Source: CanadianPatriot.org
Learning how the sausage made is never easy. Disgust, horror, fascination are only some among the feelings we experience as we discover how many of our favorite foods are really made. But what about the songs and culture we consume? How often do we get to see how they’re really made?
Since the time of Plato and his Republic, politics has been understood as essentially downstream from culture. The songs and art we emote with and the stories which capture our hearts and minds shape our affective systems and color our imaginations in ways that are hard to quantify. Indeed, the effects are nearly impossible to measure because they permeate all facets of our being, including the unconscious and automatic dimensions. As a result, the consequences of various cultural phenomena may often only become apparent years after they’ve weaved their magic and cast their spells over generations.
So, why not take a closer look at some of the most popular artists of our times and get to know the wizards behind the magic? In our immediate times, two of global pop superstar Lady Gaga’s spiritual and artistic mentors stand out.
Take, for example, Fernando Garibay. Known as a Mexican-American Polymath, record producer, songwriter, entrepreneur, author, and academic, Garibay describes himself as someone who teaches creativity and helps pop stars “find themselves.” One of the leading artists behind the artists, Garibay served as a musical mentor for Lady Gaga and now teaches creativity as a skill to World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leaders.
In his own words, Garibay describes his creative relationship with various global pop stars in the following manner: “I am your mirror; I am going to show you the best version of yourself, a version you can’t see because you can’t put a mirror to your brain.”
When it comes to the question of song-writing and the magical art of creating new “hits,” Garibay explained the following in an interview with Gulf Business:
People don’t know what they want. You must show them. Or, more accurately, you must create a reality they have not yet perceived. Show me a part of me I never knew existed, and you have a hit. The way you create reality for people is to author a story that is genuine, that they can buy into, so it becomes their story. The story you’re telling, what you’re wearing, what your video is projecting, must be congruent with your message and identity.
Create that world to be so authentic they want to be like you, hang out with you, or want to have a romantic relationship with you. Hit all those marks and you have something. That’s N.W.A, Beatles, Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. They created entire worlds. What N.W.A. and Prince did is create a reality different to the one where you’re risking your life and fighting off the bad guys. You listen to one song, and you’re immediately transported. Reality shifts, and it connects with audiences from the Middle America to Japan. When art, pop music, film, or any media scales, it’s because you have created an alternate reality for people.
While perhaps little-known by the general population, Fernando is indeed exemplary of the artists behind the artists. Founder of the Garibay Institute, Fernando plays the role of polymath and creativity guru for a new generation of Young Global Leaders, pop stars and “high performance” individuals who desire to transcend the regular “limits” of everyday life and access their deeper “human potential.”
Under the banner of the “Creative Industrial Complex,” the Garibay Institute’s webpage describes itself in the following terms:
“THE CREATIVE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX™ is an ecosystem founded by the Garibay Institute, the first and only research and development institution focused on art, creativity, entertainment (film, gaming, music, experiential) as an instrument for soft power, cultural identity and patrimony, intellectual renaissance, and sustainable economic growth.
The brainchild of renowned hit record producer and polymath Fernando Garibay, the Institute unites global leaders, world-class universities and academicians, financial institutions, and thought leaders with elite members of the creative class to catalyze innovation, empowered dialogue, and cultivate engaged and inspiring icons of the future.
Our research and applied methodologies bring together creative industries’ best practices. We collaborate with an extraordinary network of top artists, performers, producers, influencers/key opinion leaders, financiers, empresarios, intelligentsia, and entertainers. We deliver innovative breakthroughs in creativity, instinct/intuition, and sense literacy™ for organizations, public and private, sovereign and disruptive, for-profit and not-for-profit.”
At this point, we must warn readers: this is a rabbit hole.
Alas, we see and hear so very little about the artists behind the artists, and yet, they’re the far the more interesting and creative ones. Indeed, with more elaborate ideas and refined perspectives, one could argue that they are the real artists and visionaries.
