Creativity as a spiritual practice

There’s an old saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s intended as a dig at music criticism, but beneath that, there’s a deeper truth: Music is intangible, subjective; it’s universal yet still deeply personal. And while science and math are involved in its creation, there is something undeniably mystical about it.

Laraaji is a 80-year-old pioneer of so-called New Age music and someone who’s been sitting on the fringes of the music world for decades — though, last year, he joined Andre 3000 onstage in Brooklyn.

When he was young, Laraaji experimented with acting, including a role in the landmark experimental film Putney Swope, and spent time in the 1960s standup comedy scene. After that, he became interested in spiritual communities, discovered the autoharp, and devoted his life to making music. He’s been a truly prolific artist ever since.

I recently invited Laraaji on The Gray Area to talk about music, meditation, spirituality, and the therapeutic power of laughter. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m so intrigued by all the artistic interests you’ve had in your life. You’ve done standup comedy. You’ve done acting. Obviously, in the end, you gave yourself over to music. Did the experience of acting and doing comedy make you a better musician? Or is it just creatively a totally different thing?

It’s the same thing, Sean. It’s wherever I choose to open and give expression to. I’m practicing the art of surrendering and spontaneity.

I think that’s why I’m a lousy musician. I’m too in my own damn head.

I say observe your body language when you have your next orgasm.

I don’t think anybody — including myself — wants to see that!

Seriously, look at your breath. Look at your body language. Look how focused you are into surrendering to this energetic expression. And I see some of that expression carried over into the way people sing pop music, rock music. They get into the more orgasmic, passionate level of release.

Do you think of yourself as primarily an improvisational musician for those reasons?

I depend more on improvisation than I do on set scores. I find that improvisation is aligned with what I call my spiritual belief that every moment is new. And to trust that what I need in this moment is here.

Musicians always talk about that, feeling more like a conduit than an author. Is that what it’s like for you on stage?

Yes, and it’s magical and mystical and a transportive place because you’re somehow beyond linear time flow. You’re in the midst of local time, but you’re also witnessing an unbroken, constant present time. It’s speaking through me and it’s speaking as me. I’m sound, I’m space, I’m timelessness. This is like music I can dream up. Part of my art is knowing when to get out of the way, how to set up a musical flow or a musical event, and then to step to the side of it and let it speak through.

You also sing but it feels like part of the music, like there’s little distinction between the instruments you’re playing and what’s coming from your voice. Do you think of your voice as another instrument and not something separate?

Yes, I do like doing everything at the same time. Spontaneous, unified flow.

Create a flow with several instruments at the same time, using the voice without calling the mental process into linear thinking. And using a voice as an emotional expressional instrument. That’s what I’ve been exploring, especially with meditation or deep contemplation of contacting altered planes of conscious present time. And so to talk about it is to take the mind out of it.

Then there’s sounds of passion, passionate immersion. The voice can be used to express witnessing inside of an awe-inspiring perception. So the whole body becomes the voice and the breath and the movement and become a conduit.

Invented or improvisational language can be the evidence of a person or practitioner in total immersion, total submission, getting involved with a total perception that’s beyond linear description. So the brain is given a vacation, and in that vacation or place, it might be freed up to have an alternative space-time experience. And that might be the message the artist wants to convey, that there is an alternative way of being conscious here and now.

I have heard you talk about music as a tool for total presence. Why do you think music has that kind of effect on us?

Music generated or channeled by the right musician or artist? The artist is in a state of contemplation or meditation or a suspended time awareness. And in the languaging that occurs with their instrument, their interaction with their instrument and with their voice can convey this repurposing of the human instrument, repurposing it from a conveyor of local human-based emotion to a conduit of exalted emotion, direct perception inside this timeless present moment.

It’s always available. Certain sounds. Drones can do that. Music that’s very spontaneous, that can pull the mind out of linear thought, could allow the perceiver, the listener, to suddenly directly notice the reality of eternal time and the infinite space.

Sound can point to the invisible and sound can suggest the flowing of energy, the flowing of blood, the flowing of breath. It can suggest the integration of seemingly separate and discordant. In the case of a harp, all 36 strings are vibrating at the same time and producing this synergetic tonal event. So, as you say, that sound can throw a suggestion. It can point to the invisible, it can point to the transcendent. It can direct the emotional body out of heaviness so that a lightness, a more ethereal resonance can be directly witnessed.

Once we start talking and using words, we’re already in the world of ideas and abstractions. But music is more primary than that, right? It touches something in us that existed before we invented words.

Yes. Music might be able to say more than what speech can say. My general mode of operation is to prepare before a performance or recording through just dropping into a refined sense of the meditative field. Do some yoga postures, some breathing exercises, some positive affirmations, and then sculpt this field or point to this transcendental field and let it transmit itself into a sound repetition through me. When this happens, I tend to call it a sound bath. A celestial sound bath. It’s an immersion experience. And once again, here we’re away from the words and we’re into the pure impacting force of sound.

Do you actually find a meaningful distinction between music and meditation, or is it all just different manifestations of the same practice?

My ultimate answer is that they’re one and the same, meaning that in the moment of deepest meditation, I consider meditation to be the highest romance and that romance is the highest meditation. This meditation is simultaneous with music. It couldn’t be separated.

When did laughter become such an important thing for you?

