99/1: This is a New Series of Articles

SETMI

Search for ExtraTerrestrial Music Intelligence

 

by

 

Dr. Harvey “Gizmo” Rosenberg
Guildmeister, The Triode Guild
Thermionic Techno-Shaman

 

 

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve. 

                                              Max Planck

 

 

There is no genuine music experience without ecstasy.

 

                                                         Glenn Gould

 

 

The Master can help you open the door, but only you can walk through

 

                                                                                             Chinese proverb

 

Extraterrestial intelligence is not out there. It is already encoded in our DNA. All that we have to do is figure out how to decode it, and that will require the emergence of the Nth Dimensional mind.

 

                                                       Dr. Gizmo

 

 

 

 

The feature article in April 1999’s Rolling Stone is a story about an Internet millioniare who has dropped out of Cyberspace, and is devoting his life to the search for extraterrestial intelligence (www.thewordistruth.org). Increasingly the music industry, which has traditionally supported revolutionary political ideas, but resisted other cultural waves, is beginning to explore the implication of the revolution in cosmology and quantum physics.

 

Like you, I started to explore the notion of higher forms of musical intelligence a number of years ago and now that the mellenia is about to pop its cherry, it is time for those of us who have the “right stuff” to get down deep on this subject. Why is it so important for us to expand our imagination about the nature of music, mind and evolution? Because we must expand our imagination before we can get beyond the crudity of all audio technology that is limiting our musical expression. Let me make the sequence of music expansion clear: (1) expanded imagination, (2) new technology, (3) new forms of musical expression.

 

1999 is 1899

 

Let’s pretend, because this imaginative leap will help put this adventure in perspective. One hundred years ago we were poised at the next millennia, and there was much excitement. Now let’s check out the amazing world of 1899. There is no electricity. There are no motor cars or airplanes. There is no electronics, little or no  music in our lives, no computers, no hot-rods,  no Playboy Magazine, no television, no rock and roll, no pizza, and while we have heard about motion pictures we haven’t seen them yet. In spite of the dizzying changes all about us, it is very difficult to believe the fantastic stories we hear about the future.

 

Can you imagine the effect on someone living in1899 if we could bring them just thirty years into the future to 1930?

 

I am suggesting that the same type of dynamic is still true, and many of you will find the notion of higher dimension of music intelligence unbelievable. If I would have predicted in 1899 that very soon you would have all the music you wanted in your home, or on the street, or in your car, and would have described a rock concert, you would have looked at me like I was crazy, and you would be right.

 

Yet, we are on the verge of  exactly the same type of revolutionary shift in human culture, and it is not about technology, but about the way our mind in our brain organizes itself. These revolutionary shifts in mind have occurred many times during its current 500,000 year old form, yet we seem oblivious to them.

 

Though these continuous reorganizations of mind are easy to detect there is no denying that, like our friends in 1899, it is hard for us to imagine  an unfamiliar world in the future.  Not only is the human mind, for the first time,  on the verge of knowing higher dimensions of reality, it is on the verge of expressing higher dimensions of music reality, and music will be the primary mutagenic of this new mind expansion.

 

Just think of our entire music and music/audio technology culture as being in 1899. We wrongfully think we are at a very high level of development, but we are not. We are impressed by the enormous variety of music that is available. We have expanding choices of how we experience music in our headphones, home or car. We walk into recording studios and we are impressed by all the knobs, buttons and gizmos. We go to rock concerts and are impressed by the impact of the sound. Soon it will be apparent that all of these are still artifacts of a “horse and buggy” music/audio culture that is already obsolete. Listening to the finest state of the art custom sound system, like those featured in Positive Feedback, or on the Triode Guild web site, and you are still listening to a whined-up Victrola. We are on the Verge!

 

For this new music paradigm to emerge a new music mind must emerge first; a mind capable of imagining higher dimension of music intelligence. This is already happening, and again, like our friends in 1899, if they would have looked harder they would have discovered the auto, electricity, and electronics were very pregnant ideas, and would soon be born into their world. Meaning? The entire way that music is recorded and reproduced in our home is about to go through a revolutionary shift, and I don’t mean higher sampling rates.

