The Blessing & the Bliss These songs come from spirit! I’d like to try and explain that here… I don’t sit down with an intention to compose or with any plan in mind, rather I am guided by spiritual imagination and intuition… by what feels certainly to me a manifestation of the Holy Spirit; an impulse to represent a depiction of higher love in song. I work as a qualified spiritual psychotherapist too, and when I sit with people I make full use of my trained skills, but it’s actually a clairvoyant intuition that guides me to the source of their issues. There is a language of psychology that talks of complexes, neurosis, pathology and so on, but I also see spirits, demons, angels, elemental beings and entities. This is the realm of shamanic healing… the mythological world of spirit that lies in the subtle realms beyond the purely physical. In truth we descend from spirit, and all human psychological issues are in fact the fallout from false ego assumptions about the divine, that somatize and cause dismay or distress. So the healing required comes from spiritual awareness. The spiritual realm lies outside time and space in the eternal, and proceeds from the divine impulse of love. My songs also come from this place. It says ‘therapist’ on my business card, but in truth I am a ghost-buster and soul-detective! In the same way, it says ‘musician’ on another business card, but in truth I am a messenger; a postman. I am guided to compose these songs from the impulse of cosmic love. They talk of other worlds, of love, longing, loss, sacrifice, bliss, blessing, eternity and home-coming, and they invoke higher beings such as Christ, Sophia, the Archangel Michael, Elijah and the angels of the elements. I go to the piano to heal my own heart first of all, with melody, mantra and rhythm. Then poetry comes into my consciousness, and I interact with it until a song is born. Sometimes it comes through in twenty minutes, other times in three hours, and afterwards I can feel dazed and elated, as if to say ‘wow, where did that come from?’ I could never dream up these narratives with my intellect alone… I often channel a song without fully understanding it; only later do I come to reflect on the meaning. I am transported to another zone during these times, and also when I film for videos to the songs. I now know this to be the Christ spirit speaking to me and through me, orchestrated by the Archangel Michael. In this album there are thirteen such songs, and even that was suggested to me by this inner holy voice… thirteen; the twelve and the one; the one being the mysterious stranger. One sees this twelve and one configuration variously; in Christ and the disciples; in King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and in Christian Rosenkreutz and the Initiates of the Rosy Cross. It emanates from the twelve stages of the zodiac, with the sun-hero at its centre… the cosmic configuration of the divine. The mysterious stranger in this case… the thirteenth song… I called ‘O my Jesus be sweet to me’. It was the last to be born, as it were, and it came after a near-death experience where I accepted Christ into my heart. Here, it is just me and the piano. There is the feel of a gospel in it. It describes the seven initiations of Christ as a passion in the human soul. This does not mean that I call myself Christian in any regularly understood way. I am not a Christian, and have no ideology, affiliation or creed. Rather, I am guided by and fully in love with the Christ… and by the Christ I also mean the Dao; the intense love of God for humanity; the Spirit behind the physical. The Dao is the dewdrop… the microcosm of God’s eternal love. The Christ is a spirit… a state of grace preceding the historical Jesus, and coming into the physical body of a mortal human being that one time only. These songs are mystical expressions of eternal love. Several of these songs are written for my muse and twin-flame who guided me to the gates of perception faithfully and then withdrew, gracefully. I performed the same sacred task for her. Into those songs I pour my gratitude, faith, undying love and sense of sorrow, sacrifice and loss. These songs are called: ‘Do you love me still?’, a hypnotic love-ballad written on my soul-mate’s birthday in Budapest, where she lives (October 18th); ‘Be’ an invocation to ‘be yourself’ and to ‘be here now’ in the style of a French chanson; ‘Clouds like angels’, a piano-based ballad; ‘Crumbling walls’; ‘I suffer your silence’; ‘The pleasure was all mine’, and ‘Until we meet again’. ‘Crumbling walls’ came after a dream in which the temple walls of a mystery school crumbled and I escaped with my love… at the time that my twin-flame withdrew into herself, ending our physical connection, in order to foster spiritualisation in her soul, and to free me to do the same thing. This renunciation is a spiritual sacrifice of the highest nobility. ‘The pleasure was all mine’ is a piano-based ballad directly honouring our sweet intimacy and divine connection, and ‘Until we meet again’ is an epic thirty-three verse narrative charting our many incarnations, clustered around a gently thundering tabla beat. Musically, these ballads are gentle and natural… folk-songs, lullabies and fairy-tales, with piano, guitar, skin-drums and choral sustains. ‘I suffer your silence’ alone is more ambient and dreamy. Lyrically they are all shamanic, dream-like offerings that echo the poems of Rumi and Hafiz… ecstatic verses woven around Love, Lover and Beloved. They seem simple, even child-like, but they are sweet transmissions of pure love, direct from source. I know them to be more than songs… they are parables and healings. They are atomic; the greatest is contained in the smallest. Then there are songs from spirit that are not channeled through my muse. ‘Old man’; ‘We weep for your son’; ’Spiritual love’; ‘The lightning seed’ and ‘When we sleep’. These are cosmic and esoteric troubadour songs, inspired by the love of life itself, rather than by my love for one individual. But even when I channel through my muse, the song that emerges is both for her, personally, but also for life… for God. A homage to and adoration of the divine. ‘Old man’ is a country-style ballad in a minor key; up-tempo, uplifting and yet not without sorrow. ‘We weep for your son’ is also up-tempo and like something of a Hebrew folk-song, honouring the birth of Christ in humanity with the death of the God on the cross. ‘Spiritual love’ is a folk-hymn for piano and soft skin-drum; ‘The lightning seed’ refers to the Christ impulse in the cosmos going right back to Zoroastrian times, and contains a sacred invocation in that tongue, powered by shamanic drumming, Persian lutes and thunderclaps! ‘When we sleep’ is a vision of how the Gods inhabit our being to protect us at night, when our ego and astral body depart. It is a stately lullaby woven around an Italianate pizzicato melody. These thirteen songs… the twelve and the one… together make up “The Blessing & the Bliss”; seventy minutes of heart-centered, spiritually-themed higher love ballads.