Quote from Inside the Music

Inside the Music: Conversations with Contemporary Musicians about Spirituality, Creativity, and Consciousness

by Dimitri Ehrlich 

Shambhala Publications, Boston, Massachusetts   © 1997   240 pp.

Features interviews with Perry Farrell, Philip Glass, Joan Osborne, Ziggy Marley, Mick Jagger, Meredith Monk, Moby, Iggy Pop, Michael Franti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Allen Ginsberg, Jeff Buckley, Dead Can Dance, Al Green, Billy Bragg, Leonard Cohen, The Reverend Nun, Robyn Hitchcock, PM Dawn, and Vernon Reid.

"About ten years ago, while writing and recording some songs, I began to wonder about the impact that meditation could have on the process of creating music. My mother had given me my first instruction in meditation--what she called sensory awareness--when I was about ten years old, while she and my father were doing research for an article on meditating with the whole family (think Brady Bunch, mid-seventies hippies style). But it wasn't until a decade later that I began to practice meditation in earnest and to experience the subtle shifts in consciousness that can accompany any other consistent, formal practice of mindfulness.

It wasn't anything earthshaking. It wasn't even about doing anything. It was the realization that just being attentive to what goes on in your mind, the very fact of awareness, changes what goes on in your mind. That's all. It's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to consciousness: things observed behave differently than things unobserved."  (p.1)