RockOm contributor, artist, community member and friend, Michael Garfield interviewed groundbreaking author and philosopher Ken Wilber in early 2008. In this excerpt, the two discuss the evolving "role of music."
Michael Garfield: Well, one of the things that I've been talking about with my friends is something that's kind of central to a lot of people's world right now: the changing role of music in our culture. That there's this technological revolution that we're going through now, it's a revolution of communication, and so the role of communication is expanding - like it tends to, in the middle of a technological revolution.
Ken Wilber: Right.
MG: And just as someone who's given a lot of thought to what the consequences of new modes of communication and discourse are going to mean, in the 21st Century, how do you see the role of music expanding or changing in the next ten, twenty, fifty, hundred years?
KW: Yeah. Well it depends on how you look at music, in terms of its actual functionality, its actual contours, its actual definition. We sort of begin with pointing out that music is an artifact. So it's something that is created, meaningfully, by human sentient beings. And it has a component of it that can be looked at as just purely expressive, which is something in a sense that an artist can theoretically just do alone, but then it also has a communitive aspect. Something that is meant to be conveyed to another sentient being. And that then opens the artifact to being interpreted at the altitude that it's created at.
[Ken's uses the word "altitude" to mean a particular station along the continuum of psychological development. The more developed you are, the higher your altitude.]
And this then leaves music's self-expressive and communicative capacity coming from a particular altitude. And different types of music, or even within types of music, individuals and different artists in specific types of music can pretty much span almost an entire spectrum. And so what we're looking at is a range of signifiers [signals] that are both self-expressive and communicative. And particularly in the communicative mode, it's a system or pattern of signifiers that's going to go through a particular medium, and the medium itself can be an important part of the message, but it goes through a particular medium and then is decoded as a signified [the signal's meaning] in a human or a group of human beings.
And so that essentially means several things, in terms of the role of music, what music is doing, and so on. And one is that you can look at the actual content of music, its actual altitude, and whether it's evoking a sort of second or third chakra rock and roll beat -
[The chakras of the body's subtle energy system are roughly equivalent to the stages of human psychological development - chakras two and three are correlated with the emergence of the ego and personal power.]
- or whether it's more cerebral, and Bach-classical music sort of sixth or seventh chakra [the nexuses of intuitive insight and divine union, respectively]. And you can look at it in terms of that kind of altitude evoking, and that refers essentially to the structure of music, and the structural altitude that music fits into as a signifier - and, again, whether it's aiming at lower chakras or intermediate chakras or higher chakras - but you can also look at music as its capacity to evoke states of consciousness. And this is probably one of the most important aspects of music as a spiritual transmission. Because music at any level can start out as a third-person artifact, and then can actually end up as a first-person identification. A person can actually end up feeling one with the art in a nondual flow state [in which the boundary between self and other is completely dissolved]. And if not a flow state, then as a pure witness, a contemplation of the art as being so beautiful or so arresting or so provoking that one is thrust into a causal witness state.
[The witnessing state is a state of pure awareness, unidentified with any of the objects of consciousness - the featureless self of this state is "causal" in the sense that all things arise within its spaciousness, and so there can be no prior origin.]
And if that deepens or intensifies, it will go from that third- or second-person into a first-person identification, and one gets into a flow state, one loses one's self in the art. The art evokes and pulls forth a capacity for causal or nondual Spirit. And this can happen at, again, virtually any altitude, just as states, peak experiences can occur at any altitude. But looking at the state transition itself is one of the really important aspects of looking at art, because at whatever level a society is at, art is one of its primary means of transmitting causal and nondual Spirit.
And you had some questions about environment and in the modern world, as artists are the primary spiritual speakers - one way to put it - and in a sense, that's true. So what we're looking at are two different scales of what art does. One is the altitude that the signifiers of art are flying at, and that's a developmental altitude, it's an altitude of complexity, an altitude that is put into the artwork by the consciousness of its maker, by the artist, and will then tend to evoke the same level - in viewers or readers or listeners - the same level of signifieds as the level of signifier. And so in the modern, in the coming world, art does two things - one, it has a world of higher signifiers open to it, it has a world of integral or second-tier, in some cases, third-tier altitude open that it can resonate from.
["Second-tier" refers to the altitudes at which all previous altitudes are recognized as essential elements of one's own being, and less-developed individuals are treated compassionately and appropriately according to their own development. "Third-tier" refers to the altitudes beyond second-tier at which the self/other boundary begins to unravel - not merely as a temporary peak experience, but as a permanent feature of one's identity.]
And whether it's in music, or painting, or literature, it can transmit that second-tier evocation, that integral transmission. And then another is its capacity for states, and in this capacity, as in the past, art has a possibility of evoking state experiences in the viewer, listener, or reader. And these can be subtle states, of just emotional intensity, but it can be spiritual states of causal contemplation and nondual flow. And it was nondual flow, for example, that Schopenhauer had in mind when he talked about art transmitting spiritual awareness, where subject and object become one in the viewer, and that's a nondual flow state. So, sort of two parts - and that's just an analytical, third-person answer to the question.
There's also first-person answers to the question, which are just more aesthetic responses to what aesthetics is. But that's kind of an overview, a third-person view, of where art is and that it's opening up on a frontier now of a second-tier transmission as well as being able to transmit and evoke states of consciousness. And those are essentially similar in the past, except that they are going to be interpreted. If somebody comes out of a nondual flow state, and somebody happens to be at turquoise -
[Ken uses a color-coding scheme to refer to specific altitudes. "Turquoise" refers to a mature and stable realization of so-called "integral" or "second-tier" consciousness. See the chart from Integral Spirituality (hi-res image viewable here).]
- and the art itself was composed by a turquoise mind, then if you asked the person, the listener/hearer/viewer to explain the artwork, they will explain it from an integral vantage point. They'll explain it from an turquoise vantage point, in terms of just the effect it has on them. And whether that's music, and it just somehow "makes me feel whole," and whether it's literature, and there's a consistent writing from a second-tier perspective that's taken and conveyed and evoked in the narrative itself, or whether any sort of art in its communicative form now has signifiers that are available at second-tier. And this is basically, this is a fairly novel breakthrough. And certain great artists of the past have had a chance to push into second-tier cognitively and relate that aesthetically, but we're coming to a point now where there are a large number of everyday individuals that are at that - they're advanced everyday individuals, but it's somewhere upwards of five percent of the population, so that adds a mix to art that was not present before.
And the last thing I'll say about is, when it comes to art recognized by art critics, we have basically just about run the course of postmodern art, and that's art that has green-altitude signifiers [conveying an awareness of the social construction of the ego and systematically "deconstructing" it by illuminating its reliance on cultural context] and is heavily invested with normative judgments [declarations of right and wrong]. So art basically has been politicized, which is not really its function, but that's what green postmodern artists and critics have done with it. But we have about run that course, and so what's new is signifiers coming from integral. Signifiers coming from post-postmodern. And whether that's just in music composed by individuals at second-tier, kind of a certain resonance that comes across in that, or whether its actual narrative forms that convey these second-tier perspectives either explicitly by talking about integrative material or implicitly by coming from that altitude - however the form that they are, it has the capacity to use signifiers, and it is going to start using signifiers, that are post-postmodern. And that's going to be kind of huge. We're waiting to see how it breaks out, waiting to see what form it takes, waiting to see what narrative form it takes and particularly what visual arts do in the face of integral.
So that's all right on the horizon, and that's why it's a very exciting time in the art world, we're watching the death of a huge movement and the birth of what will be a huge movement, and we're right on that cusp.
Read Michael's entire article and interview here.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.
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