Consider another spin-off of Garibay and his circles: the Liminal Collective. Driven by a 2.0 vision of humanity, it describes itself as an elite institution bringing together high performance individuals from the military, entertainment, science and business world:
We assemble bespoke, multi-disciplinary teams to work at the threshold of human potential, applying the deep science of elite performance, tapping ancient traditions and breaking convention…
The Liminal Collective’s role is to bring together various high performance individuals who seek to challenge their limits and work at the “threshold of human potential.” Take its intimate and invitation-only “Legends of Ibiza” gatherings. The exclusive get-together is described in the following terms:
An invitation-only, intimate and exclusive gathering for a diverse group of high performers including entrepreneurs, business leaders, athletes, military, music, culture or arts. If you are at the top of your game or looking to increase your human potential, this experience is for you. This immersive journey through creativity, science, technology, music and ancient wisdom is designed to be life-changing.
Interestingly, the collective’s Executive Acheron offers “experiential adventures” that bring together the world’s so-called “elite leaders” so that they can learn to unlock their hidden “human potential.” A description of the exclusive program reads as follows:
A reference to Dante’s infamous journey, we will guide you on an experiential adventure that brings cohorts of the world’s elite leaders together to explore the first principles of humanity. We will infuse the powerful and transformational practices of ancient rites of passage with cutting-edge science and insights, so you can optimize yourself for both life and business. In challenges lie our greatest transformations.
While perhaps seen as a generic term by many, the notion of unlocking one’s deeper “human potential” or hidden reserves is a theme popularized by one of the vanguard counter-cultural institutions and New Age meccas, the Esalen Institute. Pioneering the works of Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Sigmund Freud, among others, the notion of expanding one’s human potentials has its roots in a very specific historical development in the modern West, one whose deeper implications remain largely unknown, despite its having shaped generations of artists and thought-leaders across the Western world.
Human Potential
Established in 1962, the Esalen Institute served as vanguard for a new counter-cultural vision of America and the Western world. Specifically, it sought to establish a new religious and spiritual ethic to replace what were regarded as the outdated religious traditions of Platonism and Judeo-Christianity. Among its interests were drug-infused mysticism, psychical research, the integration of Eastern mysticism into American life, and a heavy focus on the “liberating” effects of altered-states of consciousness through chemicals, meditation and various forms of “experiential” learning.
As Jeffrey J. Kripal notes in his Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion:
In 1960 Price went to hear Aldous Huxley deliver a lecture called “Human Potentialities” at the university of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Although “we are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago,” said Huxley, we have “in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized an immense number of things which at the time for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.” He went on to suggest that other potentialities remain hidden in us, and he called on his audience to develop methods and means to actualize them. “The neurologists have shown us,” said Huxley, “that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right wat, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.” (Kripal., 85)
This notion of “human potential” would go on to inspire more than just an intellectual movement, replete with countless new self-actualization gurus, New Age prophecies, eastern tantric practices and psychedelic liberation schools, all of which would be heralded as a new “religion of no religions.” With generous funding from Lawrence Rockefeller, whose “seed money” would be handed out across California to help found a blossoming new ecosystem of “spiritual” institutions, this new religion of no religions would be one in which America and modern Western civilization would finally liberate itself from the strictures of classical Western philosophy and spirituality.
For, this was an age, we are told, in which Being and becoming were separated. In his book, Kripal references Aldous Huxley’s remarks from his The Doors of Perception:
Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged…. a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. (The Doors of Perception., 17-18)
But these were now things of the past, we are told.
