My encounter with these non-ordinary songs
The act of singing, what is it, and where can it take us?
Before giving some possible answers to that question, let me first talk about what this act is not, and in which ways the act of singing these non ordinary songs radically inverses our habitual perspectives – perspectives here meaning ways of perceiving the whole world, including ourselves. These habitual perspectives are so very ‚real‘ for us that we do not even know how to put them into question, how to see them for what they are: they are perspectives of perception, not ultimate realities.
Of what kind are these perspectives in which many human beings find themselves locked up for the most part of their lives, if it‘s not for the totality of their lives?
I would like to call them the perspectives of introjectionism, of projectionism and of reductionism – and I‘ll say some more now about what that might mean.[1] It is as if one would live, without even knowing why this is so, in two separated worlds: the ‚outer‘ world of measurable material objects, confining to laws of classical physics, and the ‚inner‘ world of the ‚psyche‘ in which all other phenomena are being situated, phenomena who do not find their place in a world reduced to outer objects – we are projecting those phenomena inside an inner world, a world somehow locked up within ourselves.
In a very precise sense, we could speak of phenomena, of situations, of atmospheres as originally subjective experiences. These subjective experiences, by calling them ‚emotions‘, ‚inner states‘, ‚psychic phenomena‘, we introject them inside us. Consequently, their subjectivity becomes minorised, sentimentalised, and put under suspicion.
According to these perspectives of introjectionism, projectionism and reductionism, one finds oneself in an outer world that is void of all these qualities of subjectivity, in a world of a radically different substance than that of the inner world. As a consequence, the things of the outer world appear to us to be dead, they cannot sense anything.[2] They may be animated by our ‚projections‘, but they do not have any interiority, nor do they have any ‚psyche‘. In itself, beyond that which we are projecting into it, such a world has no subjectivity, no interiority, no depth, no life of its own, no soul.
To see it otherwise is considered‚ magical thinking‘.[3]
All that has been said up to this point is important in order to put this cleaved vision of the world and of ourselves into question, and to begin to see the consequences of such a perspective.
I won‘t be able to analyse here in detail how such a perspective reflects a limited understanding of science, or how one can actually know anything through the methods of science – or how such methods actually reflect a limited comprehension of the question how on can know anything at all. And I won‘t say much about how it is a misunderstanding of the results of scientific experimentations to see them as ‚objective‘ realities.
Much rather, I‘ll speak of the effects of such a cleaved perspective on ourselves and on the world we inhabit.
The scientistic reductionism‘s superstition leaves us isolated, without any true connection with our proper world, without even any possibility of getting in touch, as all that we could touch is never anything but our projections.
And therefore, the world could never really be full of life, full of psyche, full of soul – even if it may sometimes seem us to be otherwise, this again is nothing but my own projection. Never could the world really return my glance, or be a vis-à-vis that would relieve my isolation. Never could I really trust my experience as indicating a truth and a beauty beyond myself, because all phenomena of perception would be nothing but illusory perceptions of the idea that one has of a brain.[4]
When the world is dead, being killed by my view, by my habits, by my conditionings, I find myself locked up in the narrow prison of ego-consciousness, confined to my inner world. In this way, all subjectivity becomes literally mine, and all experience is appropriated by the ego.[5]
What does that actually mean?
What does it mean for my experience of singing these non ordinary songs?
To call God, to let oneself be called by God, to sing God, to let oneself be sung by God, to play God, to let oneself be played by God: all this becomes impossible, according to the ego‘s perspective. The ego does not know how to serve, how to be of any help for, how to give itself to, something more beautiful, more noble, more true, more alive, than the ego itself. Except for its personal experiences, nothing has any reality. Ego thus gravitates around the question: „What does this workshop, this performance, this experience, this song – what do I get out of this?“ In this way, all experience remains confined within ego‘s little bubble and its obsession of personal growth.
Maud sometimes talks about the necessity to sense the song‘s effects on us – recipients of life‘s forces in action. Does the way in which we support and nourish the song (or in which we fail to do so) does us good or does us bad? How do I feel after having sung them? Here, the interest in my own experience is not an egoistic obsession, but the subjective sense becomes a sort of compass, indicating the action‘s quality. But what does quality mean here? We have to experience, otherwise we cannot evaluate the quality of a song, or an action, or of anything at all. Quality is not about external criteria. Having worked in such a way, I feel contentment, and I feel clean.
Even the idea of really doing us good or bad through a song – from the ego‘s perspective, this is inconceivable. It is equally inconceivable that we could really call someone or something that would be more real than the ego by the means of a song.
