Not only was I the only black kid and the only poor kid, but my parents were transcendental meditation devotees, and I live in an ashram for a good portion of my childhood.
On a transcendental level, a film is not going to be better or worse because there's a prize behind it. The work will be what it is, with or without a prize.
Religion comes from the word 're' or again and 'ligare' meaning to bind or tie back. The purpose of religion is to unite the self with God or the creative force. Music, sacred spaces, and meaningful icons are the way we conjoin our minds with the transcendental.
Look at what trance means. It means to transcend... it means to become transcendental! So if we get a singular transcendental path of light, that could lead to such great dimensions of consciousness, of revelation, of spirituality, of spiritual power.
Now celebrity has taken on a holy status all of its own, and we look to the stars to provide us with the transcendental experience that was once achieved through religion.
I've got a transcendental way of thinking about things. I've got a galactic self.
Sometimes for a lot of new artists, they don't have a vision, really, or know what they want to say; it's kind of drawn out for them. But me, because I'm such a transcendental thinker, it's always like a journey and an adventure with each project. It's like going through a different doorway each time.
Transcendental Meditation, for me, has been a way of turning down the outside racket and turning up the bandwidth of instinct, intuition, concentration, attention. On the light ends, it's a power nap. On the strong ends, it's a giant battery, and that battery doesn't run out.
I wake up around nine and do morning chants in my bed. I learned transcendental meditation four years ago, and I do it twice a day, plus an extra ten minutes before the show because I struggle with stage fright just before I go on.
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.
