The spiritual experience results in completely new thinking: the newborn child's point of view (thus "Da Da") & Wordsworth's poem's one crazy line.

They're both inspired (as far as Brian goes) by the same event which likely lasted "all day" in one way or another.

My lasting final impression about Bob was that he felt that, to some extent, the life he led paralleled that of Brian Wilson.

Because of this Bob not only felt a closeness to and insight into what made Brian tick.

That was my impression.

Never read Korzybski but he seems like an original thinker much like Koestler.

Here's yet another from The Act Of Creation:

""Without the hard little bits of marble which are called "facts" one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them. "We shall find"' wrote Butterfield on the opening page of his history of the Scientific Revolution, 'that in both celestial and terrestrial physics--which hold the strategic place in the whole movement--change is brought about, not by new observations or additional evidence in the first instance, but by transpositions that were taking place inside the scientists themselves....Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds if the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, of all which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact about Richelieu, but it needs light from heaven to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student has been accustomed to seeing his Richelieu.'"

18th Of May inquired:

You been watching that movie again??

Well yessss! Here are a few of my favorite lines....

"He's off in his vision, on a trip. Reality is gone; he's creating it like a dream"

Here's another, "Wonderful thing--the joy of enlightenment."

The main point of my point was that after Brian became "enlightened" he wanted to work with "enlightened" people.

After Brian became "enlightened" that was his trip.

18th said:

"Still not getting of that cloud are you Bill."

I do have a problem of seeing the bigger picture. Maybe you can send me some blinders.

David Leaf was nice to take my two phone calls, he yelled a little during the second one, but he also wrote back when I wrote him later on.

It's obvious that he's in Brian's corner & maybe without his stance we wouldn't be seeing a SMiLE release in November.

I also loved his liner notes all along the way. One less than factual aspect about his writing was that it was true believer stuff about the possibilities possible.

Leaf's "keep the faith" attitude toward Brian has paid off for all of us.

I think that by SMiLE not coming out in 1967 we were presented with a mystery. What was this SMiLE thing?

Add to that the idea that the album itself was to be a mystery. That's two mysteries for the price of one.

Brian asked Van Dyke Parks to write lyrics for "Good Vibrations" after Brian had started working with Mike on the song (and this was after the Tony Asher lyrics!!!).

If Van Dyke had accepted the offer the lyrics would have taken an immediate turn toward the less obvious style of SMiLE.

The point is that the story of the dogs & vibrations may be a convenient way of avoiding talking about the deeper stuff involved. 

Thanks to 18thofMay for the link.

The Out Of Sight! SMiLE Site page is back. The older stuff (with all its warts) is to follow. Someday an Act Of Creation page may follow that would basically compile all that has been presented here already in some sort of vaguely cohesive form.

Andrew is a great facts guy.

Hard to believe... but it may be the case that the number one "record" in the nation isn't what folks would really choose if they were given a true choice.

And I would bet the farm that Brian would come to life if there was music being made that was inspiring.

You've got it!

With regard to a song that a few folks said they'd like to especially hear on the upcoming SMiLE set:

The song "Child is Father of the Man" is based upon a line from a Wordsworth poem as probably most of you know. What some folks may not be aware of (& some will likely think I'm nuts for saying this) is that the poem is about spiritual enlightenment (& thus why it is so appropriate). As such it's a neat little pocket guide to the larger (& hidden) process that is SMiLE.

Here's the poem:

My heart leaps up when I behold   
A rainbow in the sky:   
So was it when my life began;   
So is it now I am a man;   
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!   
The Child is father of the Man;   
I could wish my days to be   
Bound each to each by natural piety.

First line is about the awesomeness of nature/the universe.

Then we go back in time a la "fell in love years ago with an innocent girl" or the antiquated references in SMiLE.

Then we get the present moment, the current status.

The next line looks to the future a la "at 3 score & five I'm very much alive" or "my children were raised."

"Or let me die!" is the ego-death line much like "if I die before I wake" in BWPS as well as in the imagery of "Surf's Up" and maybe even "Cabinessence."

"The Child is Father of the Man" is the unexplainable level of understanding that words cannot do justice to. What I personally like to think this is is a time reversal sort of thing where both aspects of the mind's take on time are equally trivial. There is only the present moment....the now.

