Ep. 97 - The Power of Sound + Music with Alexandre Tannous

[Music] The sound is what created all. sound created universe. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. Welcome to episode 97 of synchronicity. I guess this week is Alexandre Tannus and Alexandre is a professor, a researcher, a teacher, a musician, a student of life, of spirit, just a totally awesome guy, big Daf of the cap to Michael Daf of the cap. What? I've never used that term before and I definitely am not going to use it again. Sorry for that. But thank you to Michael Phillip from Third Eyedrops for recommending that I have Alexandre on. You will hear why in this episode. I'm not gonna break the whole thing down, but let's just say this. If you're interested in sound, if you're interested in music, if you're interested in mysticism, if you're interested into the broad blanket spirituality moniker, this is a really great episode. We get pretty nerdy about sound at some point, but also get pretty esoteric about how this stuff really can work and you know whether you've gone out to clubs or see your favorite band or a concert hall or just listen in your headphones, which I like to do, get a nice pair of headphones. It's undeniable that sound has and music have a dramatic impact on our day-to-day lives.

I know there's rarely a day where music is not heard by me in my life and when I find that it's been a few days, I'm usually in a bad mood. So there's a lot of stuff to this. Yes, there's the emotional components of music that can resonate with us. You know, there's the pleasurable entertainment aspects, but there's also this deeper level, which Alexandre mentions very early on, which is many of the religious and mystic and philosophical traditions refer to sound as kind of being the primordial start to this reality. And you could say that's a coincidence, you could say whatever you want, but it's true. So that should hold some weight. It does for me. I also know that in my life making music, listening to music, discussing music, sounds, making sounds, you know, having a kid really teaches us, they make weird sounds. Some really fucking weird sounds coming out of my kid's mouth, but it's really funny and sometimes it's cool and sometimes it's cute and all these things carry some energy to them. So we really get deep into that in this episode, which is really a treat for me. So I think I'm going to keep this intro very short. Again, I'm getting carried away at times. I want to get right to it. I think I'm going to start rolling out some other things for people who want to support on Patreon. I'm going to do some recommendations, going to do some music recommendations, some book recommendations, some show recommendations, and also some other exciting and fun things. So you can go check that out on patreon.com/synchronicity. I'm going to probably stop mentioning that every show. If you want to find out anything that's going on related to this syncpodcast.com, that's the best place to go. I want to think everyone who has joined the Facebook community recently, that's been going great. The email list, I managed the community there. People are really tuning in and writing with some great synchronicities. Always love to hear about those. Noah at Sync Podcast, if you just want to shoot me an email. Things are going great. I don't know if I mentioned this this month, but we are continuing to break every records for downloads every single month for the past three or four months. And that's awesome. I really, really appreciate it.

You're the best basically for listening. I don't know if your first time, long time, whatever you are, whatever type of listener, know that you are fucking awesome. So I think we'll get right to the episode. How about that? Without further ado, here is Alexandra Tanu. Thank you again for coming on. I'm super excited for so many reasons. You sent me some of these questions beforehand just to get a sense of maybe some of the things we could speak about. And as I was saying before, we were rolling every single one that I was reading was like, yes, yes, yes. Just so you know, one of my favorite books ever, I've recommended it to countless people is The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Hazrat Iniak Khan. And I just, oh, incredible.

So I also, just so you have some background on who I am, I went to a music school I graduated from Berkeley. And it's just always been a tremendous kind of tool and modality that I've used in my life, not only for pleasure and enjoyment, but also as a spiritual practice. So, you know, just looking at the tremendous work you've been doing over the years and your focus on sound and ethnomusicology, philosophy and how these things intersect, I'm just incredibly grateful to have you on. Thank you. And great to hear about your background. Yeah, yeah, saving it as a treat. So, I think let's, let's start maybe with your background and how you kind of got pulled into the world of sound. Like, where, where in your life did that start as a child, as beginning to try to kind of form your persona in the world, where how has sound been linked in your life?

It's a long story, but I've had great interest in music and I was a child and eventually started studying it. And it basically modulated from one thing to another, from the normal interest in music to eventually going to college and studying various aspects of music. I did eventually four degrees in music over 12 years, studied double major in music theory and composition. And I performed a lot. And from there on, I did three master's degrees in music education and ethnomusicology. And I was doing PhD and didn't end up by finishing it because it had been 12 straight years. And I also realized that yeah, I wasn't interested in academia. I became interested in an area that no one is studying, which is the esoteric and therapeutic properties of sound.

This is something that emerged after having done a variety of different things in music, from playing to composing contemporary classical music and film music and playing different musical styles and eventually different musical cultures, teaching, conducting, doing research. And after having done years of fieldwork in over 40 countries, I became deeper and deeper interested in something, as I said, no one's looking at. And eventually that won over. And I dropped everything I was doing before, even though I loved it. And I focused on this area. And I ended up by learning the most important things about music that no one is teaching, unfortunately. And no one is researching. And I became a sound researcher and sound therapist.

