greetings everyone michelle grander and here welcome to another episode of positive energy they're going up in lighting television for your evolving soul my guest on this show is david david as a singer songwriter guitarist author and professor he's been playing traditional as well as modern folk music for over thirty years is music and message are truly inspiring the don't touch that right we'll be satisf ski david welcome to positive energy and thank you for being here thank you it's an honor to be here so let's start by talking about your music you are a musician long time when and where did you develop your love of folk music and who influenced your style right well i was mostly a rock n roller and i think it was when i first heard bob dylan and then peter paul and mary and tom paxton and that's when i got into folk music so that was back in college  when everybody was getting into that type right and i was actually a little later than some i've met some people my age or around my age who were getting into it earlier than me so i was a little bit of a late comer which is nice i didn't get burned out right away so that's when you started playing in yeah i started getting into it in college but i really didn't become professional until much later you want to hear how i became professional how it started yeah my daughter was going to p d s for a couple of years and we went to the auditorium and they asked the parents if the parents could do anything i said i play guitar so they they asked me to do a little performance of sea shanties and in the audience was the director of the one of the children's programs in new jersey says she hired me so i became a professional children's performer and then that continued to evolve and i started performing and adults you know ever since then they started with children work perform other people's music that i love so much of it to me it's a it's about social justice for the primarily it's also about deep feeling and deep understanding and a lot of it is very philosophical and i do a lot of leonard cohen very philosophical ever but it's never irrelevant i would definitely agree with that so what would be your hope for the music that you play and i know we know music is healing music by design brings people together what have you seen with that and what your hope yeah the hope that that conscience gets touched and continues to rise and become active it looks as if conscience is having some problems these days so we're trying to i'm actually going to be doing a show dylan since he became the nobel laureate i've done whole shows bob dylan so there's going to be picking out his songs that are particularly focused on social justice and you think you know music makes it easier for people to accept the message because you know of the sound of music and  invitation that music is music reaches all of the brains all of the centers right the intellect the emotions and the body so it's holistic in that  sense yeah yeah and all of that is subconscious of course right realize how music is touching our heart and evoking emotions right it's up conscious and it becomes conscious when you become conscious of it yeah right yeah wakes us up in the best possible way so let's talk a little bit about your book yeah you wrote a book right and your book is right and gurdjieff right sexuality and the evolution of consciousness we rarely see those two things in the same sentence together hi you know and it relates to your being a student of the fourth way right which is a system of in her development and gurdjieff is a modern day mystic who traveled and sought to uncover an ancient wisdom could you say a little bit about his message what inspired you to write the book right well his message is that as we all are as human beings are for the most part we're asleep with mechanical and we're asleep and his work is to try to help us wake up that was the scientist in in the twentieth century who had been a student of freud and took freud's concept of libido sex energy seriously and studied it and came to the conclusion that it's an actual physical energy freud had been looking for it he couldn't find it rush thinks that he did find it and did experiments to prove its existence and so for rice the sexuality sexual health is very important and  put the two and together to try to show how you can be spiritually growing and also be healthy sexually and how important the two are together so what are some of the the practical implications for that for people to take well that one of the most important implications is that you don't need to be celibate you don't need to give up the physical life if you want to develop spiritually right a lot of people think that you do and there are of course many system one that can tell you the other out yes a lot of people think so so that's why i wrote this book to try to indicate that i don't think it's but it's necessary to a different context to frame it differently yes it's something certainly natural to being human right and it actually leads to spiritual growth and spiritual expansion and there are systems that have been saying that for many thousands of years like tantric yoga for example yes and so what's usually the response when you do lecture on your book and you talk about your book do you find people very open to the ideas or not so better just depends usually when i lecture on the book it's to it's to groups of people that are interested in the subject so they're usually very very open to it i lecture on many many different topics and i try to lecture on topics that the that the audience would be interesting and so the oh yeah right i give a lecture on the ethics of torture to three different groups last year  and that would that went over well with three different groups of mostly senior definitely and your people audience right so sail a bit more about some of the you know you know you've been going around speaking and teaching for many years that you teach and they've said to me you know your classes in philosophy religion are all like introduction to the good g fork even though i don't actually ever say that in the classes so in other words to me the teachings of waking up of consciousness evolution  in philosophy and in all the religions you just have to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff to find them so it's in plato and it's an error startle and it's and can't and it's in islam and it's in christianity and it's in judaism so to me that's what i'm teaching i'm teaching how to work on yourself to evolve yeah and so people will find that message some of them because it's a universal message it right and they might not they might not be open to it so they might not see it so some of the students are there just to get the grade some of the students are there to to take a nice rest you know but then there's always going to be some students that are really interested in going deeper and i and that's so you know react responds to the message so if you believe in this idea of that there is a