Every once in a while, and by that I mean maybe once or twice in your whole life, a moment shows you something important about how you function in life.
I don’t mean function in a superficial way. I mean a basic approach you use to understand the people, places, and events of your life.
Your approach is so natural to you that it is like breathing — you just do it without even realizing you are doing it, until a moment brings your attention to it.
For me, that moment happened in the spring of 1992.
It had to do with how I use sound to understand my life.
Here is the story of how I discovered my deep need to hear my expressions and thoughts out loud in order to make sense of it. I call it my quest for the ultimate echo.
IT STARTED WITH A SAXOPHONE AND A TUNNEL
The moment in question, 1992, found me living like a bohemian poet sax player freelance philosopher in San Francisco. I lived near the big park there — Golden Gate Park.
My sister Mary, who lived nearby, was graduating college. The whole family had come to town to celebrate her accomplishment.
Before her graduation ceremony, I went with my dad and two brothers for a walk in Golden Gate Park.
That is when my big epiphany happened. It happened like this:
We walked the forest-like path, joking and talking about our lives, totally relaxed and easy.
Then we entered a long pedestrian tunnel beneath a bridge.
In this tunnel, I did something I always did — I made a sound to hear how the tunnel sounded.
This time something new happened. The echo of the tunnel hit me in a way that stopped me dead in my tracks.
A lightbulb went on inside.
Out of the blue, I turned to my father and brothers and said, “You’re going to think this is crazy, but I need to leave right now.”
Before they could respond, I was running — literally running — back toward my apartment.
Once there, I grabbed my saxophone, packed it into the sax case, and ran back to that tunnel. Inside the tunnel I opened my sax case, pulled out the horn, and felt the sounds of the tunnel by itself, with no noise from me.
Then I started playing. Oh man, how beautiful! The tones and overtones astonished me.
But what changed my life was that I was inside the sound I was creating. I was inside my own echo chamber. It felt like total comprehension.
In that moment, I fell in love with playing sax in tunnels.
For the next 30 years, I would travel the world searching for tunnels — for cool tunnels, for beautiful old tunnels, for tunnels under forgotten highways — but mainly I was looking for tunnels that wanted to talk with me.
I was looking for the echo.
And right there, in that tunnel, I realized: my whole life has been about the echo.
THE ECHO WAS MY TEACHER ALL ALONG
My love for the echo — no, my need for it — didn’t start with the sax and the tunnel. It was present far earlier than that.
My earliest recollection of the need for echoes came courtesy of my eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Draper.
I was failing his class. Why? It was a mystery to everyone.
I wasn’t a bad student — I did try — but somehow, when it came time for tests (which were always in writing), I couldn’t get a single thing correct.
One day, Mr. Draper asked me to stay after class. He had an idea.
He had me stand in front of him. He said a word out loud and asked me to spell it — verbally, not by writing. We were both surprised when I could do it instantly.
Then he went through the whole list. I spelled every word correctly and without difficulty.
We were both astonished.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t learn — it was that I couldn’t make the connection through writing or seeing.
For that, I needed sound.
Sound made things real. Hearing information made it understandable.
If you stop and think about it, thought itself is sound — words are thoughts made audible, and thoughts are words heard within but silent in the material dimension.
I needed these thoughts to be made material through sound for me to get them fully.
And the echo has been my teacher and helper.
In the classroom or in the tunnel, or even reading this very sentence out loud as I write it — the echo tells me everything I need to know.
If I was to think of my life as a progression of spiritual development,
I would say that this life has happened in 4 phases:
PHASE ONE — Survival Through Intellect
PHASE TWO — Explorer of the Emotional Universe
PHASE THREE — Diving Below Meaning Into Pure Sensation
PHASE FOUR — Discovery of the Ultimate Echo — Effortless Awareness
Here is how the echo has been with me through the different phases of my maturation
of spirit, intellect, and most importantly my artistic expression, first as a sax player, then as a gong player.
PHASE ONE — Survival Through The Echo of Intellect
In the beginning, the echo served a single purpose: survival. Like a bat navigating a landscape it couldn’t quite see, I used sound to give me a sense of clarity and confidence.
I used sound — mostly the sound of my own voice — to confirm whether a thought was true, accurate, or correct.
Much like Mr. Draper saying a word aloud and me echoing the letters back to him, I needed to hear the thought in order to know it.