And I feel that the word really needs it. There's a great interest in sound. And it's going in a nachillerando and crescendo where people don't fully understand it. They're drawn to it. But they don't fully understand it. I mean, I've been studying it for years and I don't fully understand it. Yeah. Yeah. That's the kind of thing we're talking about. So now I'm all focused on these two aspects, the research and working with people. And I keep on coming out with new findings. And what I do now is a combination of working with people, transmitting the practice, doing more research and fieldwork. I'm writing a book.

I do recordings, various recordings. I did six recordings recently. They're still in that app. Yeah. For download eventually there will be that people can get in touch with me. And they can first come directly from me. My website is soundmeditation.com. But there are some recordings on it that they can access. They're actually on sound cloud. I was listening today. Yeah, I was listening today. It's some really cool stuff that Tibetan bowls in particular. Yeah, really cool. And I'm actually doing recording right now. Just I was at the late last night doing studio session and I'll be going in the afternoon as well. With Lisa Fisher, who's an amazing singer, she used to be the lead backup vocalist for the Rolling Stones.

So I are doing recording for, you know, meditation and spiritual purposes. But sincere, you know. And that's what's out there. Let's talk about this kind of area that people aren't really studying and focusing on, yet still has been spoken about even in the mystical traditions. For millennia, truthfully, of how sound is typically thought of as the primordial beginning of what we experience as physical reality. And we also know that sound has an impact physically on us. And, you know, even more into the realm of things like binaural beats or certain frequencies can actually invoke changes in our neurochemistry, which is a fancy way, I guess, of asking what are some of the most illuminating things you've discovered in your years of researching sound and kind of getting into the more esoteric elements of it, which I personally find fascinating.

I mean, I mentioned at the beginning, but anyone who doesn't, you know, hasn't read the mysticism and sound and music, you don't have to take everything as gospel in there, but there are some incredible expositions on how sound can function on us. So, yeah, I mean, what have you discovered? What is like some like mind-blowing thing that you're like, "Oh, my God," or what was something that was like, "I found this here and there," and all these things seem to line up. I'm sure there's been many of those instances. Yes, there are so many. The biggest one is that, and that's not coming from me, but I'm starting to agree with it more and more of that.

In every, pardon me, I'm suffering from allergies today. In every religion, philosophy, we arrive to something quite significant, which is the fact that sound is what created all. Sound created the universe, whether in Christianity, the first sentence in the gospel of John, in the beginning, there was the word that the word was with God, and the word was God. That's referenced to the concept of logos in ancient Greece. Sound, or the word, is a sound. In Hinduism and Buddhism, we have another sentence that we often hear and don't interpret it well. The universe started with the primordial own. In ancient Egypt, they tell us the universe started with a song. Also, in Hinduism, we have the concept of Akasha and spanda movement or vibration.

Also, in Hinduism, another Brahma, the world of the sound. Right. If sound created the universe, then sound can be perceived as God. This is one of the biggest findings that sound is God. How can we wrap our head around it? Also, in Kabbalah, you have the tetragrammaton, which is the unpronounceable name of God. I believe, and also another good friend of mine, who is a scholar who has been studying the biblical texts and their interpretation and the esoteric properties of sound and how one has to use mathematics to understand these texts and sound is mathematics. Right. It's mathematical ratios. So, the conclusion in Beseferitzia, which is the book of creation, the only book attributed to Abraham the Patriarch, the harmonic series is The Living God.

So, the connection between mathematics and sound is also another huge revelation. To really understand sound, one has to go into mathematics because sound and music, the reason why they're powerful, is because there are mathematical ratios and intelligence manifests in various mathematical systems in nature, such as the Fibonacci series and the Phi or the Golden Mean, the Golden Ratio, and its significance, which is immense. And it's something that physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and many others have deeply observed and its intricacies and how it's at the root core of everything. It's the constant of the universe, to say, and other mathematical systems are fractal geometry. So, the harmonic overtone series is the most important one, and that's the one that impacts everything, all musical cultures, harmonic systems, scales, and modes, all come out of the harmonic series, and it's encoded in us. So, the reason why this system is found in nature is to give any sound its tone, color, or tap, and it's incredibly complex. And coincidentally, this is what all sound practitioners, whether in native or in an indigenous setting or in contemporary setting, people end up using instruments that emit harmonic overtones to clearly audible levels, such as gongs, singing bowls, discs, bells, Shruti boxes, harmoniums, overtone singing.

All of these instruments produce harmonic overtones to clearly audible level, when they're found in any sound that we listen to, it's important for us to hear them directly in a concealed way. Because when we listen to various sounds of various instruments, voices or sounds in nature, the fundamental frequency, the most pronounced part of the sound, is more dominant in overshadows these overtones. Only when we start to hear them, like the way we hear them on a gong or when one plays, singing bowl or crystal bowl, we hear these harmonics, these frequencies, and that changes everything. What we're basically listening to, we're listening to the audible side of mathematics, and mathematics is a source called in the universe, and Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras confirmed that as well.

