I do not want these albums to be obscure, but they are. Even the ones I take for granted — by famous bands like Kraftwerk, remain unknown to so many! This is why musical evangelism is so important. Lacking magic and prophecy, we have the next best thing, perhaps the only thing: art. And we are privileged to live at the moment that the music can be recorded and played back at will. This is no achievement to be taken for granted. We are living in awesome times.

I am listening to Shri Camel by Terry Riley. This is a work of divine inspiration, or perhaps human inspiration masquerading as divine. It might not matter. The point is that this is so beautiful and powerful as to melt the boundaries and liberate us. This is a Key!

There are others… I’m certain you know of them. Works so special they argue for the existence of something more profound than anything offered in exoteric practice. These are what matter. All the rest of our actions matter only as the substrata, the infrastructure, the lattice supporting these inspirations.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

• View all posts by Aharon N. Varady →
• website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+

“Music Evangelism” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.