Sound was my way of checking: “Is this right? Does this make sense? Am I oriented? Am I competent?”
The echo returned that information instantly. If I heard it clearly, I understood it. If I couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t grasp it.
At that time, echo was the tool that helped me navigate school, people, expectations, a world where I often felt awkward.
Echo gave me footing. Echo let me know where I stood.
As I said, at the beginning it was survival — but as I began my life as an artist, it became a tool of creativity. Even in writing this text, it is here, determining what words appear and how they are presented to you.
The thing is, with phase one, the echo I cared most about was the echo of thought.
I believed at that time wholeheartedly that the way to enlightenment, to peace and pure bliss, was through thinking. I was sure of it.
Here is a poem I wrote at 16. It clearly shows how I thought about thinking and its importance for our happiness.
And who is this that I suddenly see but a tall blonde stranger looking at me. She is looking at me with her big blue eyes. Upon orbs such as these, I lose my disguise. This guise of humor, good looks, so amused. Upon orbs such as these, how could I refuse? So I walk over toward her with a wide flashy smile. I sit down beside her and say, let's talk for a while. We talk for a while. We talk for some time. Then I get poetic and start to rhyme. You're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy, says she. Crazy to others and crazy to me. You're lazy. You're lazy. You're lazy, says me. Your blue eyes are nice, but thinking's the key. The key to contentment, being happy within, always expanding. If not, it's a sin.
In those days, even my use of imagination was all about shifting and changing thoughts to get at the control panel of the universe — of my life — to make the reality of my dreams by changing the thoughts within me.
This was clear at age 20, when sitting in the backseat of a car outside the birthplace of Sigmund Freud in Vienna and looking at a marquee outside the door where it said “Dream and Reality.”
I suddenly had a flash of insight — grabbed the only writing implement I could find, a pencil, and the only paper I could find, a half-used napkin — and I wrote this:
Reality known but not by me, reality sewn by minds that are free. Reality seen on the face of a starving child seen by the tame, seen by the wild. On what reality I'll say, and this I believe, that what reality is is what you perceive. Fiction to fact if you really do think, imagination the missing link. The link between fantasy and what is shown to be true. Reality simply the thoughts within you.
That was pretty much my ethos and philosophy and foundation of creativity. But it was all about to change.
It was all about to change when life circumstances showed me that for every thought, the opposite thought is also true.
And then it was also to show me that who I really am is beyond my thoughts — that the thoughts are just symbols, indirect echoes of reality, but not the direct experience itself.
Just like a glass of water is not the word “glass” or the word “water.” Those are just letters or sounds, if you prefer. But the actual thing itself is beyond that.
I began to really understand that around the age of 28 or so.
And then, in one single moment, I understood it completely and dramatically. But I wasn’t ready to live from that.
So I had to explore a combination of pure sensation and meaning or thought — the field of emotion.
Thus, I was ready for phase two: Explorer of the emotional universe.
PHASE TWO — Explorer of the Emotional Universe
Eventually, if you try something with enough intensity, you find the truth of it. What I found was that thought, as great as it is, is like ChatGPT — it is a lying machine.
It can never tell you the truth. It only gives you symbols, and if you try to live off that, eventually you will realize how unqualified thought is in the face of the unexplainable, immeasurable, and direct.
I had such an experience — a direct encounter with a full tidal wave of emotion and no ability to control or codify or detach.
It was raining and I was getting wet, and that was all there was to that.
I won’t go into the circumstances of this moment here. That is a story for another time.
For now, let’s say that I learned to distrust my mind completely.
I learned that my mind, like artificial intelligence, is in some cases a very false friend.
Don’t get me wrong — I am not anti-ChatGPT and I’m also not anti-mind. It just depends on why you are using it and how you are using it.
If your purpose for using the mind is a direct understanding of the nature of reality, you have to go beyond thought — you have to go direct to the experience itself.
The mind is all about indirect — all about symbols — all about meanings, but not the things which are meant by those symbols.
It’s these direct experiences, as they are, that will teach you about reality.
For me, at that time, emotion was the most real thing I could live with and work with.
Somehow, I wasn’t yet ready to give up thought completely. So I landed in that space between thought and sensation — which are basically emotions — sensations that we give meanings to.
That’s what an emotion is.