Right, and if those three are agreeing on something, then you should pay attention, because they didn't always agree, so. Yeah, no, I mean, and this is a fascinating kind of exploration into not only the fundamental basis, potentially of the universe, but especially for sound, but mathematics in general, I mean, I've referenced this many different times on this podcast, but Marie-Louis von Franz, one of Carl Jung's, his main translator and a great academic in our own right, often referred to number as the primordial archetype, if superseding everything. That is actually what we look at. We don't typically think of numbers like that, because we use them quantitatively, but qualitatively, they can also have resonance both conceptually and physically, and spiritually, and all the ways we can mention. So, I think this would be a cool place to talk about kind of the differences between non-Western harmonic systems and Western systems, and I know a little bit about this, but explain it to me as though I know nothing. I was lucky enough, like I said, when at Berkeley, I had Indian music classes, Indian music synthesis classes, learned a few, raga, some tintal, so I have some basis of how these things different micro-tonally, but maybe if you could, I'm using you as an amazing and immense resource here, kind of elucidate some of the differences between the non-Western systems, harmonic systems, and the Western ones, I'd be fascinated to hear about it. Sure, I'm going to stick to basics because it's quite convoluted. So, let's start with the octave. The octave is the distance between one frequency and the doubling of that frequency.

If you take the note C, for example, and let's pretend that the C has a frequency, and it's frequency that measured using hertz, which is cycles per second, and let's say it's 200 hertz. So, if you keep raising the pitch until you get to 400 hertz, this is where the note C is doubled and its frequency becomes 400 hertz. So, if you were to sing the scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, C, C, that's an octave for people who are not familiar with music. So, it's the same repetition of the note, but in different octaves could be an octave higher, two octaves higher, four octaves higher, or several octaves lower. So, the magic is between the two notes that constitute an octave, and in various cultures, this distance has been divided in different numbers of divisions.

In the Western word, it's divided into 12 semitones, or let's call them 12 tones, and the tone, the smallest division of sound in the Western word is the half step, which is the distance between the black key and the adjacent white key on a piano, a difference, the distance between one fret and the next fret up on a guitar, or the next fret down on a guitar. So, that would be C to C-sharp, C-sharp to D, so on and so forth. Now, in the West... Our chromatic scale, yeah? Chromatic scale, exactly. So, in the West, we ended up by dividing this distance into 12 equidistant half steps, and that became the equal temperament, which is the act that castrated the octave.

Yes, and I'm taking particular note that you are using the term castrated, right then. Yeah, it disempowered it. Yes. We lost the state of trance and euphoria of ecstasy, why? Because by creating an equidistant division between all 12 half steps, when before the equal temperament, they were not all equal, let's say Western music was 12 half steps, and not all octaves are divided into 12 half steps, but I'm getting to that in a bit. We are no longer following the mathematics that nature gave us, and they're encoded in us, and the octave is divided into 1200 cents. A cent is a unit that's used for logarithmic measurements for sound, and if the octave is equal to 1200 cents, and we divide it into 12 equidistant half steps, naturally, each half step's going to be 100 cents. When before the equal temperament, these half steps were not all 100 cents. Some may be 100 cents, some 98 cents, or 96, and some 104, 102, and in other cultures, especially in non-western cultures, this octave is divided into a greater number of divisions.

I'll take Indian classical music, for example. There are 22 shrewties, so you have the swaras, which are the notes, and the shrewties, that are the notes between the notes, so they divide the octave into 22 different notes that one can use, so there's a greater level of minutia in Arabic and Persian musics, which are ancient physical cultures, they divide the octave into 24 terms. In Turkish music it's 53, in Byzantine music, which is the music of the Eastern church in Orthodoxy, so in Christianity we have catholicists, protestantism, and orthodoxy, they divide the octave into 72 terms. These various numbers and divisions of octave come from the complexity of the overtones.

If we look at the overtones series and the tuning of the notes found in the series, we find that all of them fluctuate, except for the fundamental frequency, and every time it repeats in the series, people can look at harmonic series on Wikipedia, let's say, and they see that there are varying numbers over these harmonics plus 2, minus 14, minus 49, all of these things are measuring the deviation in sense. So all of the notes deviate, except for the fundamental frequency, and every time it repeats in the octave, and that means these notes that deviate, you cannot play and match them correctly on a perfectly tuned piano in equal temperament. So they're a little bit higher, or dramatically higher, or lower. So this is the tuning that we're no longer following. The complex mathematics, there are in nature, and as I said earlier, sound is mathematical ratios that we are listening to, and the reason why sound has a great impact on everything, if we are, whether on the mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic, physical levels. Music is powerful because it tempers the way we perceive reality. Right, right, which is what mathematics do. Yeah, I mean, which is obvious, even if you don't understand anything about that, you know, just listening to a song, can change your mind, or emotional state is prove of it alone. And I also find this fascinating about the microtonal stuff. I'm a big, my major at school was music synthesis, which is a very weird way of saying I got to use various, you know, state-of-the-art synthesizers and DAWs and, you know, ways to use modern technology. And one of the things I really enjoyed about it is the ability to shift things around, you know, use semitone shifts and use microtonal shifts. It's very interesting because some of the music I like the most in the electronic world is not like dissonant per se, it's still very structured and falls within the parameters of the Western things, but you'll hear drifting drones, you'll hear changing things that sweep through different microtones or sense.