shift there's a shift happening there's so much to it on a large scale on a large on a large scale on a large scale the way i see al right on a large scale i see there's a kind of struggle going on between those who want to evolve and those who are afraid of evolution and are just interested in their own greed and it's and it's a struggle it's been going on probably for a long long long time and now with modern media and everything we can see it pretty clearly i don't know who's going to win but i'll just keep working and we'll all just keep working for what we can do right well to stay on the leading edge of trying to move in the direction that feels best to us that is towards awakening collective awakening and right consciousness raising exactly we don't know what the tipping point may be if there is such a thing you know we don't yet so we just have to do that's why i'm doing the show exact langley right to bring some more light into the world to cause people to think in this in this way so how about you know for you personally i know that what you teach obviously is your passion it's what you believe in so how do you draw from that personally how has doing that affected your personal life and what's your personal spiritual practice right how does that look where you are you can't teach this work is without doing it i mean you can try but you teach what you are not what you say i believe that so if i'm not working on myself to try to become more awake every moment that i can then my teaching is worth nothing so that's how it mostly affects me but i keep it keeps me on my toes yeah you learn best when you teach you probably know that most people most teachers know that teaching on the right way to learn i'm touching it i'm more awake and more conscious when i'm doing that right so i try to and i try to bring it into my life with my wife with my friends with my children with my grand i have one grandson so you know i try to i try to bring do it all the time so it's stay aware of it and being conscious and observing yourself and observing yourself as you're relating and applying it in those situations do you do any form of meditation or or more just contemplation well i do practice touchy which is form of meditation i do have a whole yoga routine that i do and achieve that i do every day which is a form of  meditation in terms of sitting meditation i do do some sitting meditation with susanna the rosa who is the touchy inspiration structure she brings she does it with us usually almost every week and on my own i think of myself as practicing what is called fourth way meditation g four it is another name for it which is meditating on the run so in other words right now if i'm actually doing it right i'm actually meditating now in other words i'm observing myself and i'm trying to remember one thing that you can tell people right now that will be almost like a a montra or a trigger for them to remember that well i think that the first thing so to speak is to realize that you're not awake that you're not observing yourself so if you can observe that at that moment i was not awake i was not observing myself that's the first step towards this whole process and the more you do that the more it grows and then you can also oh there's a lot of literature out there that can help help people grow and i still have a school in the fourth way and we meet periodic lee i see people independently so if anybody wanted to study with me they can find me and that's a possibility  right but i love the idea of just pausing and saying am i awake right now right am i aware right now and if not let me wake up let me be observant and witnessing me and what's happening in this particular moment right  you want to say thing about you know maybe locally where you where you play the most and anything about your music that you have produced that you put out there yes well i'm i'm going to be performing in  new hope at a new venue for crows in february and then i perform reg and i hope that becomes a regular and then i'm going to be performing in somerville in march at the dragon fly caf perform in roosevelt every year i perform at the princeton center for yoga and health regularly i do have a website which as all of my upcoming performances and lectures as well so it's a mostly local sometimes i will performing in pennsylvania at my college and sometimes i'll go into new york you know i'll get a gig there and you have a team of musicians i have a group that go around with you yeah and it depends on where when and who's available it's called i'll do one of the loud two songs so it's the soundtrack to philosophy right almost exactly and that's your spin on things i think that's what makes you unique and your music unique as well and it also has such a message to it right yeah so speaking of messages you have some some final thoughts what you really really really want to leave people with well if we don't wake up we're not going to be around to keep intellect our understanding hasn't that hasn't evolved along with the technology or technology is way ahead of our understanding so i mean can you know you give fire to it to a bunch of children right  or so that's the problem so we want to try to raise that understanding as fast as we can on a large enough scale so that we can balance things out so that we can continue to evolve and that's that to me that's an important thing we can try to do yeah and any thoughts on why it is going in that direction it's just i mean it's just too many factors to be able to add them all up i i believe yeah ultimately i think it's just that the human race has evolved intellectually technologically faster than it's evolved emotionally and why that's happened maybe it's easier to evolve intellectually the way our brains are set up i don't know but that seems to be the case don't you think i've seen that yeah yeah it seems best to be that's more of our default it's just more of what will happen if we don't make some effort yeah i mean our technology is absolutely unbelievable every time i make a phone call every time yeah you know they get on the internet and you drive over these bridges i mean it you know raise it up salute lee amazing you know what it can do yeah but unlimited potential unlimited potential intellectually but we also unlimited potential spiritually right and we want to try to catch up we want those to be in sync with when i would be nice ok so that's a really beautiful message thank you so thank you they've ever has before that message and for the songs and the music and the difference that you're making in the world thank you thank you so much they are kno i like to close with one of my favorite quotes from marianne williamson your playing small doesn't serve the world there is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you you shine your light you automatically give others permission to do the same thank you monday morning flowers in princeton for the beautiful floral arrangement thank you for watching please visit michelle grandma or dot