Liquid Mind

Last summer while I was vacationing in Colorado, I walked into a bookstore in Glenwood Springs. I was hoping to find a bird book to identify a brightly colored bird I'd seen the day before. As I flipped through the pages of a couple of field guides (western tanager!), I found myself responding in an unusual way to the music playing on the store's CD player.

My first impression was that it was typical ambient new age music, quiet, relaxing, unobstrusive. Yet I couldn't ignore it. My attention kept being drawn back to this music. It bore a resemblance to the Prelude to Wagner's opera Lohengrin.

In Music and the Soul, I'd classified this Prelude as a rare instance of cosmic consciousness music, corresponding to grace (what I call middle eight, meaning that this is the eighth center's full and purest expression, uninfluenced by the characteristics of the centers above and below it).

I ended up staying in the bookstore much longer than I'd planned. The music was strangely compelling.

One aspect of eighth center music is that it seems to radiate timeless, irresistible waves of compassion, grace, or invitation to become one with the divine. It's also difficult to compose. Most examples that I'm aware of are unable to sustain this level of transcendence for longer than ten minutes. But I'd been listening for twenty.

I finally asked the bookstore owner what we were listening to. She produced the CD case for Liquid Mind III: Balance, by Chuck Wild.

I made note of the name. When I got home I did a search on the web and found the Liquid Mind website, ordered the CD and have been listening to it ever since.

Chuck Wild is a film composer in Los Angeles who wanted to write slow music to get himself, his friends, and family to slow down. He says that he considers it a compliment when people say that they fall asleep listening to his Liquid Mind Music.

There are seven CDs in the series to date. Each lasts about an hour. I currently own III (Balance), IV (Unity), and VII (Reflection).

I use these CDs frequently in my musical meditation practice. Typically, I'll lie down on the couch in my living room for 20-30 minutes with headphones and a warm blanket (necessary for a good part of the year here in New England).

I've experienced a wide range of effects during these sessions. First, I would find myself relaxing as if in layers. Each day of meditation to Liquid Mind III allowed me to go a level deeper in muscular relaxation until I felt that I'd gotten down to the bone level. Sometimes I've had a full body shakedown, a ripple of muscular release running from head to toe, seeming to realign muscles, tendons, bones in a much more organic, natural, and lasting way than I've achieved in some bodywork sessions.

I've also had the feeling at times of being held in the warm, compassionate, all-understanding embrace of a divine being. Once or twice I've had the sense of golden light pouring into my head through my crown (seventh) chakra.

People I've introduced Liquid Mind to have gotten spiritual highs from it--one way in which transcendent musical experiences, or TMEs, may express themselves. Others have found it so relaxing that they play it every night to help them fall asleep.

Being a composer myself, I seem to be hardwired to listen to music even if it's long past my bedtime. So I have yet to fall asleep to a Liquid Mind CD. As a composer, I find listening to Chuck Wild's music completely satisfying. At its best, it's like Wagner without the ego or Bruckner without the Catholicism--ravishingly beautiful, deeply felt, intelligently constructed, and spiritually transforming. It's a perfect adjunct for the yoga of listening that I developed in Music and the Soul.

In my next three posts, I'll list the centers touched by the three Liquid Mind CDs that I presently own. In the next several months, I hope to do the same for the other four CDs in the series.