 

 

DON’T MIND ME

 

Human self-consciousness, which requires language and thought, is a generic term we use for our mind’s capacity to know itself and reality. Self-consciousness has been evolving for about 25,000 years, which is a very new experience for our bipedal DNA which is about four million years old. The appearance of mind and language is the most fundamental mystery of existence, and we still don’t have a clue about how this happened in an instant of evolutionary time. It is also a scientific embarrassment that we understand so little how the mind, a complete abstract/dematerial energy, has mutated over its life, yet it does continuously.  The mind of today is very different than the mind that spoke with God in Moses’s desert. Our mind become infected with mathematics only  eight hundred years ago, yet we were able to build the Pyramids. Have you forgotten that America became electrified in the 1930s, only seventy years ago?

 

Anyone who studies the development of mind is keenly aware that they are studying not an elegant, coherent or consistent design but more a Rube Goldberg, a cognitive mish/mash patch work quilt of conflicting cognitive centers. We all know that we know so very little about mind, but we can be sure of this, just by looking around: the enigmas, paradoxes and conflicts inherent in the structure of mind is manifest in all human activities, especially in the music/audio business...only more so.

 

As we enter the next millennia we are hearing predictions about what the future holds, yet there little or no rumination on how our mind will evolve. It is easy to talk about the material world. It is very difficult to describe the evolution of trees while you living up one in the forest.

 

 

BREAKOUT

 

To this thermionic techno-shaman, the major breakout of the next century is very predictable: we will begin to experience beyond our normal four dimensional reality and finally sense what Einstein predicted almost one hundred years ago....reality is far more complex than we experience with our feeble “modern model” of reality. Those of you who are following the frontiers of quantum physics and astronomy know what I am talking about. One of the best books on this subjects is HYPERSPACE by Michio Kaku, which expands the notions made popular by Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and the writings of Carl Sagan.

 

We are on the verge of a dramatic expansion of mind; an expansion where we will be able for the first time to experience the “more” that we always sensed was there, and have labeled with many glorious names, from Allah to Wanantanka.

 

As you know my brain has been damaged many times, so I became fascinated with the evolution of the brain and long ago started to ask the most basic question....” I too asked how did the brain start to think about 25,000 years ago?. This is such a puzzling and basic question that in spite of heavy duty intellectual/professor types exploring this question...no one has a clue. Will it ever be possible for us to understand, using our modern brain, the origins of consciousness?

 

I remember these questions asked by one of the scientists working on SETI: How can we expect to understand alien intelligence when we can’t even understand our own? How can we expect to communicate with more advanced life forms when we can’t communicate with the Chinese people? And I ask, “How can we ever expect to communicate effectively with higher intelligence, when we can’t communicate to the higher intelligence all around us...our wives, or girlfriends, or our pet dogs?

 

We know how to build a supercomputer, but we don’t know how we developed thought. I should point out that one of the major philosophical dilemmas of the 18th century was this question...”Can man ever know the mind of God”, or, put another way,  “Can the dematerial mind ever grasp the infinitely dematerial mind ?” (Think of that question seriously on the potty)  Freud asked this same question another way, “What do women really want?”.

 

We do know that the male and female brain works very differently ( see Brain Sex by Moir) because they are constructed differently, and that the way the brain organizes itself has changed over time. Yes, trees do talk. Yes, stone idols do talk. And yes, we can hear voices in the wind. 

 

In the same way astronomists only know about 10%, or less, of the reality of the universe, scientist probably only know about 10%, or less  of how the brain works. How does the brain store, memorize, organize and reorganize dematerial forms of meaning....like music? How does a MEME jump from brain to brain and infect millions of minds? Why are humans ready to sacrifice their life for a dematerial form for which there can never be any proof of existence...like God? Why does a sound (an insult) threaten our lives and illicit a lethal response?

 

We also know that we humans were making music long before we created thought or used language, by about 20,000 years. This priority of music over thought is discussed very little. This obvious continuum between music consciousness and the creation of mind seems to be a taboo subject.