Luigi Pirandello talks about this very perturbation of our sense of what is ‚real‘ that may happen through art when he lets his six characters search for an author who could write the play in which they appear. In order to convince him of the necessity to give a written artistic form to his reality as a character, the character of the father asks the director to „step out of this game of art“ that he is accustomed to playing on this stage with his actors, and to „seriously reconsider the question: who are you?“ The character of the father thus addresses, in the question who are you, the director‘s conscience. And the director, astonished as well as irritated, turns away from the father and from the claims of this other reality expressing itself through the latter, and in order to reassure himself of his own worldly, social and habitual reality, the director tells his actors: „Well if this doesn‘t take some nerve! Someone who is trying to pass himself off as a character comes and asks me who I am!“[6]
From the ego‘s perspective, claims of another level of reality, such as expressed here by the character, seem to be an unacceptable pretence. And thus the ego runs off into denial, ridiculising this other reality, to be able to exist itself.
However, the character of the father does not let himself be ridiculed in this way, but insists, with all his dignity: „A character, sir, can always ask a man who he is, because a character truly has a life of his own, marked by his own characteristics, because of which he is always ‚someone‘. On the other hand, a man – I‘m not saying you at this moment – a man in general, can be ‚nobody‘.“ Unable to even just hear the character‘s reasoning, the director takes the argument back to the ego‘s level and to its habitual reference points. „OK. But you are asking me, the director, the head man! Do you understand?“ But in so doing, the director could never refute the truth expressed by the character of the father.
The character of the father is not too impressed by that discourse of the director, but insists on the fact that the play which those characters have come to accomplish is more real and more true than the director‘s situation of being isolated in his own inconstant ego. „But there is no doubt about it, sir. […] I thought you had understood this from the very beginning.“ The director still cannot imagine this reversal of perspective. „More real than me?“ he asks once again.
This dialogue between a so-called ‚imaginary‘ character without any power nor importance in the so-called ‚real‘ world, and a human being, so-called ‚real‘ and therefore powerful and important, reflects perfectly the distortion of the egoistic vision: The ego is incapable of seeing the Other – the character, the angel, the daïmon,[7] the infinite, Life, God – as reality in itself.
The character of the father talks about the „miracle of reality that is born, evoked, attracted and formed by the stage itself“, which emerges and „has more right to live here“ than us, the actors, because this reality is so much truer than us being cluttered by an ego. Between this view informed by miracle, and the pseudo-reality of ego, the „verosimiglianza“[8] as Pirandello calls it, there exists a total gap. And it‘s exactly there where the act of singing can take us: to the edge of this gap, as well as beyond.
Note that the question here is not so much to know whether what one is calling through the songs is actually, literally, real or not. It‘s not a question of belief, of wanting to believe, of dogmatism, of goodwill. Rather, it is a question that hinges solely on our lived experience:
Once I am entering into a vaster sense of reality, opening up to a new perspective, then what happens to my habitual little me?
The archetypal psychologist James Hillman, student of Carl Gustav Jung, points out: „The world and the Gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls. A world view that perceives a dead world or declares the Gods to be symbolic projections derives from a perceiving subject [...] who has lost his imagine del cuor.“[9]
As soon as this reality manifests – as a presence, a necessity other than a personal interest – often we take flight. The ego feels that it is in danger and seeks to escape – which may take various forms: all sorts of inertness, of agitation, but also of goodwill... Instead of feeling concerned by the living necessities of the songs themselves, and of doing whatever one can to respond to them, a person‘s effort (which can be immense) remains paralysed within the ego‘s perspective, by the obsession of ‚personal growth‘, of ‚how am I doing‘.
Here, the question actually is not whether ‚I feel like it‘ or ‚I don‘t feel like it‘, whether ‚I‘m doing great‘ or ‚I‘m doing terrible‘. It is not about wanting to please Maud or being someone in the eyes of others. The question is not one of cultivating a spirit of scholarly competition, or of grandstand performance, or of ‚psychotherapy‘ – except if we return to the original sense of the term, which is to „to serve soul, not to treat it“.[10]
Once we inverse the perspective that habitually we take to be real, what happens then? And how does this reversal even come about?