So for example, if you say “I’m angry,” it corresponds to a story, perhaps a reason why you’re angry, and it corresponds to a sensation in the body. It’s not a pure abstraction like a thought, and it’s not a pure sensation which is just the feeling itself — it’s both.
And that’s where I lived.
And, as always in my life, the echo was there to teach me and guide me through the journey of emotion.
I received this echo in the paintings I painted, the sax solo excursions I went on, and the meditations I explored — which I called “thinking without words.”
I wasn’t messing around with why I felt how I felt — the point was to experience it fully. I now understand that I could have skipped this phase, but maybe not — I was in love with the intensity of it, so maybe for the love of it, I had to indulge it completely — to feel it all the way through.
But the main thing that started to occur to me after about 15 years in the emotional phase was that I needed to surrender the meanings and just experience pure sensation.
This wasn’t so much a tangible realization as the outcome of the experience. I just started being more interested in pure sensation than the meanings the mind was giving those sensations.
Like that.
The intensity of the feeling experience was still there — but it was no longer emotional.
It became pure life — pure physical life. The actuality of experience itself. And thought became a bystander.
PHASE THREE — PURE SENSATION
The difference between a saxophone and a gong is the difference between the emotional journey and the journey of pure sensation.
When I was traveling through the phase of emotional understanding, the saxophone was my perfect echo machine.
I could play anger really well with the horn — sadness too. I used to say that if you were a guy and you wanted to get a girl, pick up the guitar — but once the girl leaves you, pick up the saxophone.
In fact, it’s also true that you can get a lot of girls with a saxophone.
In truth, the saxophone played a role in a certain woman deciding to accept my courtship. I brought her to a tunnel, played, and her heart melted. 16 years later, she is my wife and the mother of our child.
A funny side note — after 10 years of not playing sax, just playing gongs — she still won’t let me sell my saxophone, even though I could buy a really nice gong with the money. I haven’t played it all this time, but somehow the echo of that play in the tunnel still resonates in her heart. What to do?
Anyway — the difference between these instruments, the sax and the gongs, is the difference between emotions and pure sensation, at least in my cosmology.
The gongs, on the other hand, are not — at least as I approach them — an emotional echo machine. Not at all.
Emotions don’t find good echoes with the gongs. Emotions are too indirect, too coarse, too insensitive, too much mind.
What ends up happening — if you transmit anger with the gongs, for example — you’re actually committing a violence. Whereas with the saxophone, it’s exciting and interesting, with the gongs it’s invasive.
Let me explain it another way.
A saxophone is pretty much a sound instrument only — and even with sound, the range is, relative to gongs, very limited. A gong is also a sound instrument but also a vibration instrument. It plays sensation — vibration that is felt, not merely heard. These vibrations go inside you — literally — not just auditorially.
So as a gong player, you don’t want to send a homeopathic of anger with the gong — it is a violence to do so. This is also why you must learn to be aware of sensation without creating meaning about it. That way, your sensation is infused with awareness.
The gongs were perfect for this phase — they reflected a whole universe of sound and vibration that were beyond meaning.
These echoes of pure sensation became even more pronounced when I realized the power of surrounding myself with the gongs — of making my own tunnel, so to speak.
I created my own echo chamber, where I just absorb pure sensation. And it’s this absorption that has completely purified — or at least is purifying — the egoic structures of emotion and separate identity.
They’re simply interacting and dissolving with sensation all the time. And that’s what the phase of pure sensation is all about — it’s about experiencing things directly.
If you want to understand pure sensation, try this:
- Grab a drinking glass.
- Look at that glass until all your focus is on it.
- While keeping your attention on the glass, say out loud: “You are not a glass. Glass is just a word.”
- Just keep your attention on it and see what happens.
- The next thing that may happen is that another word comes to mind — like texture or shininess or shape. Repeat the process with that word, until there are no words left.
- Notice how with each word you take away from the experience, the experience becomes more vivid, more alive, more direct — more as it actually is.
That is an echo of pure sensation coming into your awareness.
Signs, symbols, traditions, stories are surrendered to sensation.
In this phase of pure sensation, I have increasingly released symbols, religion, signs, and stories.
I have gone directly to the source — where the energy actually is. And that’s really all I want to say about the pure sensation phase.
Meditation is no longer based on emotion. It is no longer based on thought.
The echo of pure sensation allows all experiences — both external and internal — to be exactly as they are.
