is your pseudo-science any better than this?[7] Why not listen to New Age music as if it were
an intuitive gateway to God, or the Collective Unconscious? If it creates belief and experience is it not
real enough? If it allows someone to overcome addiction is it not good? Is not my love of a field recoding of Taos
Pueblo round dance singing merely equal to another’s predilection for Kenny G?
Is one less authentic? Belinda? Is not the inauthentic the real experience by
now? Like a store bought strawberry from Chile?
This album and the Kundalini
movement can confront the listener with an old yet still fundamental question
about culture in general – what is authentic?
Even discounting the claims to objective
science, clearly a real need is being engaged by the Kundalini yoga phenomenon.
Large gatherings in the US, Mexico and Europe alongside thousands of
individuals in their homes on sheepskins evidence a remarkable sense of shared
purpose and practice. Conscious or not
this is a collective.
Spiritual work in the age of
mechanical (digital) reproduction is necessarily absurd. The aura of uniqueness
(what Belinda finds in “punk” Simrit[8])
hasn’t been seen since the 1930s, that is, since it began to visibly disappear.
The question thus becomes whether Belinda’s newest effort is an alternative or
a reiteration of the problem of inauthenticity it seeks to soothe. Both. And
this is a most modern phenomenon: that something is both what it is and is what
it is not.[9]
There is something about the way of our world which validates and invalidates
anything that appears. Hallowed hollowness. The lack of peace, clarity and
higher purpose – modernity – is reopened and healed by the realistically
inauthentic. Truly disembodied and displaced pop song mantras which do not even
have a peasant tradition to give them character are our folk
music. No wonder the pure products of
America go crazy. (To Elsie, William
Carlos Williams, 1938)
And like an all-you-can-buffet, or
a weekend in Las Vegas the hodge-podge feels real because it is. If Belinda’s
album is inauthentic it is nevertheless all-too real.
Wilder
Shores is a full length album of pop mantras plus an acoustic remake of
“Heaven is a Place on Earth.” Before considering the music, note that these are
not chants a la Simrit. Like Jung or Campbell, Carlisle has abstracted content
from Kundalini practice for her own use.
The songs on Wilder Shore are
not for practicing Kundalini yoga. As
Belinda tellingly posits, “If you were to put it on in the next room or in the
background you would think they are pop songs,”[10] She has broken up the repetitive (scientific)
nature of chanting with a more verse /chorus structure. “I need to be me.” The
mantra has been transformed into a pop song, just as punk or the Playboy
centerfold (2001) was transformed into a statement about Belinda. Despite the ever-present demonization of the
ego, Belinda is in fact making the world of Kundalini her own. She is still
punk whether she knows it or not.
Media agrees. With no trace of
irony (awareness) the website
Joy-Yoga.com states that Belinda’s recording are“ elevating Kundalini
mantras” which is like thinking King James improved God’s word. Suffice to say,
this album is not for attaining enlightenment nor chanting “Sa-ta-na-ma” for the
proscribed 12, 18, 31 or 61 minutes. Instead, Belinda is offering company while
one drives to the yoga studio or blends up a green smoothie.
The music itself is much as one
might imagine. (I am writing this review
without having heard more than 60 seconds of YouTube snippets which
should be sufficient.) It is neither here nor there. Thus listening or not
listening to it doesn’t make much difference. What is the sound of one hand
clapping?
For all the materiality that
Kundalini yoga practice emphasizes, even a snippet of Belinda’s latest music reveals
a sound as disembodied and displaced as any other contemporary recording. As has been the case for many decades, pop
music no longer seems to come from any actual place on earth. Once there was a
Stax sound, or Chess, or Motown, or Megaphone which reflected both the technology
in the studio (RCA’s room size plate reverb in Memphis) and the engineers. The digital
revolution and “flat economies” of recording have erased all spatial
reference. While some projects do
reflect a technical signature (Dr. Dre’s “sound”), in general the conventions
of recording (even field recording!) have produced a generic room tone and
gated community of pure digital silence between perfectly tapered sound waves.