We can play on different perspectives. Instead of seeing, as we habitually do, the whole of our experience as dead ‚projections‘ of ego, we could, for instance, play with a reversal of perspective: it is not Life, or God, who is ‚our projection‘, but it is us who are the projections of Life. Rather than seeing the reflections of our ideas in the world, we could play that it‘s us who are the reflections of some ‚objective‘ ideas. This perspective is giving all her weight, all her density, to God, to Life, to the songs, rather than to my little ego – and at the same time its appropriation is being renounced.
The Singing-Calling springs and vanishes, it appears and disappears, it is done and undone – it is completely free, and equally absolutely necessary. God is calling us. We are calling God. We are singing God. God is singing us. God is playing us. We are playing God. Buddhism calls these ways of playing the experience and understanding of the emptiness of all things. It is through playing in these ways that our realities manifest themselves: if we forget to play, we find ourselves enclosed in a flat, solid, tasteless world: enclosed in a unidimensional real-ness, separated from God, without any life. This is why the act of playing is so serious. Playing helps God, helps us, helps the world, helps Life, to exist.[11] Life, we ourselves, and the whole of our phenomenal world, even God – all of it emerges interdependently through playing thus.
God is doing us. We are doing God. We are entering in God‘s doings. We cannot do otherwise. All this becomes genuinely possible for us – it becomes a reality that is calling us, that is speaking to us, that is inviting us in ever more. A reality that comes alive more and more, through our very acts. If I allow myself to be touched by this necessity beyond ego, such as it expresses itself through the songs, I do not even quite understand how it is even possible that another, in that same situation, on his part could not be touched; so evident is the reality of the song‘s calling. From this perspective, it is about following an imperative. What matters is the palpable life of the songs themselves. They come from so far away that we do not even know neither how nor why they are touching us, traversing us. As much as they transform ourselves, they change the entire world of our lived experience.
Complementarily, the songs, on their own, do not have any isolated power, they are no detached idols by any means. The actual question is how to treat them, how to approach them, how to receive them, how to respect them, how to embody them, how to become the spot of their incarnation. In order for this to happen, a process of elaboration is needed – bringing the instrument that are these songs, as well as ourselves who are their vehicles, towards a perfection. It is in the encounter of these two, the songs and ourselves, it is in the act of singing, that the mystery of transformation is being played out. Without such, there is no fecundity, there is no Life.
Eva Kreikenbaum
[1] See the work of the contemporary German philosopher Hermann Schmitz.
[2] Alphonse de Lamartine, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, Livre III, Harmonie II, cf. https://sites.google.com/site/texteschoisis/home/alphonse-de-lamartine
[3] James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, Putnam 2014.
„[68] For centuries we have identified interiority with reflexive experience. Of course, things are dead, said the old psychology, because they do not „experience“ (feelings, memories, intentions). They may be animated by our projections, but to imagine they are projecting upon us and each other their ideas and demons, to regard them as storing memories or presenting their feeling characters in their sensate qualities – this is magical thinking. Because things do not experience, they have no subjectivity, no interiority, no depth. Depth psychology could go only to the intra- and interpersonal in search of the interiority of soul. Not only does this view kill things by viewing them as dead; it imprisons us in that tight little cell of ego.“
[4] James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, Putnam 2014.
„[78] A world without soul offers no intimacy. Things are left out in the cold, each object by definition cast away even before it is manufactured, lifeless litter and junk, taking its value wholly from my consumptive desire to have and to hold, wholly dependent on the subject to breathe it into life with personal desire. When particulars have no essential virtue, then my own virtue as a particular depends wholly and only on my subjectivity or on your desire for me, or fear of me: I must be desirable, attractive, a sex object, or win importance and power. For without these investments in my particular person, coming either from your subjectivity or my own, I too am but a dead thing among dead things, Potentially forever lonely. If particulars – whether images, things, or the events of the day – are to afford significance, the burden has been on the subject to maintain libidinal cathexis, „to relate“, so that depersonalisation and derealisation do not occur. It has been up to us to keep the world aglow. Yet these syndromes, depersonalisation and derealisation, are latent in the theory of the external world as soulless. Of course I am lonely, unrelated, and my existence thrown away […] [79] When the world is dead, ego psychology is inevitable, for the patient must find ways to connect the psyche of dream and feeling to the dead world so as to reanimate it. What stress, what effort it takes to live in a cemetery; what terrible need for will power. So of course I fall prey to ideologies and cults that relieve the burden of this subjectivity. Of course I am in desperate narcissic need, not because I have been neglected or still neglect my inmost subjectivity, but because the world without soul can never offer intimacy, never return my glance, never look at me with appeal, with gratitude, nor relieve the essential isolation of my subjectivity. But at that moment when each thing, each event presents itself again as a psychic reality […] then I am held in an enduring intimate conversation with matter. […] Then Eros descends from being a universal principle, an abstraction of desire, into the actual erotics of sensuous qualities in things: materials, shapes, motions, rhythms.“
[5] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92. „[2] Just as modern science and metaphysics have banned the subjectivity of souls from the outer world of material events, psychology has denied the autonomy and diversity of souls to the inner world of psychological events. […] All my subjectivity and all my interiority must literally be mine, in ownership of my conscious ego-personality.“
[6] Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921.