As Kripal notes, regarding the advent of new psychedelic proselytizers like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary and others advocating a new “enlightenment of the body”:
As for Watts’ Joyous Cosmology, the subtitle alone suggests that the enlightenment of the body was quickly entering the chemical, and even molecular and genetic, levels through a kind of micromysticism. With Leary, moreover (who co-wrote the foreword to The Joyous Cosmology with his Harvard colleague Richard Alpert), it would not be long before an entire genetic mysticism of DNA stands was set loose in the culture. A very small number of writers, artists, and intellectuals were transforming an entire generation, and they were doing it with what were essentially chemical-spiritual tracts infused, more often than not, with a kind of subtle reductionism of the sacred to the chemical. (Kripal., 123)
Now, mankind would finally have the chance to reunite the material and immaterial, matter and spirit, body and mind, we are told. In Lawrence Rockefeller’s terms, man would now be united in “mind, body and spirit.”
Today, perhaps no artist embodies the new “limitless” ethos of a so-called fully self-actualized self than Marina Abramavić, the renowned Luciferian performance artist. Known as the grandmother of performance art, she is a chief spiritual/creative mentor of Lady Gaga.
Listening to Lady Gaga describe the “limitless human being” that is Abramavić is itself quite revealing.
The “boundless” Marina was famously mentioned in the DNC email leaks as the host of “spirit cooking” soirees attended by Washington movers and shakers, including the likes of John Podesta, whose association with child sex trafficking rings is hardly a taboo in 2023. No less than the likes of Lady Gaga has become a devote of the “Abramavić Method,” which consists of various practices designed to push people to their absolute “limits.”
At this point, we should note that because ideas often take the form of new aesthetic movements, they can often be difficult to analyze or discern. Often expressed in the form of hypnotic rhythms, spectacles, catchy lyrics and cathartic musical performances, songs function much as Plato observed in his Laws over 2000 years ago, that is, as “charms.” For, songs do not take the form of any discrete set of logical propositions or arguments, but rather manifest themselves through a series of “altered states” and emotional transformations conjured by the subtle treatment of imagery, musical rhythms and stories. In most cases, to the degree any particular messages are stated, they remain largely hidden below the deep-structures of our psyche, taking the form of “felt-thoughts,” feel-good melodies and catchy anthems.
Regardless of whether the songs usually suggest any direct course of action, these “felt thoughts” often anchor us to a given set of ideas and emotions, whether we so desire it or not. We hear a line or a lyric and then associate it with a particular mood; and that particular mood becomes associated with a set of thoughts or behaviors. For these reasons, art becomes one of the most difficult things to question or analyze beyond its charming surface, given its effects are so subtle and covert. It also therefore becomes one of the most potentially subversive.
Alas, we find ourselves moved without being able to articulate exactly how or why—and yet the effects are definite, immediate, though often temporary. However, over time, a constant and regular experience of such ethereal charms may exert a seemingly lasting spell over us and numberless other individuals.
Today, it would not be controversial to regard much of what we know as modern pop culture and music as a kind of artificial magic created by a group of largely invisible wizards, but the question becomes: is this really new?
In a word: do we really know how the sausage is made?
Riders of the Storm
Most of us have probably swayed to the seductive rhythms of “Riders of the Storm” or bobbed our heads to the magical anthems of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” But what exactly have many of us been bobbing our heads to? Many might simply argue: “Who cares? It makes us feel good.” From the Summer of Love to “Chaos Theory,” various fashionable narratives and historicist explanations have shaped the officials story.
While we’ve all been hit with cartoonish depictions of plastic devil horn conspiracy theories and heard the ravings of many a suburbanite conservative mom warning about “the devil’s music,” the actual story of rock and modern music is indeed a fascinating and rarely explored story. Sure, legend and whispers about occult influences have always floated around, but in most cases the reaction has been to simply shrug one’s shoulders or laugh off whatever possible connections and/or negligible influences they may have had.
However, in 2023, with Satanic and Luciferian imagery now essentially serving as a hallmark of modern pop music (if we’ve even bothered to pay attention), and that in light of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations which exposed that large swaths of our political elite are beholden to pedophile blackmail rings, curiosity has understandably grown: where exactly does all the Luciferian jesting and satanic trolling come from?
And is it only just that, trolling?…