Listeners are at once displaced and reassured by the sterile warmth of contemporary
recordings. The familiar contours of the sound production are everywhere and
nowhere at the same time (especially with ear buds, optimized car stereos or
“we got you surrounded” sound.) Listeners can feel at “home” with the music in
any number of settings be it the grocery store or a transatlantic red third
eye. Presumably the standard digital
displacement beautifully serves Wilder
Shores which like many New Age iterations of “Eastern” religious impulses (including
the perfectly smooth and pure tones of Simrit) seeks to transport listeners
from the attachments of earthly concern to an amorphous space where the self,
the ego, is dutifully lost.
The ego. The “Western” version of “Eastern” bio-psychological
philosophy and Kundalini yoga specifically, conceives the ego as the cover-all
term for all earthly, “toxic” concern. The ego - logical, fear-based, harsh, burdened
with baggage and inconsistent - is opposed to egoless creative, loving, neutral,
intuitive and consistent consciousness.[11] Here is the rub, to what end? What is being
escaped and where are we finding ourselves?
Mark Epstein, MD, a long time
practioneer and writer on psychotherapy with a Buddhist perspective argues(!)
in his latest book (Not Giving Advice,
2017) that ego as identified with emotion has been stigmatized unfortunately. A
misinterpretation of Buddha’s “mindfulness” has led to a demonization of all
emotion. Even the kind of love that arises between two people can be felt as
triggering, an unwanted “obscenity” because it simply is a strong emotion: one which
pulls the individual from the heavens back down to earth. Here is one of Epstein’s case studies:
As I got to know
Claire, I found that she often seemed more comfortable with her meditative
attainments than she did with her own history. She tended to use meditation as
a doorway to an empty and infinite expanse into which she could dissolve. She liked
to go to this place in her imagination and hang out there. It gave her a sense
of peace but also a feeling of sadness. There was a desolate quality to it that
I could feel whenever she spoke of it. For Claire, meditation was an
alternative to everyday reality; it was a place she could go to get away from
things that bothered her.
The richness of
the interpersonal world remained something Claire felt unworthy of despite the
best efforts of her mother and her meditation teacher. Her basic premise,
disguised in her veneration of meditation, was that she was not real. She felt
it in her relationship with me, and it is fair to say it had become an
unconscious pillar of her identity.
This unreality is at the center of
Belinda’s autobiography where she talks at length about feeling a fraud all her
life from being “Blimp-inda” (chubby kid) to being a pop star who didn’t know
how to sing. Not only did she feel like a fraud. She was one. As anyone is whose social functioning defines their self - not only because the public subsumes the private self, but because the public self, unlike in earlier times, cannot be authentic, subsumed as it is unto what the French call Le Machine. That Belinda "feels" or intuits that she has now had her fraudulent self transformed by the science of Kundalini complicates an already confused sense of higher & lower, inner & outer selves. For if a new age pop collection of "elevated" mantras is just another groundless machination of Belinda Inc, the only change is that the very idea of an inner life has been finally vanquished by its valorization. Ironic. Obeying the practice of Kundalini yoga thus both confirms her egolessness and provides a consistent way to identify herself as someone who truly has lost any sense of authentic self. Full of emptiness. Empty of interpersonal
richness. At one with the world. [Perhaps the lack of drama in her marriage (and autobiography) is not some quaint idea of discretion, but perhaps evidence of two people whose lives are more akin to two travelers on a cruise ship than two soulmates hashing through life's ups and downs.]
Like many an American Belinda finds
enlightenment on a junket to India. The former Dotty Danger who branded her
punk self with a garbage bag dress comes full circle (in the sand) years later
at the Ganges where she “realizes” we are all just trash, our inner selves
(egos) are “garbage” to be thrown out. Heartbreakingly, the nullification of
the subject as evidenced in the concentration camps (Adorno) and the star making
machine (and every day exploitation) becomes a dissolution to identify with. What
is truly needed is to recycle and repurpose our bodies our selves.
