My book is coming out soon!

Good morrow, gentle reader!

Not only do I have two fun CDs of baroque blues music waiting for you at Kapa'a Music and Sound (823-8000), I am also just about to publish a book. 

Who am I? I am Dr. Matt Miller, PhD in Medieval English Literature, literacy teacher, poet, composer, wood-carver and practicing mystic. On Kauai I am known for helping quite a few young people improve their literacy skills, which I believe is the most useful thing I can share, after the Teachings of the Holy Spirit. 

 What Happened to Happiness? is a short book I have written that reveals the seven steps to direct experience of the Sacred. Using these steps has turned my life around from bitterness and anger to peace, acceptance and an unquenchable desire to help others who suffer.

In the mid-1990’s I began a prayer dialogue with the Holy Spirit that still continues. In our exchanges She has patiently taught me seven universal truths about human life, by showing me how they are at work in each life situation that arises. She has also taught me certain details of Her own history.

I have written down what She has said to me in prayer, and through research I have discovered the same teachings in many cultures all over the world – Hindu, Tibetan, Hawaiian, Cherokee, Senecan, Toltec, Christian, Judaic, Taoist, alchemical, Buddhist and Gnostic, as well as the ancient Mystery religions that were the foundation of paganism. The Teachings are seven universal truths that apply to all souls of every land or creed or time.

In brief the Teachings are

1.     Learn to experience Community with all things as vessels of the Holy Spirit

2.     Develop a Partnership with the Holy Spirit immanent in the world around you

3.     Master the Power to communicate with all things telepathically as vessels of the Holy Spirit

4.     Experience the Holy Spirit daily as a living, sentient Love permeating all situations

5.     Strengthen your Will in any situation by fusing it with Hers

6.     Dedicate your Mind to the task of understanding how this technology works inside you.

7.     Learn to feel and act upon Compassion for all who suffer, as parts of yourself.

These teachings are together a Path to an enlightened state in which the accidents of fortune no longer hurt you as they did before. A great measure of your personal unhappiness is alleviated, partly because you learn to think about things differently, and partly because the Path is inscribed in your body and central nervous system, and by following it out there you can learn to return to the pool of bliss and inner peace whenever you wish to do so. It is a change in perspective – a personal transformation – but it is also a physical technology built into the soft machine of your own body.

Operated backwards, the technology becomes a Pain Machine, a set of habitual stressors that create and store stress in the tissues that eventually becomes a physical problem  of some kind. Operated as it was meant to operate, the technology generates ecstatic union with the Sacred, triggering the flow of a healing anesthetic bioelectricity through the body which is alive and aware of you. In India they call Her Shakti, and She permeates every body, not just your own. In the West She is known as the Holy Spirit.

The bliss of union with Her has a gentling effect on the soul – you no longer seek external pleasures so relentlessly, for now you have this unspeakable Joy that blooms within yourself when you call It up in prayer. Things you used to fight about don’t seem to matter so much any more. You become willing to let other people have things their way. Why not? As long as the bliss continues!

I will discuss the technology in these blogs, but first I want to share a poem, whose seven verses combine Her teachings of Her own origins with the seven great Teachings that guide the human soul to inner peace and deep pure experiences of bliss. Check out the next blog for the first verse, about the first Teaching: Community with all things. It is mingled with the tale She told me of how She was born from the volcano on Kauai, five million years ago. 

Blogulater!

Dr. Matt

My Music is available at Kauai Music and Sound!

Time to wake the blog up again! It has lain fallow for some time.

Today I placed two of my CDs with Kauai Music and Sound! They are called The Raw and the Cooked, and The Winds of Kauai.

Kauai Music and Sound (823-8000) is a nice little music store in Kapa’a with instruments for sale, and a stand of local musicians’ CDs. It is the place to go if you want to buy some local music and take it home. For a paltry $15 you can have an hour of music that took me a lot longer than that to create.

If you want to hear me play along with it, come on down to the Kauai Women Artists’ Society get-together at Poipu National Tropical Botanical Gardens on Father’s Day. At the moment I am scheduled to play 12-2 PM, and I will be playing the pieces on the two CDs for sale at Kauai Music and Sound.

Most of these blogs concern the Lady Spirit by whom I have been guided for the last thirteen years. But I will also blog about my music because I channel it from Her. She is not quite the same as a choir of angels – She is the life energy in all things, that which drives us on to do what we do, and the energy with which we do it. She is the Force. That means a lot of what She has to say is jungle music – wild, savage and free, beating against the sky, full of trees crashing down and rivers bursting their banks.

Sometimes Her music is very beautiful, but it is what She is, and She is no tame Spirit. She does beautiful if She feels like it, but She works from a complete emotional palette.

It is all drawn from the Portal where I go during meditation and prayer, fed through my own imperfect musical talent into a guitar or computer and mixed down to its present state. In the two CDs available at Kauai Music and Sound you will find live guitar duets, trios and a quintet, as well as an assortment of computer-generated chamber instruments.

The CD The Raw and The Cooked has three songs by the great Chas. King, long-time teacher at Kamehameha and author of many familiar Hawaiian melodies. I discovered his book Hawaiian Melodies has “piano arrangements” that are really five-part harmony squashed down onto one keyboard. By unfolding these pieces into their original five parts on the computer, and giving them to different instruments so they are distinct from one another, I have wakened these arrangements from a long sleep and given them new life. His voice duets, trios and quartets I put in other instruments, always separating out the melodies so you can hear them all at once.

It appears to have been his practice to put the chord tones in the highest and lowest voice, and then insert strange jazz notes into the middle voices. I discovered that by turning his music “inside out” so the jazz notes are on top some extremely interesting, almost Stravinsky-like music is uncovered that has always lain hidden behind the dominant melody before.

Then I guide the whole in new directions by adding a live guitar line on the top. The three King songs are combined into a chamber orchestra medley, “Hawaiian Suite,” comprised of three somewhat similar songs: “Aloha Oe,” “The Choice of My Heart,” and “My Heart’s Choice.” My guitar is entirely pulled into King’s formal arrangement until somewhere in “Aloha Oe” it loses control and starts to cry and sing and carry on, producing an “Aloha Oe” like I bet you never heard.

At the other end of the spectrum is the somewhat mysterious duet on the CD Winds of Kauai called “Luhaikinimakalehua,” the breeze that blows the dew off the lehua blossoms. The two guitars do not always fall exactly together on the ear, producing an effect of floating lushness and sensuous beauty similar to the flamenco use of arpeggiated chording in a solo guitar piece. Tempo slows down and speeds up slightly to catch the emotions in exactest detail. It is like poetry that pushes language apart so that which cannot be said in words may yet shine through.

These unique pieces stand out against the two CDs’ live guitar trios and duets, which basically combine the polyphonic sound of the Baroque era with the idiom of the blues, so you hear two or three part harmony in electric guitars, and flutes and violins take a blues solo as readily as guitars. It is a new musical language, with roots in blues, baroque, rock and Hawaiian music. Treat yourself to an hour of it today, at Kauai Sound and Music in Kapa’a.

Blogulater!

Dr. Matt Miller