What Is The Conscious Music School?

By Simon Siddol, founder and head coach

At this crucial moment in our civilization’s development, with old cultural structures crumbling under the weight of publicly understood truth, being revealed for the systems of dis-empowerment and slavery that they truly are, our collective mind has been gifted an opportunity of structural dissolution and chaos in which we might melt down and reform many ideas that have been cast in iron for far too long. Not just our thoughts and ideas, but the very way that we think, feel, perceive and act on the world are in a state of flux and up for grabs right now. The time is ripe for a deep examination and re-evaluation of our beliefs, practices and structures. The harsh truth is, if we don’t do this work for our own good and all that we love, others will do it for us for exclusively their good. Thankfully, we are now in a time when investing in our own wisdom and authenticity can prevent this kind of philosophical takeover from the usual suspects.  

At this moment in time, The Conscious Music School has been founded with one such authentic and deep re-evaluation as it’s overarching goal: the re-evaluation and re-integration of the three practices of music, consciousness-raising and education into ONE practice, art-form and sociological phenomenon, in the service of wisdom, health and contentment for all of us. In other words, to cleanse of corruption and reinstate (in an adapted form for the modern world) the sacred office and holy duty of the Bard: a musician, magician and cultural guardian all in one. 

With it’s current influences and current levels of awareness, musical culture in the western world is suffering from a debasement of its higher functions and capacities. The average piece of music the average western music-consumer listens to currently is doing them slow but sure psychic damage. The average listener thinks this is as good as music gets. The average musician doesn’t know how to produce music that has any better effect on listeners. No wonder the value of music, as measured by the soul and the wallet, is at an all-time low. The market is flooded with uninspired, dehumanizing, industrialized ‘product’ to such a degree that finding better music is becoming a needle-in-a-haystack hunt. 

As with many other aspects of western society that don’t currently benefit it’s average member, the poor state of musical culture right now is no accident. To put it bluntly, the seemingly magical powers of music to alter the psyche of the listener have been corrupted, turned against us and then hidden from sight and memory. The dark forces ruling and shaping society that we are all becoming unavoidably aware of have been using music to keep us in a state of confused, dis-empowered slavery. The drip-by-drip method these sick people use to infiltrate whole civilizations’ systems of thought and behaviour can be traced back through historical events for more than a century, at the very least. The existence of groups using music with this nefarious controlling aim in mind can be traced back millennia.

This state of dilapidation can only be addressed and reversed by an act of will on the part of both musicians and audiences. Musicians offering inspired music to audiences still hooked on industrialized junk will find little connection. Audiences searching for something better will be disappointed by musicians who have not yet awoken to their true art and true role in society. What is required by both is a thorough re-evaluation of what music is for, which can only take place after people awaken to the truth of what music can do.  

It must be pointed out, both musicians and audiences with these subtler sensitivities and higher aims in mind do already exist, and yet in the current climate, their wishes and influences are heavily de-emphasized and hidden away by the clamour of the music industry, the press and even the musical education system as it currently stands. Scattered to the four winds like this, these musicians and audiences have no obvious societal centre from which to congregate, organize and build that better musical culture.  

This is where The Conscious Music School comes in. As well as having the aim of being a central focus and rallying point for these scattered musicians and audiences, the school aims to tackle these problems of decay, corruption and ignorance from three angles:

state-of-things-now

This diagram illustrates a condition of thought and practice currently found across the western world. Our culture is familiar with mixing the ideas of consciousness and education (1), consciousness and music (2) and education and music (3). 

These ideas manifest as: 

(1) Consciousness and education:

  • Self-development.

  • Institutes and individuals teaching methods of raising one’s consciousness, balancing soul, mind, emotions and body.

  • The reappraisal of teaching methods in the light of modern understandings in psychology and neurology.

  • The slowly re-emerging idea that education should teach how to think, not what to think. 

(2) Consciousness and music:

  • Songs with lyrics that invite or exhort awareness and conscience from the listener.

  • Singer-songwriters better described as ‘bards’.

  • Drum circles, community choirs, Tibetan gong and singing-bowl ‘bathers’.

  • Minimalism and Psy-trance electronica and its cousins, the 432Hz retuning trend.

  • Soundscapes using binaural beats and isochronous tones to alter brainwave frequencies. 

(3) Education and music:

  • Music schools and individual teachers who educate on the subjects of instrumental technique, practical musicianship, aural discrimination and history.

  • Music journalism.

  • Documentary films.

However, for each of these pairings of ideas, as our culture currently deals with them, a blind-spot of ignorance can be discerned where the third idea stands:

 (1) Consciousness and education without thought for music:

  • Teachings concerning self-development and consciouness-raising rarely if ever tackle the subject of music and its power to either catalyse our growing awareness or tear it back down.

  • This despite music’s influential power being up there with diet and habitual thought patterns, in terms of its capacity to make or break our consciousness-raising efforts.

  • Lyrical content with consciousness-raising aims being paired up with music that dulls the soul and the senses.

  • General quality of schooling being damaged by the mistaken idea that the removal of arts education in favour of more S.T.E.M. is advantageous to the less artistically inclined student.

(2) Consciousness and music without thought for education:

  • Widespread malevolently-intentioned mind-control using music: the alteration of consciousness without the conscious mind of the listener being engaged or even suspecting anything.

  • The lack of awareness in our culture that this situation is going on under our noses and at the back of our minds all the time.

  • The archetype of musician-as-educator (also known as bards, troubadours, shamen) being quantitatively swamped and drowned out by the archetype of musician-as-entertainer.

(3) Education and music without thought for consciousness:

  • A system of music education that generally ignores the whole phenomenon of how creating, performing and listening to music inevitably changes our conscious state.

  • Methods of education that emphasize the (overwhelmingly large) extant culture needing to be assimilated by the student, de-emphasizing the student’s inner psychic world and all the wisdom and capacities that may be found there.

  • A complete rejection/ignorance/avoidance of the idea within western educational culture that musicians have a responsibility to society, having been taught the means (if only subconsciously) of shaping that society with their output.

 

One of the main aims of The Conscious Music School is to re-inject a consideration of the missing third element into each of these idea-pairings, through public conversation, educational drives and practical music-making. 

There is a central balance-point between all these three subjects, for us all to consider anew. Thinking, feeling and acting from this central point has the power to eliminate all the blind-spots described above, and work to reduce their damaging effects on our culture as a whole.

triple-vesica-with-ear

Here, at this central meeting point, we perceive the mission domain of The Conscious Music School, and we see our logo; ‘The All-Hearing-Ear’, (surrounded by the enlightening rays of Contrapunctus 1 from J. S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue).

We have adopted and adapted the symbol of ‘The All-Hearing Ear’ as our logo, on one level as a symbol of increasing consciousness through music (and learning music consciously), and on another level as a public symbolic mockery of certain secret societies who hoard esoteric knowledge for themselves at the expense of society in general, and who are responsible at least in part for the appalling state of ignorance, self-denial and mental slavery that much of the modern world suffers from. 

Whether western society muddles through it’s current challenges to survive another day, or it truly has to crumble and burn before anything can be built with its ashes, The Conscious Music School aims to rediscover, revivify and rescue from total oblivion in memory the many aspects of western musical culture that serve our personal psyches and whole civilization for the betterment of all, not just because these concepts and practices are all under threat of extinction by forces that would like to negate the freedoms and spiritual victories of the European and American psyche, but because these elements of musical culture are some of the precious nuggets of wisdom that could make all the difference between a future culture shrouded in psychological darkness and fear, and a future culture we can actually look forward to, and send our children into with pride and excitement.