In a deep irony Carlisle misses as
she affirms her self as truly trash, is that the problem is not with the self
but with a culture that no longer celebrates or provides the satisfactions of its
citzens’ desires and will. America has not been of the people or for the people
for a long time, certainly not since the advent of the military industrial complex.
Our society uses and discards its people, as Belinda rightly felt in her pop
days. “America eats its young” (George Clinton). But daily struggle is not to dismiss the
self, but to reassert it. To whatever degree Carlisle attempts to make Kundalini
mantras her own, we might applaud her intuitive desire to “live your life” as a
weak, unconscious attempt to affirm her individuality. The irony at play in an earlier footnote can
be seen in the pull quote by Belinda on Simit’s home page.
“The first time I saw her live I
thought – wow she’s kind of punk rock. I
don’t know why I thought that, but that’s the element that drew me to exploring
her music. Her sense of melody, her
energy, and her musicality set her apart from the rest.”
The individuality of Simit, what “sets
her apart”, is "punk." But Belinda does
not make the effort to understand this. This lack of critical retrospection
might explain why there is not more contradiction and conscious irony in the
Kundalini movement in general. While the ability to hold opposing ideas together at the same time is indeed a laudable capacity, the traditional thought was that this was done through understanding dialectics not turning a blind eye as to "why I thought that."
Homogeneity, programmatic inherently practice has its price. While much can be said about the loss of discipline (see the letters between John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar), the modern world ultimately finds whatever authenticity it can not by following rules, marketplaces or intuitions. The true Modern makes their own rules.
Insofar as Belinda never felt special or unique or worthy, seeing herself as garbage to be discarded (as she was and she allowed/encouraged her self to be treated within the industry), she finds a perverse sense of oneness with her fate by subsuming her creativity within a nascent tradition apotheosizing the eradication of the ego. On this recording Belinda undoubtedly finally comes home – nowhere. The hodge-podge (pastiche) of “world music” is inherently a loss of specificity and history. And rather than struggling like Benjamin or Williams against the dissolution of self within modern culture, Belinda and others have sought to make peace with their predatory environs by detaching from anger, frustration and outrage over say the burning of wheat. Such emotions (along with potentially inspirational emotions rallied by the music of George Clinton or “To Pimp a Butterfly”) only bring you back into a post-Apocalyptic world which punk had already realized was unredeemable.
Homogeneity, programmatic inherently practice has its price. While much can be said about the loss of discipline (see the letters between John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar), the modern world ultimately finds whatever authenticity it can not by following rules, marketplaces or intuitions. The true Modern makes their own rules.
Insofar as Belinda never felt special or unique or worthy, seeing herself as garbage to be discarded (as she was and she allowed/encouraged her self to be treated within the industry), she finds a perverse sense of oneness with her fate by subsuming her creativity within a nascent tradition apotheosizing the eradication of the ego. On this recording Belinda undoubtedly finally comes home – nowhere. The hodge-podge (pastiche) of “world music” is inherently a loss of specificity and history. And rather than struggling like Benjamin or Williams against the dissolution of self within modern culture, Belinda and others have sought to make peace with their predatory environs by detaching from anger, frustration and outrage over say the burning of wheat. Such emotions (along with potentially inspirational emotions rallied by the music of George Clinton or “To Pimp a Butterfly”) only bring you back into a post-Apocalyptic world which punk had already realized was unredeemable.
[The 1960s were] the
last burst of the human being before he (sic)was extinguished.
Andre
Gregory, My Dinner with Andre (1981)
Such “Eastern” (now “Western”)
detachment is seen again in Epstein’s case of Claire:
Emotions still
have a bad name in many Buddhist circles. When I was learning meditation, the
emotions I was taught about most often were the obstacles, or hindrances, to
meditative stability that are known to all those who try to quiet their minds.