„[55] I would like […] to invite you to step out of this game [looking at the leading lady as if to anticipate her] of art! of art! which you are accustomed to playing here with your actors and seriously reconsider the question: who are you?“
[7]See James Hillman, Healing Fiction, Putnam 1983: „ [55] Just to remind us what a radical, shattering move – theological, epistemological, ontological – Jung‘s personifying was, let me merely pronounce the usual judgement upon daimons that is part of our Western religious psychology. Whether Eastern Church or Roman, whether Old Testament or New, whether Protestant or Catholic – daimons are no good things. They are part of the world of satan, of chaos, of temptation. They have been written against by major Christian theologians down through the centuries, associated with the cult of serpent worship in the midst of Christian Europe, and they are, according to the authority of St Matthew‘s Gospel the source of possession, sickness, and magic. Who indeed are those figures that they should be so menacing? If we look into the world before and parallel with the rise of Christianity – first to Homer, then to Plato and the dramatists, then to Plutarch, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and then to the Renaissance – the daimones were figures of the middle realm, neither quite transcendent Gods nor quite physical humans, and there were many sorts of them, beneficial, terrifying, message-bringer, mediators, voices of guidance and caution (as Socrates‘ Daimon and as Diotima). Even Eros was a daimon. [56] But the dogmatic crystallisation of our religious culture demonised the daimons. As a fundamental component of polytheistic paganism, they had to be negated and denied by Christian theology which projected its repression upon the daimons, calling them the forces of denial and negation. Thus Jung‘s move which turned directly to the images and figures of the middle realm was a heretical, demonic move. His move into imagination, which had been prejudged in our religious language as demonic and in our clinical language as multiple personality or as schizophrenia. Yet, this radical activation of imagination was Jung‘s method of Know Thyself.“
See also James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92: „[175] Our distinction between psyche and human has several important consequences. If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists independently of human beings, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon‘s; not my faith that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul.“
[8] « La vita, per tutte le sfacciate assurdità, piccole e grandi, di cui beatamente è piena, ha l’inestimabile privilegio di poter fare a meno di quella stupidissima verosimiglianza, a cui l’arte crede suo dovere obbedire. Le assurdità della vita non hanno bisogno di parer verosimili, perché sono vere. All’opposto di quelle dell’arte che, per parer vere, hanno bisogno d’esser verosimili. E allora, verosimili, non sono più assurdità. Un caso della vita può essere assurdo; un’opera d’arte, se è opera d’arte, no » […]. (Luigi Pirandello, « Avvertenza agli scrupoli della fantasia», postfazione a « Il fu Mattia Pascal », 1921 - Luigi Pirandello, « Avertissement aux scrupules de la fantaisie», postface à « Il fu Mattia Pascal », 1921).
[9]James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92, [16].
[10] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975/92. „[74] Let us recall that psychotherapy, in accordance with the root meaning of the word „psyche“ and „therapy“ means to serve soul, not to treat it.“
[11] See Henri Corbin, Alone with the Alone. Creative Mysticism in the Sufism of Ibn‘Arabi, New Jersey 1969/ 97 [titre originel: L‘Imagination creatrice dans le Soufisme d‘Ibn‘Arabi, 1958]. „[95] He who knows himself knows his Lord. Knowing one‘s self, to know one‘s God; knowing one‘s Lord, to know one‘s self. This Lord is not the impersonal self, nor is it the God of dogmatic definitions, self-subsisting without relation to me, without being experienced by me. He is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me; it is alone with him alone, in this syzygic unity, that it is possible to say Thou. [248] For prayer is not a request of something: it is the expression of a mode of being, a means of existing and of causing to exist, that is, a means of causing the God who reveals Himself to appear, of „seeing“ Him, […] in the form which precisely He reveals by revealing Himself by and to that form. [...] We do not pray to the Divine essence in its hiddenness; each faithful prays to his Lord, the Lord who is in the form of his faith.“