 

We can be sure of the priority of music consciousness because year Neanderthal/Stone Age flutes were discovered (www.webstar.sk.ca/greenwich/OG-EZ.HTM) that have diatonic scales, which according to their dating are about twenty years older than the appearance of thought/language.  How do we know that pre-thought man was creating symbolic rhythmic sounds. Anthropologist can measure their intervals. Our genius for organizing harmonics into meaningful patterns preceding our genius for thought....or is it all the same? This shouldn’t surprise any of us because, what is language other than rhythmic patterns of symbolic sounds, which means we had the capacity to create rhythmic symbolic sounds before we created thought and language because you can’t have one without the other. The meaning of sound is that it has meaning because our survival depended on our brain’s ability to ascribe meaning to harmonics. (Don’t even consider the origins of the abstract)

 

 

THE TWANG BEFORE THE BIG BANG©

 

You are all aware of The Big Bang; the notion that the universe started with a big explosive harmonic. This is the central religous theorem of cosmology and four dimensional quantum physics, and it is all wrong, and I am the first to name it. The Big Bang was not the primal moment of creation. Something happened before it, and it was a Twang.

 

I am not the first to hear the Twang Before the Big Bang©. Jimmy Hendrix who got to the Garden of Eden before Adam heard it too. I am only the first to name it. Those of you who have the newly evolved Nth Dimensional mind have this primal sound in you, in the same way cosmologists have the secondary harmonic, The Big Bang, in them. (The Big Bang is a meme, as is the Twang)  It shouldn’t surprise you that all theories of creation start with a very big sound. This is an archetype of mind that knows meaningful sound created meaning. Om!

 

I don’t know why I was chosen to name the primal cosmological harmonic foreplay, and I don’t bother to ask anymore. Perhaps it is because I am a thermionic techno-shaman. Perhaps it is because many years ago I made the commitment to organize the journey  to the Nth Dimension of Music HyperSpace©. Perhaps it is because I had a bat ear transplant almost two decades ago.

 

Let me explain why the BIG BANG was not the primal sound. The Big Bang is an intellectual construction, a metaphor of a scientific four dimensional mind; a meme of the old paradigm. A couple of obvious points: (1) the true reality of the universe is not four dimensions but N dimensions and asserting that the creation of the universe can be known with a feeble four dimensional mind is arrogant, Yet, paradoxically there is great scientific humility about scientist’s general weak understanding of the nature of universe’s reality . Astronomers now admit just how little they know. But let’s face it. Scientists have to earn their keep, and their keep is to come up with really cool ideas about unknowable subjects, which is exactly what priests did in the Court of Zoroaster thousands of years ago (2) Cosmologists, and quantum physicists know squat about really cool sounds because they are all a bunch of geeks, propeller heads, nerds and dweebs who listen to Lawrence Welk on Circuit City boom boxes. How would any of these guys know the difference between a twang and a bang if they heard it? The problem with all of these scientists is that they are locked in their little orthodox models of music/mind, and there can be no advancement across the broad field of cosmology until these dudes learn how to get way deeper down with their bad selves. Shall I say this another way?: Music is now (because mind mandated it) the primary mutagenic of mind. Music created mind. Mind then created exactly the type of music it needed to advance its mutation. Music is the best tool for enhancing the sensitivity of neural synapses so that their capacity to generate “imagination” is expanded, which is exactly what is missing in the scientific community. Imagination always creates the future. Imagination is The Twang Before The Big Bang. Mind  had to exist before creation. It just took its time getting into our brain.

 

Or let me put it another way. The scientific mind will not be able to grasp higher dimensions of reality because it can’t tune into the full range of harmonics of the universe. Cosmology and quantum physics, like all good orthodox religions  are brilliantly structured, internally consistent, powerful editors, that desperately hopes it has some sticky relationship to reality. Science will not be able embrace the complexity of the universe until it is able to get much further down into its funky harmonic intelligence; the intelligence that was proto-thought, the mind that knew before the mind became an editor, the mind that is creating its own mutation to higher level of perception.

 

 

BLASTING THE LID OFF OF THE SCI-FI CHANNEL

 

Now let me blast the lid off the Sci-Fi Channel. There are no aliens out there, and the notion of traveling millions of light years to finally make contact with ExtraTerrestrial is also absurd: all notions of four dimensional minds.

 

Higher forms of intelligence, ExtraTerrestrial, aliens and UFOs are not out there, they are “in here”. Higher forms of intelligence are all around us, or, I should say,  present and undetected because we are using the wrong mind to experience it. When the Nth Dimension mind emerges we will make immediate contact with higher forms of intelligence because it already exists at the harmonic level in our mind.

 

Those depressing looking aliens; those advanced forms of intelligence with bad breath wearing silver Lurex Donna Karan jump suits who are desperate for barbecue and regularly appear on the Sci-Fi Channel are silly.