These hindrances are usually listed as anger, lust, worry, doubt, and fatigue,
although “fatigue” is given the more arcane name of “sloth and torpor.” Who is
it that is angry? Who is it that lusts? the Buddhist teacher wants to know.
Behind each of these feelings is a sense of an all-important “me”—a person,
striving to exert control, at the center of a mostly uncooperative universe.
This way of working with the emotions, while incredibly useful at certain points,
tends to leapfrog over the important and meaningful personal content bound up
with such discomfort. Claire’s therapy is a good example of this. She wanted to
avoid her uncomfortable feelings by whatever means possible, but this left her
feeling unreal.
Emotional content
needs a welcoming attitude; otherwise it will remain undigested, waiting to
jump out at inopportune times. There is a tendency among Buddhist
practitioners, and even among many Buddhist teachers, to lump all feelings
together and to see the spiritual path as one in which “toxic” aspects of the
self, like the emotions, are “cleansed” through practice. Through the eradication
of such “defilements,” it is assumed, a state of quiescence can be reached, a
state of calm defined by the absence of emotional disturbances. Claire’s view
was very close to this one. It is reminiscent, in the language used to describe
it, of the dynamics of toilet training associated with the Freudian anal stage,
where the cleansing of one’s waste in the service of order and control is also
emphasized. This way of practicing leads to a kind of paralysis, however.
Rather than opening up the underlying flow of feelings that marks our
connection to this world and makes us human, there is only retreat and routine.
In the guise of openness, emotions are shut down. Feelings are pushed away. A
kind of joylessness masquerades as equanimity.
My guess is that Wilder Shores will be a rather joyless
(but evocative) affair. (One of the great pioneering East/West bands was John McLaughlin’s
Shakti. The opening piece on Live at Montreux (1976) is called “Joy.” Recorded live with all the artifacts and
specificity that a live recording offers, this piece is flat out mind-blowing. Much could be said here about internalizing a
different culture at an extremely high level – suffice to say it is on YouTube.)
True otherness has disappeared with
Belinda because such depends upon a strong sense of self or ego. If the “East”
has a tradition of selfless oneness, the “West” has been dialectical. Carlsile’s
synthetic homogeneity prevails because actual mixing of historical reality creates
disharmony, uncertainness, doubt and anxiety … psychological states which used
to be lauded as “spurs” (as in punk for instance). At the very least alienation from God, Nature
or Society was considered part and parcel of the all-too-human “Western” struggle
to hold Gods and people in conscious dialectical dichotomy.[12]
Like other albums such as Live Your Life Be Free and Real, Wilder Shores is so insanely
mistitled as to approach unconscious profundity. The shores of Kundalini as advertised are not
wild at all. Yet for the right listener,
its saccharine waves of undulating electronics can with mindfulness present something
wild … and perhaps by deeply mediating on the superficiality of this product initiates
can begin to answer a question once poised as “is it schizophrenia or
kundalini?” A question perhaps better
generalized as “what is the difference between insanity and sanity?” The sane
still ask this question; they don’t package answers.
So put down that Beethoven
bagatelle because Belinda’s album at this point in history has more for the
listener to mediate upon than any product from “high culture.” This is not some snarky inversion of values,
but a fact: the trauma (whatever it might be – cannibalism, nihilism, factory
food, incest, meaningless sacrifice) is of such unapproachable consequence that
for thousands of people, they need to believe in a practice promising a final
solution to distance them from their all-too-real pain. Belinda! Belinda! Please
get up!
