Thinking outside the control box


'Wherever you are in the Western world you are psychologically Christian, indelibly marked with the sign of the cross in your mind and in the corpuscles of your habits... Once you feel your personal soul to be distinct from the world out there, and that consciousness and conscience are logged in the soul (and not in the world out there), and that even the impersonal selfish gene is individualized in your person, you are, psychologically, Christian. Once your first response to a dream, a bit of news, an idea divides immediately into the moral 'good' or 'bad', psychologically you are Christian. Once you feel sin in connection with your flesh and its impulses, you are Christian. When a hunch comes true, a slip-up is taken as an omen, and you trust in dreams, only to shake off these inklings as 'superstition', you are Christian because that religion bans non-doctrinal forms of communication with the invisibles, excepting Jesus... Once you consider the apparently aimless facts of history to be going somewhere, evolving somehow, and that hope is a virtue and not a delusion, you are Christian' - James Hilman A Terrible Love of War

'[There are] two great evils pestering our time: one is fossilized religious fundamentalism, the other the globalization of the world. Both are equally threatening to healthy diversity in a cultural and individual context. Like two sides of the same rusty coin' - Rahal Eks On the Path of a Friend

 'Religion is something that has been constructed , like a franchise. When you're dealing with sound, you're dealing with the ultimate vibrations of the earth, the people, the soul, the universe. All of this existed before religion. Religion was constructed, it's not something that grew like a tree. It's a construction made by human beings. The music goes back to the Om, to the One, to the planet and outer space. It's way before you had the construction of how to control people, because religions are just control systems anyway' - Bill Laswell speaking to Peter Lavezzoli in The Dawn of Indian Music in the West
Soundtrack is Exil from Olivier Moret (string bass) and the Syrian brothers Khaled and Mohanad Aljaramani (oud and percussion). The Aljaramani brothers featured in my 2011 post Syria - remember the musicians.

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