And I never really thought of it as having a direct application to some of these more ancient or mystical or older, really, ways of breaking down music. So like, what, what are some of the, trying to figure out the right way to phrase this, what are some of the techniques or benefits of some of these different systems of harmony, harmonic systems in different cultures? Like, where would you pinpoint a few that are kind of interesting? And you're like, wow, this is a way that they're actually using this in a practical sense. And these are the functions that we've kind of cut ourselves off from. This is a great question. So as we start to study these ancient musical systems that have been runged for, who knows how long, we realize that the sophistication comes from a point in the past, where there was a great knowledge of sound, of mathematics and consciousness that they devised musical systems, harmonic systems, that are used not just for entertainment or the way we use music nowadays, but as a system for spiritual maintenance, therapy, and other modalities all at once in systems that are perceived nowadays as mostly part of the art. Right, right. But it's not necessarily so. It's, they're very, very complex, however.

So basically, we listen to music, involve a variety of different reasons, and this is why music is so versatile. It's used even nowadays in religious ceremonies, in indigenous ceremonies, in all shamanic ceremonies, and various other realms, really. So it's malleable, it's flexible, it has a function, and that function varies depending on the intention and the will of the individual. But what it does, it reveals consciousness, music, and sound, is a system that we intuitively subconsciously gravitate to word and use and creates very systems to unlock consciousness, to connect us to the higher self, to help us understand who we are, and to elevate our consciousness. And I'm not exaggerating this.

If people go deep into the therapeutic and this is very exciting music, and how it's used in indigenous setting, and the various things that people do with music, whether instrumental music, vocal music, or the dance that's result of the music, and the reverence, and the spirits that people talk about when they play music, and of course, we need to do a lot of translation when we are listening to, let's say, indigenous people talking about the various spirits that music have, such as in Genoa music, music for hitting and trans in North Africa, or the various songs that I used in different shamanic ceremonies, let's say the Ikaros in ayahuasca ceremonies, and so on. So basically, we are talking about something that is so incomprehensible for us, and it's very important not to take things literally, and that's what people do, unfortunately, because then this is where dogma is going to happen, and we don't want darkness. We need to use all of the sciences, all of our faculties really understand to decode something so immense that it can accommodate an infinite number way of talking about it. But at the end, sound impacts our emotional state through something that's called ethos. Sound has an ethos. Ethos is a word in ancient Greek, which can be best translated as the describing character, the personality, the spirit, one of the 25 definitions of spirit.

And yeah, the way it evokes emotions within us and moves us. But there are layers involved here, and it's very important. So the equal temperament is one. So if we're listening to music that's equal tempered, we shouldn't expect magic. Music can still be beautiful. All music in the West is played on equal tempered instruments or equal tempered scales and harmonic system. So we need to use a system that's not incapacitated, that's not quantized like the Western. I'm not putting it down, I'm just saying that it can be better. It's wonderful what we've created in Western music, the various styles. However, we lost the state of trust, the ecstasy, the euphoria, the enchantment. And this is why I believe that people started using drugs in raves and various contexts, because music no longer takes them there. Well, I have a very interesting interjection at that point. So I started getting into house music and underground house music back in the late 90s. I was between the ages of 16 and 18. I was really getting into it. And I used to go to clubs, I used to say, I didn't say I did. I, you know, got my way into writing for a Dutch music magazine that covered club events. So I got press passes and I got to go into these clubs well before I was able to smoke, drink, take drugs, didn't know anyone, I'm going alone. And I would be there until 8 and 8 a.m. in the morning. I knew people were taking drugs. I didn't really get the full extent of it until much later in my years of going out.