It shifted the energies of the bullies in my neighborhood when I was young to use humor. I wouldn’t be so afraid of their presence when I could use humor. And in church, we use humor because it could get so boring. And because I was in the right place to use it, we’d use it to get other peers to laugh in the middle of a serious sermon. But I notice the power of laughter to alter, to break the sense of rigidity and separation. I began writing scripts in high school and doing situation comedies for talent shows because I enjoyed seeing people lose it to laughter. The family I grew up in, the uncles, aunts, the cousins all were laughter friendly, so laughter was always on the menu. I can’t remember even a funeral where laughter was outlawed.

You really do see it as a transformative force?

Well, after doing standup comedy I decided to let standup comedy go for a while and just focus on music. It was a book by Rajneesh, Osho Rajneesh, that helped me to realize that I could access the laughter experience without doing comedy, and that I could guide other people into the laughter zone and enjoy the deliciousness of laughter without using humor and at the sacrifice of something.

And now, through laughter — play shops, I call them — we use laughter to get people into the play zone and to get them into contact with their inner child and to get them into deep relaxation. Yeah. And I really enjoy laughter now because it can come up out of people without it having to be nervous. Yeah, the entire body can get involved. The entire breath can be open, and it’s getting sweeter and more delicious every time I do one of these.

So laughter is another way to transcend the thinking mind?

Yes. Rajneesh pointed out that when you’re laughing, really involved with laughter, that you or us or whoever is laughing is not thinking, they’re not involved in the thought process of linear thought. That may be so if you’re into pure, open laughter. If it’s a nervous laughter where you’re mindful of a threatening situation, that would be a different situation. But real, full body, cathartic laughter, you’re releasing faster than you can think. So there’s no thought process processing what it is that’s being released. It’s just a yummy, open, nurturing release.

You’ve been a professional musician for decades, performing all over the world. You’re entangled with the business and the commercial side of music. I guess I just wonder how you navigate that element, of being a professional musician and being a spiritual person at the same time?

Well, I did many years ago get that unless I integrate my spiritual nature, I would never be totally happy, content, or experience resolution because I can’t get it from the physical world. I’m not hating the physical world, but things in the physical world are temporary and constantly we’re reminded that things come, they stay, and then they leave. And some things are just too beautiful for us to accept that they’re ever going to leave.

And I grew to understand that behind the world that is changing, there is this spiritual field that if I learn how to embrace it constantly, even while I’m embracing my outer wealth, that when the outer wealth shifts, I’m not bent out of shape because I’m still connected to this inner spiritual platform that doesn’t get bent out of shape when the outer world shifts. So for me, staying constant and staying with my spiritual practice allows me to be more playful and less fearful of the physical world, and less fearful of change and less fearful of losing. And so I find that the spiritual side helps me to be more present, more experimental, and more risk-taking with my musical expression.

I’ve also heard you say that you think our core spiritual problem is our misidentification with our bodies. What does that mean?

I’m not going to do this. I wouldn’t think of doing this to you, Sean.

Wait, what are you going to do to me?!

I would amputate your leg. Your feet. You’re still there. Your torso. You’re still there. Your arms, your elbows. You’re still there. That’s just a head. And you’re still there. Your ears and nose goes. You’re still there. Your lips and tongue. God is still there. Suddenly your head disappears. But you’re still there. And you’re saying to yourself, wait a minute. I thought I was that body. Look. I’m timeless. I’m invisible. I’m wingless. What do I do with this?

And I believe that identification with the physical body, which is birth, that lives and dies, and we get attached to it, and we get sentimental with it. And we try to enjoy its five senses, and we forget, or we don’t access the joy that we can have, the more expansive joy we can have through the infinite self that is always here.

Perhaps your buddies have had an epiphany through the use of certain ceremonies. Where you’re suddenly in another sense of present time and space, a different sense of expansiveness, a different sense of how time is unfolding, slower or not at all. And to have this experience is to be taking advantage of a different form of body. The deepest sense of happiness and joy I feel comes from having an intimate, communing experience with my eternal present time-self. The spiritual presence which is always here, always everywhere. It just needs to be totally present, to dig it in, to catch it and to wear it and to behold it.

You’re 80 years old. You’ve been making music for over 40 years. You’ve lived such an interesting life as an artist and a contemplative. As you sit here now, today, what is your spiritual mission? What gets you out of bed every day?

I’ll go through what I have to do the moment I get out of bed. Usually what gets me up is a sense of a daily agenda, which is different every day. Something that I’m going to do that day that I’m going to really enjoy, whether it’s music, performance, or designing, new tuning or getting to know a new piece of equipment, or sitting for an extra period of time in meditation, either in lotus position in my house or going for a walk in Central Park or Riverside Park and sitting on a bench in the sun, getting into meditation.

What keeps me enthusiastically involved in life and passionately involved with life is the sensation of an eternal non-human intelligence that’s generating this thing called creation and is allowing me to participate in it and to co-witness and to co-collaborate with it. And then in the midst of this, it is remaining invisible and remaining infinite. And I’m feeling it through my connection with it. And so it’s not so much what I’m getting out of bed for, but as I’m getting out of bed there’s this sense of conscious improvisational collaboration within the divine alternating intelligence. But when I’m doing tours and I’m put in a nice, beautiful hotel, I’ll happily get out of bed for the breakfast.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.