 

Higher forms of intelligent life exists, They are, it is,  just like mind, a dematerial form of energy, and it is already deeply embedded in the harmonics of the mind, except our hearing is not sensitive enough to hear what it/they are telling us. That is why I have organized SETM™: SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE. This is our best chance for making contact with higher forms of intelligence, and to be successful at that task we must travel to the Nth Dimension of Music HyperSpace on the XH-1, The World’s First High Tech Biomachine Dirigible Astronomic Space Laboratory Recording Studio In The Sky. SETMI is the most natural instinct in everyone and it is a metaphor of music in the process of mutating in imagination.  AND THE JOURNEY HAS BEGUN ON THE TRIODE GUILD WEB SITE. There is no doubt to make contact we need more advanced music technology, not more advanced telescopes, and for that to happen we must first elevate our music consciousness; we must first elevate our imagination.

 

A LESSON FROM MY TANTA ROSEY

 

In the 1960s when my great aunt Rosey died my father and I went to her house and gathered her belongings and by her bed was the family whined-up Victrola. My father told me this tale: In the 1920s when his father finally had enough money to buy this exotic machine and cranked it up for the first time everyone in their tenement building gasped in amazement. My father swore that it sounded like Carouso was actually singing in the room...that’s how real the music sounded coming from that archaic machine. As my father told me that story his face shone with the light of that moment.

 

The reason I mention this story because the same is true today. Even the most sophisticated audio system, and I don’t even mean the store bought equipment, but our hyper-hot-rod edge of the art systems are still only a tiny step away from that whined up Victrola. All forms of “normal” four dimensional audio/music technology is still at an incredibly primitive state of development because it arises out of a paradigm that wants nothing more than having Carouso appear in its living room.

 

Which brings me to the subject of the male-techno-ego, which is an artifact of mind. Men struggle long and hard to create the most advanced technology, and when they are done building their V-16 supercharged nitro-methane powered amplifiers, can we expect them to say: this is incredibly crude? No. Yet we know even with all forms of technology accelerating at an accelerating rate, machines still can’t keep up with imagination. What is the half life of today’s computers? Mind always mutates at a faster rate than machines. At the mutating dance contest of the dematerial and the material the dematerial is always the winner.

 

Our music imagination, our new music consciousness, is far ahead of our music making ability, and the music and audio industry is struggling to keep up and is in quandary on how to respond. Just stop for a moment and consider the quality of music that comes from the average home music system or television. What time is it? In terms of music, for the average person, it is still 2,000 BC, not 2,000 AD. What an exciting opportunity for men of vision.

 

 

LET’S GET IN TOUCH WITH REALITY:

MUSIC AS A MUTAGENIC OF MIND/BODY

 

How intense is humankind’s efforts to alter its mind/body metacontext? How large is the demand for mind expansion in America (both its dark and light side)? I did some research on this subject while I was Chairman of the Addiction Brain Trust and tried to figure out how much Americans were spending on all forms of mind/body altering substances: alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs. The amount of dollars spent was much larger than the Defense Department budget. When you add in other forms of exogenous mind/body altering products like music and audio technology, it appears to me that America’s largest group of consumer products are those that are expressly designed to get us out of “normal mind” and boot us up into an altered state of consciousness. This is nothing new, yet it is one of the best insights into the music explosion all over the world....humans are demanding increasing doses of mind altering stimulation.

 

The archaeological and anthropological record is clear: humans have been using mind altering plants, substances, rituals, and music, from a time long before we could speak and think. Is there some relationship between the extraordinary achievements of Egypt and the fact this culture consumed enormous quantities of cannabis? Why is there such a clear pattern between sucessful ancient civilizations and the use of mind altering plants, not only in daily life, but as an essential ingredient in their religions? The answer is mind know exactly what to do; what to use to advance its mutation, and open the door to higher dimensions of reality.