But the truth of it is, is I found there to be an energy that I didn't feel everyone else was aware of that was coming through this music. But I did notice some people felt that they had to have some altered state of consciousness going in to fully appreciate it. I get that. I'm an avid cannabis user. One of my favorite things to do is, you know, in consume cannabis and listen to music, I totally get the appeal of altering your state of consciousness. I also this is this is an area I'm fascinated in talking to you talking with you about because to me, what we're communicating here via sound via our voices via music via tonalities, whatever it is, is what you alluded to before the intention, the idea, the resonance, the full spiritual force of what is being communicated beyond the sound that that is before it. And I think that can come through in any music we listen to even even tempered. But I think what you're getting at, which is something that I've certainly experienced when I've gone to certain sound teaching modality things, is that there is a whole other level that not only can induce pleasure and beauty and ecstasy, but really transcendent states, really physically shifting almost, I mean, the way I would describe it, I went to a particular sound healing thing in New York City. And it was about six hours with a half an hour 45 minute break in between Tom Kenyon was the guy and he has all these crystal bowls and all these things. And an incredible like four and a half five octave voice just absurdly low to absurdly high. And you constantly are opening your eyes to see if this is the same person making these sounds. And what I'll never forget about it is after about five, six hours of this walking out of the place in the upper west side of Manhattan and feeling like truthfully, I had just taken a heavy dose of mushroom, smoked a ton of weed. Like I was viscerally and palpably elated. I felt like I was floating and that to me unlocked a different layer of this that I had never really experienced with sound before. So I would love to hear kind of your take on all of these different things and how we can use sound in much more of the way we're accustomed to either listening to music or they're hearing things in our daily lives or just kind of building relationship with sound in a different way.

Mm-hmm, beautiful. Yeah, well, so basically what you went through is an experience that allowed your body to vibrate in resonance to the music that was being played because the human body is the most sophisticated instrument on all levels. And healing is reinstating a state of resonance, is allowing self-healing to take place. That's something we as westerners, we need to learn so, so much about. Yeah. And the fact that we call healers, healers, instead of healing facilitators, that communicates to us a lot that we think that healers really heal us. No, healers do very important work. They facilitate an experience that can be healing. They give us tools, they support us, they push us, they encourage us.

That's huge. That is such a huge thing that I would just like to point out is applicable to every single aspect in modality in life. That is super poignant. I love that. And it's so true. Yeah, so thanks, I fully agree with you. Yeah, and that's something I know so well because this is what I do with people every day. If I'm healing them, I would know by now. I think this worked for 13 years. So, no, they have to be engaged in the experience to learn, to tune their instrument, and it's a very difficult way. So, how can the instrument be tuned? Well, by first providing the body, and I'm talking about mind, body, and spirit, every aspect of being to source of music, or could also be involving visuals and many other things, but I'm going to emphasize and focus on music because music is the most powerful tool.

And this is why it's the only thing that you find in common in all ceremonies, all... Right. You know, whether they're indigenous setting or shamanic and Eastern philosophical realms, and Hinduism, and Buddhism, the chants, the mantra, and sutra systems, and Western music, and... Yeah, all the Abrahamic ones. Yeah, all the Abrahamic religions, precisely. So, when we are in a situation where something so profound, like the concept you've attended, where overtone-emitting instruments are being used, that basically model to us how to realign with source with the complex system, the harmonic series, as often described as the living God, to model to us how, in what being in tune with me and like, and how to be engaged. Now, there's another very important aspect that we, as Westerners, know very little about, is how to listen, the proper way of listening, how to be engaged in the act of listening.

We call it in the West, deep listening, but this is in certain realms. Not a lot of people know what it means, but they can infer what it means. But I would like to call it judicious listening, judicious listening, intentional, intentional, keeping the mind present, getting the mind out of the way, allowing the person to focus their attention on the music, and our attention is the spotlight, our consciousness. Yes, yes. So, when the mind wanders to just bring it back to the sound and to observe and to learn to observe things that we don't know that they're there, we have to remember that that which is not there doesn't exist for us, and it's very important to come to that awareness and to notice that which is there, and we don't know it's there, but when we start to know that it's there, many things change. That's what consciousness needs to expand, to fine-tune awareness, and ability to zero in on something to quiet the mind, quiet the monkey mind, to quiet the chatter, this mental diarrhea that's with us all the time, and how much is connected to reality, the way we feel, and the way we think, and how we create reality in fractal forms.

Yes. So, sound, if we really listen intentionally, and that's how we listen to ancient musical cultures that continue to exist, this is how we really find the deepest pleasure in listening to Indian classical music that you mentioned in a bit. Understanding what the Raghas are about, what the Tala is, the rhythmic modes, the melodic modes are the Raghas, and the rhythmic mode is the Tala. So, there are different divisions of time and frequency. So, all intervals, musical intervals are mathematical ratios. Fifth, for example, the distance between C and G or D and A, or F and C, that's called a perfect fifth. Fifth is three to two ratio, a major second, another interval, the distance between C and D, or D and E, it's a nine to eight ratio. So, when we listen to music, pure music, played in non-equal temperate scales, which means that we're using pure harmony, or just intonations, an intonation that fits the tuning of the harmonic series, we are actually using the most powerful force in the world.

But if we don't encounter this most powerful force with our mindset, which is the intention, the intention, the attention, the will and the awareness, we're not going to fully benefit. This music and sound are very powerful tools, and these tools can act on us without us knowing how to perfectly use these tools. However, when we learn more and more how to use these tools, to unlock the power of sound, everything changes, right, right. So, sound in this case can allow the person to vibrate sympathetically, because when we're listening to these instruments, or even to normal music, even music that's incapacitated, there are many changes that happen in us.

