The Teacher's Journey

What a life it is! For forty years I woke up in the morning, got dressed, went to work. I thought that was all there was.

Then I woke up inside.

Now by focusing I can enter a space where my whole being seems to peel back in layers, and Light that is alive and speaks to me approaches and fuses with the Light inside me. I enter into a pool of bliss in which there is only One, and it is both God and me. It is the classic mystical experience, but it has become immediately available to me.

How can we understand the changes that brings on? I used to be an English teacher. I am still a teacher - a good one. But the Light experiences change one's agenda. I am a different person now, than I was before I knew such ecstatic fusion with the Sacred was even possible. You can't move in and out of bliss experiences regularly without losing your murderous edge.

I stopped fighting with people. That made it hard to be a teacher. Teachers are under constant pressure from parents, students and administration. It is a continuous battle for all of us, which we win by staying calm. But I am no longer interested in fighting. I think it is a basic failure to comprehend the situation, and that basic failure permeates education.

What is the situation? There is only the Light. There is just One Thing. We are all pieces of it. If I hit another, I have hit my mother, my father, myself. It is better, then, not to hit. That's what the Light taught me. It is simple and direct and nobody understands it. We just keep fighting.

So after a period of shock during which I departed from one teaching job and stopped seeking a career position with the other, I am rebuilding the whole "teacher" idea, to offer the classes I am able to offer now. They are different in three important ways.

One is that they will be conducted in the world, not in a classroom. I am presently blessed by being able to use Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a as an evening venue. Thank you, Anni!

Another difference is that they are all about how to do something. Literary studies are strangely unreal -- they don't do anything but produce more literary studies. In private classes at Small Town Coffee during the last school year I have been making my literary PhD useful by using it to help people do their own creative writing. My book How to Write Heroic Tales, which has evolved from those classes, should be available at Amazon some time soon. Thank you, students!

Since I am also an active composer who has produced about twenty hours of classical-blues polyphony in the last 3 years, I am going to teach people how to write polyphonic pop music, expanding the principles of twelve-bar-blues into larger patterns. And since I have 20 years of training and experience as a woodworker, specializing in wood ornament, I am going to teach people to make carved / veneered boxes. Every course has to result in a useful product of some kind.

The third difference is something I have established through years of experiment and observation: creative inspiration comes from the Light. My creative life has spiked sharply upwards as I learned to contact and communicate with the Light. And I will teach my students how to contact the Light themselves and use it either for prayer or creative inspiration. Kauai is a very strong place for the Light experience, which is why I am here. That will be a part of every course.

I doubt if I could teach that in any school but my own. Perhaps deep post-graduate work always brings one to such distant outposts. But so it is, at any rate, for me.

Dr. Matt Miller

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