 

Nothing is a clearer sign of our species genius than our creativity in inventing and discovering WHAT EVER IT TAKES to improve the mutation and evolution of  mind/body, and at the top of that creative impulse is the invention, in this century, of the process of encoding and decoding music. Clearly, today music is the most commonly consumed psychotropic substance. Music is an exogenous nerual transmitter; it is an externalr stimulatent to the brain  Mind knows how to create stumulants to alter its own processes. Music alters and advances the operation of our brain in exactly the same way as any (now illegal) plant alkaloid. This explains why music is so popular. We need to alter our minds so that it gets out of its low level industrial, and highly edited, limited perceptual/sensual metacontext, and is made more aware, more alert, and more capable of experiencing the whole-osity of reality. Or is music just the most commonly consumed pain killer needed for survival in industrial society?

 

INTELLECTUAL COWARDS?

 

Are we still intellectual cowards that we can not yet discuss the most significant perceptual paradigm shift  of the twentieth century; a preliminary step that had to taken on the way to experiencing higher dimension of reality? It began in earnest in the late 1960s synchronistically with the world moving towards a nuclear holocaust. The conjunction in our mind of plant alkaloids and the new tribal primal music (marijuana and rock and roll) is the single most significant shift in mind/body awareness of this century,  From that plant alkaloid/rock and roll mind convergence emerged a sexual, political, culture, scientific, artistic revolution that we still do not yet understand....and the high end audio tribe.  I am suggesting that this plant alkloid/rock and roll music infected mind was the primary anti-war/anti-nuclear political force of the cold war. Just Give Peace a Chance, while we are saving the Earth, Whales and Banning the Bomb, Do Ah! This was the first crack in the four dimensional mind.

 

Throw in that mix the birth control pill (appearing in the mid-1960s) which liberated women’s primal sexual energy, and you have nuclear culture cocktail that melted down, and continues to meltdown the America created by Mr. White Control Freak, and he is still not happy and is trying his damnedest to get things back under his control. The four dimensional mind will fight to the death to halt the mutation of mind/body.

 

What does all this mean? This is a multi-billion dollar business opportunity. Create significantly better music software and audio hardware and the billions of dollars being spent on illegal drugs will flow into this industry, because consumers know what feels best.

 

Now let me bring you back to our state of intellectual primitivism. Almost one hundred and fifty years after Darwin stated his theory of the evolution of species  there are still wide segments of the American population that resist this notion and believe that the world was created in seven days. As we enter the 21st century we still don’t have a credible theory about the evolution of mind, but mind doesn’t care, because it just keeps on mutating. We are not yet intelligent enough to know how we became intelligent. Can we really expect to communicate with more advanced forms of intelligence before we understand our own?

 

 

A BLADE OF GRASS BREAKING THROUGH THE CONCRETE

 

While I was in the middle of the Soviet revolution a friend of mind, a Catholic priest offered me this insight into both the life of Jesus Christ, the Soviet revolution and all revolutions. He said...”Revolutions are blades of grass breaking through the concrete”. The future never emerges from the center, but from the rebel on the edge.

 

This is grand good news for all of those with a brave new vision of the audio arts, and the new generation of music lovers who are not bound by the old four dimensional paradigm of music. The harder we hold on to the old ways the sooner we will perish. Mutate or die, which means it is time for us to elevate our imagination about music and music technology.

 

There is no music out there. There is only one music. You are music. Extra-terrestrial music intelligence is already embedded in you. Are you ready for contact? When you are ready, you too will hear The Twang Before The Big Bang©. I am inviting you all to join me on the XH-1, as we journey to the Nth Dimension of Music HyperSpace as we Search for ExtraTerrestrial Music Intelligence.

 

 

RECOMMENDED READINGS

HyperSpace, Michio Kaku

 

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (Chapter 11:Memes)

 

The Origins of Consciousness in the Break-Down of the Bicameral Mind: Julian Jaynes

 

The Evolution of Consciousness, Robert Ornstein

 

Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Gerald M. Edelman, (A Nobel Laureate’s vision of how Mind organizes the brain)

 

ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence: Jean Heidman (serious discussion of subject)

 

The Measure of Reality: Alfred W Crosby (about the quantification of society 1250-1600)

 

Plants of the Gods: Schultes/Hoffman (About the relationship between the sacred and plant alkaloids)

 

Aaron Copland: Music and Imagination (Must reading)

 

Music, Brain and Ecstasy: Robert Jourdan (A complete affirmation of the premise of my book, The Search for Musical Ecstasy)

 

The Origins of Music, Bob Fink

 

Brain Sex, Moir (explores the structural and cognitive differences in the male and female brain)

 

 

 

 

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