However, when we listen to music that's not incapacitated, we found a great level of affect on our brainwave cycles that can be measured using electroencephalography, EEG, and I've done these studies, and people can look at my website, and it can affect the heart rate variability, how the heart speaks to the brain, and how it can affect the brain more than the brain can affect the heart. This is something that we learned about recently through HeartMath Institute Research. Sound also affects our autonomic nervous system, the system that runs the machine over all the time, but it gets affected by stress.

Right, it can affect the vagus nerve, the most central nervous system, and basically even our microtubules vibrate sympathetically. These are small, tiny, really, really the tiniest part in our body. They're found, they're conveyor belt structures that are found in the cytoplasm area, which is the area that is between the nucleus and the ectoplasm in cells and neurons. Basically, we are designed to vibrate sympathetically with sound, pure sound. All of these things are happening in the body, but when we give sound more attention, eventually, if everything is right, we feel elevated, elated, deep in a transcendental state, even a psychedelic state, and eventually start to deal with various archetypes, the healer, teacher archetypes, and even the god archetype, which is inside of us, which is a form of ethos. Can you talk a little bit about identifying and relating to the archetypes and either your personal experience or just something you've noticed throughout the years?

Well, they're very, very complex to understand. I also understand that just by talking about them, you can provoke or evoke archetypes to emerge. I'm abundantly aware of the unconscious and the collective unconscious, and now these things kind of constellate in our own consciousness, too, so I get it. Exactly. This is what we need to focus on. This is the only thing that will bring humanity together. Humanity that's so passionate and so misled indoctrinated and arrogant sometimes, because of a simple thing, look at how something really profound and necessary, which is the need to want to believe in something that can cause us to be separated.

And people nowadays, in the word, are carrying each other over who's God is more merciful. Yeah, and they have been for a while. Exactly. So maybe that should tell us about the nature of these Abrahamic religions. And people don't find that it's odd to have three different religions, but wait, even in one religion, let's say Christianity, we have Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodox, even within Protestants, we have many different denominations. The same thing in Islam, you have Sunid, Alawit, and Shiit, and Druze, which is not an offshoot, that's complex. So all of these divisions, categories, and subcategories, and sub-subcategories. And coincidentally, these religions, they're denominations and sects, and every derivation that can come out of that, even the moment church, and everything else, Scientology. Each group finds that they're the best in what they believe in is better than the others. That's the human detriment. The detriment of human believers, and that's the human condition, and there should be no judgment. It's just a very important observation.

For us to grow up, we need to understand the human condition. We need to understand how something that is innate and inherent and so important to us can cause us to be separated from other human beings, because a feeling of superiority that whatever we believe in is better than everyone else. Right, and I would almost argue that that might not be human nature. It is certainly a human nature to believe in something, but to have the ultimate cultural appropriation where you then have to elevate certain levels of things and make distinctions, that's where that stems from, and that pollutes these things, because the truth is the deeper I investigate, every religion, every philosophy, every mystic, whatever is going on across the eons, you can see some very pure and beautiful things in all of this, but what then you inevitably end up seeing is a person getting their hands on this and recognizing the inherent or even relative power of these types of belief systems, and then totally co-opting them and screwing it up.

Why this becomes pragmatically useful for us is that sound is this gateway that if we tune our attention and awareness to opens up these inner mysteries within ourselves, that we don't have to have something mediated by someone else. Listen, I was born Jewish. I believe in Jesus. I believe in Christ's consciousness. It doesn't mean I'm going to go fight wars for Jesus, because I believe in him. It means that I am able to take the things that resonate with me, recognize their value as confirmation, as validation from whatever is intuitively coming out of me, and if something resonates there, that's great. But sound also gives us this direct kind of path, experiential path, I'll point out too, which is to me, that's my arbiter of truth, is my direct experience.

And I mean, not just my thoughts and perspective on my direct experience, but when I leave some situation, this is why psychedelics have such a profound effect on so many people is, that was happening. You can write it off as a hallucination as much as you want, but you experience that and it sticks with you because of that. So, I mean, I find this to be the literal nexus of what I'm interested in my life, because I have naturally gravitated towards sound and music, and also intuitively, and luckily, downloaded in my brain somehow, some of these ideas that you're speaking about, and they certainly as time goes on linearly, at least, seem to continue to line up. I mean, the synchronicities I've had with sound, music, numbers, archetypes alone, I mean, it's enough to fill a book. So, I find this, this is just totally fascinating. I mean, there's, I want to touch on some of the questions you sent over too, because they just stood out to me, but what, you mentioned something in one of the questions about disinformation and misinformation and sound, and I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are on that. Yes, well, first of all, I'm in full agreement with everything you said, and the three most powerful things that can engage the person in exploring the divine, being with God, and these are tools that humans have always used up until recently, and some of them became banned, and the others became modified are compounds, which are chemicals, psychedelics, plant, teachers, whatever you want to call them. Sound is the second one, and of course, music comes out of that, and phenomenology, and you can include in their meditation, mindfulness, contemplation, which is the act of observation, and the direct experience is the most powerful thing. However, if we know, if we learn more how to be in the direct experience, how to observe, how not to label things, how to be open, curious, non-judgmental, and attentive, judicious, and able to understand by being an experience and not have to worry about wanting to put it in a phrase, then we can experience the divine, the concept of God. Now, this doesn't happen so much because we are indoctrinated, we are mind-controlled, and this is what we have to grow out of.

