Los Angeles, CA –

There is a truism that we are a species blessed with self-consciousness. However, this is part of a massive misunderstanding or more accurately, misperception.

What we are “blessed” with is a collective neurosis that makes an error in logic appear to be a step on the road of evolution. In this sense self-consciousness is an oxymoron, meaning there is no such object as the “self” and consciousness is simply what is, the point at which our thought-of-as-disparate senses come together and converge into their actual whole.

What is the object of this perception of assumed self-consciousness? What self is the self supposedly conscious of? Is it a physical sensation that is being described? For example, the fact that you can see your own hand? Try to not see your hand with it in front of your face and your eyes open. Pass it over a flame and attempt to not feel it.

There is no “turning-off” consciousness and we are therefore not in control of it. It follows from this that “consciousness” does not exist, for we can only know something by not knowing it. We cannot stop thinking, seeing or feeling, even if for some reason we wanted to try. Eyes that are no longer there still “see”. This has been shown by experiments with tactile responses electronically transmitted through the tongue eventually taking the place of blinded eyes. The participants had the exact sensation of sight, of seeing the objects in front of them.

In addition, the idea of being self-conscious implies that we know what its negative means, to be not self-conscious. This is like trying to stop the wind from blowing or the moon from rising. Try as we might it will happen regardless of wishing, hoping or thinking really hard about it.

The way that self-consciousness is used in day-to-day language is somewhat more useful, if still mistaken. What most of us mean by saying that someone is “self-conscious” is that they are conscious of the way that they assume other people perceive them, usually negatively. Someone is only “self-conscious” if they are acting nervously and are worried, or have convinced themselves, that the people around them perceive them negatively. What the self-conscious individual hasn’t realized is that there is no self to be worried about, no person to defend, no method to hold back the ocean’s waves.

Music is a good example of something that provides a window on the eternal nature of man. Taken out of its pop-culture milieu and the relatively recent historical development that it can be bought and sold, music is a good example of the irrational, non-understandable nature of consciousness.

In most industrialized cultures music has been wholly divorced from the masses. Meaning, people do not create music as they once did and for the most part do not play or sing music. At one time stories were told, loves were gained or lost, and much of life was sung as opposed to talked about. No longer.

The idea of the band playing on the decks of a doomed and sinking Titanic is an interesting way to convey this idea of the irrationality, or the non-being, of music and perhaps ultimately of the nature of man.

Nearer My God to Thee was supposedly the song they played as the ship went down into the cold waters of the north Atlantic. But why did they keep playing? Why not throw themselves overboard? Why not get drunk or beat someone up for a spot on a lifeboat?

Perhaps as musicians they understood and knew the unknowable. The feeling that music can evoke of a relaxation of the mistake of self-perception, the movement of the thoughts towards something other than the obsession with self, and thereby the temporary dismantling of self-consciousness.

At that moment, as they kept playing, they might have grasped the significance of the prayer “it is by self-forgetting that one finds…it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life,” and thereby escaped the modern terror of a cold, lonely, death.