In the end a new self emerges wishing that the future be filled with more of the same (dare I say with the possibility to pass such an experience on---as Wordsworth did via his art form: poetry).

ghost said:

That jarringness is very 'Brian Wilson' and very appropriate for Smile at that time. It's exactly where he was at with the recording techniques and songs he was writing. It was a new sound. No one was doing that sh*t. No one does it now. Brian's edits are the stuff of genius.

I agree with this.

The recent SMiLE issue of MOJO '60s has an LSD article that mentions "...the almost violent shift of consciousness..." in the LSD inspired records from the 60s. Also of note is how the use of such "jarring" musical techniques are consistent with Arthur Koestler's creative formula.

Mr. Griswold said,

Erm Bill, you do realise that it's nobody posting and he's actually taking the piss out of you?

Everything I've posted has merit.

"Nobody" is cool.

Ghost said: "Brian broke free but his freedom was too much to bear."

This is from The Act Of Creation:

"The re-structuring of mental organization effected by the new discovery implies that the creative act has a revolutionary or destructive side. The path of history is strewn with is victims:the discarded isms of art, the epicycles and phlogistons of science."

The Shaman speaks metaphorically.

Brian Wilson did speak frankly around the time of his solo album. I paraphrase, "God cannot be conceived so we put him up in the sky." Metaphor.

If you go back to my incomplete post from earlier today you'll notice that the "mysteries full of meaning" part was never followed up on.

That's because the "meaning" has to do with the LSD experience & folks around these parts have no such frame of reference (especially since they totally discount the accounts in Brian's Bio).

But I would like to present the idea that SMiLE is very much like The Joyous Cosmology (which is Alan Watts presenting his trip experiences) except that in SMiLE such references are hidden.

Ghost said:

The purpose of Zen koans is to break the usual process of thought.

This is what Arthur Koestler postulated was the basis of creation.

Been thinking about a line from the TIME review of the GV Box in 1993: "The lyrics were as fleeting as a waking dream..."

It's the "waking dream" part of the thing that is of interest. The LSD experience has been referred to as the "conscious unconscious" and a "waking dream" seems like something along these lines.

Brian's Bio talks of an acid flashback after which Brian remembers, "Loren once explaining that hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles, mysteries full of meaning."

So the basic idea is: is SMiLE a hallucination with the ability to conjure spiritual enlightenment (a la Zen riddles) via mysteries full of meaning?

The spiritual enlightenment motive is contained in the SMILE BRIAN--AND PULL THEM STRINGS article written by either Michael Vosse or Derek Taylor depending on who you believe. Brian explains the reasons behind the promotion of vegetables: "Health is an important ingredient in spiritual enlightenment." By promoting one (vegetables & heath) Brian is promoting the other (spiritual enlightenment).

Brian's explanation of the "Surf's Up" lyrics includes the following, "He's off in his vision, on a trip. Reality is gone; he's creating it like a dream."

Now here's a line from Arthur Koestler's The Act Of Creation.

"Thinking in pictures dominates the manifestations of the unconscious---the dream, the hypnogogic half-dream, the psychotic's hallucinations, the artist's vision."

Let's add into the mix Frank Holmes' comment about the SMILE SHOP front cover: "The drawing is a surrealistic idea; a visual that is not accessible in conscious reality …" Not only do we get the "surrealist" phrase which is close to the hallucination idea but were also get the hint that SMiLE's art is accessible only via non conscious means.

Van Dyke Parks also gets into this picture through his "dream-escape" GV Box set comment as well as his "don't awaken me" comment from the BWPS tour program.

The point of all this is to indicate that SMILE presents us with images in keeping with unconscious processes, just like with the idea of a waking dream, with the possibility of conjuring spiritual enlightenment.

"Dada" can mean the art form which is close to surrealism & the idea of hallucinations. But "da da" is also what a child calls its father as well as anything containing similar attributes. The child's view doesn't discriminate...neither does the dream or hallucination.

And this frame of mind makes one ripe for the spiritual experience.

 

That's a great post!

"Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling--a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. If we may suppose that this primary ego-feeling has been preserved in the minds of many people, to a greater or lesser extent, it would co-exist like a sort of counterpart with the narrower and more sharply outlined ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational content belonging to it would precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness with the universe."

Sigmund Freud quoted in The Act Of Creation

"Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that science knows that almost every step therein has been made by...the invention of a hypothesis which, though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with...."

T.H. Huxley quoted in The Act Of Creation