This stray jacket, now, we are wearing and think that it's an ornament, and that's what causes people to kill each other over who God is more merciful. So, we are not, it's not something that we do automatically, but because of our conditioning, the setting to us, and that's something that I can talk a lot about, and thanks for bringing this aspect out, that it's not just in human condition, this is where we are, but it's also people who know more than others, and these people, we can call them the elite or the one percent, far less than one percent, and those who are in control basically are dubbing down society and conditioning people, and so basically, how does this happen in various ways? Well, part of the human condition is to observe that when we know very little, we tend to brag and boast about how much we know and what we believe in in our ability to heal. Sound healing is not a term I would use, I would never call myself a sound healer. I know what people mean by it, and I can understand that this is the commonly used term, but I always gently correct people that this is not the most appropriate term, very briefly, here's why I've written a piece on it that people can read on my website, it's called, why not just call it sound healing, because sound healing means that someone is healing someone else, we don't know if it's the practitioner or the heater, God forbid, or sound itself, but it does not engage the person in the experience as an active participant right, so it's a little bit gimmicky, it promises a lot in doing very little or nothing, I call it what it is, sound therapy or sound meditation, which is better, which means the person receiving is engaged in the experience, and the best way to do so is to be an active participant, to be listening, to learn how to use it tools, to apply the mind, so on and so forth, I can also talk a lot about this aspect. So because people are so passionate and they want to help others, some people may go and take a workshop and sound healing on Saturday afternoon over weekend, or over a week, and they become sound healers and masters, or even in Reiki, Reiki Master is something that people can get over a weekend, or two weekends, or let's say a month maximum, I'm still a master over a month, how is that, I mean this is preposterous, how can we accept this, where is it coming from, well the desire, the desire to want to help others to feel good about the self, so the ego becomes right involved very easily, so we need to awaken from that, we need to realize that for us to be lost, the good hegemonic system has to involve us in the process, so that we can act in that system, propel it, and use it against ourselves, and defend it even, so our ego can empower these systems that create the disinformation, the social engineering, and the social design, take for example this, so so many people now are debating whether 440 hertz, is the modified version of what it should be, which should be 432 hertz, which means starting the tuning of A on 432 hertz, instead of 440 hertz, because of the mathematics, blah blah blah, possibly maybe we need more studies, I'm not against that, I'm skeptical, I like more studies, and not just someone's conjecture, or confabulation, or some conjuring up of data, or pure passion for example, to release things, but they're based on either wishful thinking and wishful believing, which can turn into misinformation, or release things with the intention to mislead people, which can become disinformation, so the reason why I think that the 432 versus 440 hertz is disinformation, or misinformation, or both, because it's not the most important thing, the most important thing that no one is talking about, or very, very, very few people are talking about, is the fact that what we need to address is equal tempered octave versus non-equal tempered octave, the effect of an equal tempered octave is dramatically more impactful than non-equal temperament, that means you're not going to lose the state of trials, you're not going to be separated from the most powerful force in nature and the universe, sound, which is vibration, energy, and frequency, in Nikola Tesla, just as a reminder said, one understands the universe, think of vibration, frequency, and energy, and sound is all three, so sound is the most powerful force in the universe, but also the most destructive, he also added that if you want to split the earth in two halves, you need to find the prime resonant frequency, so basically 432 versus 440 is very, very minimally important, but not nearly as important as what we need to research, something such as the detriment of equal temperament, there's a great book called how equal temperament ruined harmony and why you should care, it's really wonderful, so people need to learn more about that and not just about 432 versus 440, I'm not saying that 440 is the better frequency and I'm not saying it's, let's move on, it's not important, it misses the point a bit. It misses the point, no, it can be important, but it's not as important and people may not understand why I'm saying this, because it's quite convoluted and we tend to shy away from anything that's difficult and we tackle the the little thing that we can, people have no clue how difficult it is to delve deep into sound studies, the level of abstruse mathematics that one has to deal with with acoustics, with biochemistry, with neuroscience and phenomenology, philosophy and ontology, so many things, I mean that's why I keep on saying that the best way to understand sound is to take a multidisciplinary approach, so these are all very important matters and people have to become, we are forced to become better researchers if we want to understand the difference between believing in the right thing and the wrong thing and how much it'll save us time and energy, we need to research things and not just take someone else's word, even a good friend, even an intelligent person, even if you want to be on the right track, don't follow the majority, throughout this being misled, this has been many motor for many years and it's been reworking, I hope I get to a point where this motor doesn't work anymore, but so far it's working, yeah, people can research, you know, and all these things about chakras and their correlation to notes, there is no evidence, I'm sorry, this is based on wishful thinking and wishful believing or things taken out of context or some, someone mentioned something in Indian music, but then if we compare Indian musical system with the Tibetan realized that all different notes affect different chakras and so who's right, five chakras were seven first, how many chakras, first of all, are talking about seven the customers, yeah, or they're going to be 12, are they going to be the million, the thousands of them, yeah, I mean, it's a complex system that if we just start pulling pieces from every which way to form a story that makes sense to us, isn't really going to work, that's not to say there isn't some underlying unity behind it, of course, it's just that it is wise to be, take the necessary precautions rather than just weaving something together and I found that out myself in my own life, I consider myself someone who believes in a lot of different things, some of those beliefs have fallen off and some of those beliefs were constructed in retrospect looking at things that I wanted to believe, so I think that the more experience, that's a learning experience just to be clear, like it doesn't mean caution yourself, don't believe in anything, that's I think the exact wrong approach, however, there is some validity and I think the people who are really delving into this stuff, what struck me when you were saying that people are eager to believe things that are much more simple than complex, it's how many people subscribe to Freudian theories versus Jungian theories, the reason is it's very simple and anyone who's read any amount of Jung knows this, it's the densest shit in the entire world, it's painstakingly written and researched and oh my god and it's much easier to be like oh everything is related to sex and our parents, I'm gonna go with that, so it's just like there are layers to this, it doesn't mean you have to necessarily dive as deep as you and I or someone else, it just means that you and I are interested in discovering the relationship between the modality of sound and these spiritual, physical, emotional benefits that that can have in a practical sense, so this maybe can evoke enlightened and transcendental states, but I think we still live in the world while we're here, we use these things practically, so I want, I'm gonna end with three questions, then I have one big question, Alexander, I would love to do this again sometime too, where are you located? In New York City? Okay great, so I'm actually about to head into the city in a couple hours, I'm about two hours north in the Hudson Valley, but I would love to potentially do another one of these, we can set it up off air because this has been fantastic, it's been a wonderful conversation, so let me ask you my quick questions here, so what is your favorite color?

