“The Grateful Dead”

Excerpt from “Remembering Eternity”: “It was while they listened to the Dead that Skylar felt closest to his friend. The music worked directly on the soul as all great art does—for Skylar appreciated certain pieces in the group’s repertoire as great art, able to impart the feel and fragrance of a better, higher mode of being to tens of thousands of listeners— lifting it temporarily out of the lockbox darkness of mentality and sense-limited life (where, supposedly safe, it could hide in a confined purgatory protected from the full flame of Spirit) to planes where “love,” and “peace,” and “joy” were not mere words or ideas but living beings, archetypes of great spiritual truths, which one could meet and interact with in ways as real in their worlds as physical encounters were in the earthly one. Anyone who opened themselves up to the music felt this effect. People often speculated about the Deadhead phenomenon: many of them could never understand what really made the music so special. The answer to their question was straightforward: initiates to the Grateful Dead experience had simply (like neophytes in any spiritual tradition) dropped their defenses and allowed Spirit to enliven them. Critics might harp on ragged vocals or apparently aimless jamming or whatever other deviation from an assumedly proper course they thought the Dead made, but Dead Heads could only smile. To them such remarks sounded like suggestions that a lover change the tone of her eye color or slightly lift the line of her cheekbones. If one truly loved someone or something, one saw in them or it perfection pure and simple. Real art did not consist in correct pitches and the melodious arrangement of notes, in N number of brush strokes of color O passing through points P, R, and G, could not be created, in other words, by even the most expert use of technique and material alone; instead, it used its constructive materials only as a launching pad for a journey into a zone of idea and feeling which constituted the very marrow, the ultimate richness of life. Great art utilized worldly sense objects (sounds, colors, shapes, and words) to escape from the gravitational belt of their world into the free-floating space of Spirit.”