I remember when people used to
stand up for what they believed in, rather than sitting down for nothingness. I
remember when people used to sit down for integration not dissolution. Wilder Shores evidences the loss of our
culture’s foundation built upon Greek tragedy (Simrit’s real life ironically recalls
Greek tragedy). Wilder Shores is not
even the wages of sin. The practice and
recordings advertise a way to dissipate, detach from emotion, and see if Heaven
can’t be a place on earth. By
considering such “reaction formulations” as evidence of traumas clearly beyond
articulation (within the subjective interiority of intuition) the attentive
listener might be able to hear underneath all the polish and predictability
(remember I am reviewing an “album” I have not heard) a profound unutterable suffering,
the greatest suffering in fact: the suffering that is unable to feel that it is
suffering. As Paul writes in Corinthians, it is only through suffering one
knows God’s mercy. To not connect to and affirm one’s suffering, to “overcome
it” (Buddha’s great mistaken goal) is to alienate one’s all-too-human self from
God, from the truly Other. Carlisle’s “religious” album is in fact deeply
profane, just as her earlier recordings profoundly denied her punk roots. For a
heretic, she goes down all too easily.
As Nietzsche wrote in his lifelong resistance
to the dangers of nihilism “Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful
people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow
to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms.” (Gay Science,
1882) One wishes Belinda had suffered
more. Nietzsche (who wrote surprisingly much about Buddhism, perhaps because of
his mentor Schopenhauer) offered a
different kind of tension than the one offered by the Kundalini yoga movement: a
tension which can be heard in early LA punk, Greek tragedies and certain
esoteric religions wherein suffering is embraced not to be overcome, not to be let
go of, nor to detach from, but to be amplified like some of the best tracks on
“Return to the Valley of the Go-Gos” (the “valley” being a specific set of bio-psychological
and philosophic concerns for those who know LA) . The alternative to the “alternative” is to
argue that “Earth is a place on Earth.” Do you know what that’s like?
And insofar as listening to Belinda
can bring forth such questions and thoughts, God Bless her. Like all great
works of art (aren’t they all great), the opportunity to hear our own denial of
our great suffering is perhaps of far greater use than any advertisements for
its relief. Not only is there no poetry after Auschwitz (Adorno) or the Native
American genocides, there is no pop music. True poems of the earth offer no
relief only brief respites, the kind one might find with a lover perhaps, bittersweet
glimpses of eternity embodied in the flesh which must pass into dust, which
Belinda has never confessed to experiencing in her music or her book. When I
listen to this CD which I pre-ordered on Amazon, I hope I will be inspired to
go out into the world and have my heart broken once again.
99 Hooker, Ancram, NY, September 27th,2017
on the eve of Wilder Shores release. 99
has been practicing Kundalini yoga for 9 months at this point.
[1] We Got the Neutron Bomb, The Untold Story of
LA Punk gives a better sense of things as does Jane Weidlin in general, see
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/01/jane-wiedlin-go-gos-la-punk-scene-los-angeles.
[2]
Paraphrase.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMr3X_60h_Q
[4]
Descartes, the great dualist philosopher who broke apart the body and mind
wrote that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul.
[5] Dr.
Trilochan Singh, “a prominent Sikh scholar and historian.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3HO
[6]
What Eliot actually said upon being asked why he chose Christianity instead of Buddhism,
“Christianity was more culturally consistent” which is not unlike the Dali
Llama’s admonition to Westerners about being wary of adopting foreign
practices.
[7]
The debate over whether psychology is more science or art is long standing.
Here is a good article about this debate: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evil-deeds/201001/redefining-reality-psychology-science-and-solipsism
[8] ““First
of all, I’m such a fan of Simrit. The
first time I saw her live I thought – wow she’s kind of punk rock. I don’t know why I thought that, but that’s
the element that drew me to exploring her music. Her sense of melody, her energy, and her
musicality set her apart from the rest.”
http://simritkaurmusic.com/about-simrit-kaur/
[9] “At
the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent
on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent
that it is not.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle,#17 (1967)
[10] https://www.banquetrecords.com/belinda-carlisle/wilder-shores/EDSL0004
[11] https://www.3ho.org/kundalini-yoga/meditation/featured-meditations/voice-ego-vs-your-intuition-meditation-build
[12] “In
form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in
apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.” Shakespeare,
Hamlet.