It changes, that's okay, between blue and orange, I like both actually, I'm drawn to both, yeah, I love that, I like that juxtaposition there, what is your favorite number? I don't have one, anyone that you pops in your head right now? 12, there you go, that was actually the last one someone said, and this is the first time I had heard it, and I commented on it, what is your favorite animal? Mircats, cool, that's the first time somebody says Mircat, Mircats are awesome, I love their curiosity, intelligence, and camaraderie, and the familiar sense they have, and yeah, that's awesome, they're cute and funny, yeah, that's so great, that's a really great answer, all right, and last question, what's a practical tip that is, you could share with people listening, that's helped you in your life? Wow, it's easier for me to rattle a couple of dozens, a couple of dozens than one, you and me both, say as many as you feel appropriate, say as many as you feel appropriate, yeah, I'm okay if you pick, sure, be curious, exercise your intuition to greater level than you think you have it, follow your heart, or as Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss, observe very attentively how you use your time and energy, and be skeptical, and use your imagination to greater level than what you normally experience.

So I'm going to say those are the best tips I think anyone has given at the end of this, and I've done 90 some of these, so amazing, thank you, Alexandra, so much for doing this, we'll be in touch soon, I'll let you know when it comes out, and I'll have, I'll reach out to you about any links or things you would want me to promote on the episode page or the intros, but really, this has been such a pleasure, and I'm really grateful and thankful to Michael Philip for introducing us. Yes, yes indeed, thank you very much, Noah, it was a pleasure to be on. Cool, we'll talk soon. Okay, bye-bye, bye. (music)

Thank you for being a friend, traveled down the road and back again, your heart is true, you're a pal in a coffee dump, and if you do party, invite it everyone you knew, you will see the biggest gift would be for me, and become attached would say thank you for being a friend, and, and, and, and, and, oh, damn, wow, how's that for sounding music? Thank you for listening to this episode, I will see you next week, thank you Patrick for being an awesome Patreon supporter, bye-bye. Polymarket is proud to be the world's top choice to trade football. You mean soccer? Right, soccer. Polymarket is proud to be the world's top choice to trade soccer. Know the game better than the market? You can earn cash trading on tournament and game outcomes, golds, assists, saves, corners, and much, much more. Download the Polymarket app and use code free50 to unlock $50 free for your first trade. Trading not available in all jurisdictions, check local regulations before trading, restrictions and eligibility apply.