I didn’t do this through a decision — it just happened that I became more interested in the actual experience (Buddhists call this “the suchness of experience”) — the experience purely as it is — and less in the symbolic.
And this is available to all of us — it’s the most simple thing, but it’s so simple that we overlook it — as I did — for almost my entire life while I searched for the perfect thought, the perfect story, the perfect emotion, and the perfect feeling.
Finally, I began to trust the experience as it is, and open up to that experience as it is, and love that experience as it is, and be grateful for that experience as it is so that I can have true respect for that experience as it is.
In the process, I could be pure — but in a way of purity which is beyond conceptual purity or belief purity or righteousness.
There is certainly no righteousness with what I’m talking about.
It is beyond ideas of good and bad — because good and bad are just words — they are concepts.
This is a very liberating idea. The upshot of pure sensation being beyond good and bad frees you to be with what you are with without controlling or changing it. For example — it doesn’t matter how crazy your mind is — if you can experience the craziness of it as a sensation — it is perfectly itself!
Said another way: the most horrible emotion when experienced only as a physical sensation in the body is never so bad as a toothache.
That’s liberation — that’s your insurance policy — or at least it’s mine.
So I realized all of this and I had a measure of freedom.
How I Discovered the Echo of Effortlessness
But here’s the thing — as I had done my whole life (and maybe because I did this my whole life), I was still full of the need to work, to strive, to try and get there — to use my full power of focus and practice to be the best artist I could be and to find the most exquisite of feelings.
I was still in the struggle even as I knew the struggle was pointless. It was like there was a muscle memory operating beneath my understanding of truth.
I practiced gongs four hours a day — or more — every day. In my communications with clients, students, loved ones, I was often very hard. Uncompromising.
It was this intensity that started killing this body.
By the time I was 58 years old — three years ago — I became very sick. My body was overstressed — it wasn’t coping — it was breaking down.
I had no choice but to surrender the intensity of my inquiry. I had to give way to a form of effortlessness — and effortlessness became my mantra.
My meditations became less effort and more like playing as if I was already dead — the dead don’t react to sensation, thought, emotion.
What I discovered in effortlessness was that I could produce more beauty with the gongs than at any time when I was intensively working with them.
I also gave up looking for vividness in outer experiences. I stopped travelling (mostly), stopped adventuring outwardly and inwardly.
The sharpness of my focus — penetrating and vigilant — gave way to relaxed spacious receptivity.
I started receiving the vividness of life as it was without trying — just trusting. This trust didn’t come on its own — it came as a function of not having the capacity anymore to not trust.
That was the beauty of being sick and weak — I simply didn’t have the power to keep hunting — so I expected life to provide — maybe hoped it would — maybe didn’t hope — but trusted — because it always has — and it did.
Crazy things happened on their own. Miracles, you could say. I won’t list them — you can imagine.
In terms of the gongs — my playing became richer — more airy — more breathy. My facilitation became more gentle, less exacting, less self-righteous — more inclusive. My teaching of gong players became the same.
In private life — the way I treated my wife and child became more humorous, humble, understanding.
As I came to this last understanding, I naturally came to stillness — not through effort — but through releasing effort.
The echoes of my playing became about the release of effort.
During this time I took up Qigong with Yuan Tze of Ren Xiu — and discovered that movement could be effortless — movement as echo of qi — of awareness.
You can experience energy if movement is effortless enough. Will becomes a simple choice — and the execution happens by itself — then even the choice becomes effortless — a flow of choices happening on their own.
When I now play the gong as qigong — it is like playing light — delicious — impossible to describe — beauty, bliss — full absorption.
In the complete surrender of effort — in resting in stillness — I was ready for the ultimate echo.
PHASE FOUR — The Ultimate Echo (Unfolding Now)
1. Letting go is not an action
Phase Four has to do with the absence of effort — not letting go, but realizing there’s nothing to hold. Effort simply isn’t needed. It’s a realization, not a doing. When I absorb what comes, life becomes graceful — increasingly so.
2. I win whenever I lose
I’ve discovered that the old line every knock is a boost is not philosophy but fact. When something dramatic doesn’t go my way, clarity sharpens, direction strengthens, and things move forward. This isn’t attitude — it’s observation.
I don’t dress pain up with positivity. If it’s bad, it’s bad, and that’s fine. I don’t do diplomacy with myself. Strangely, I see now that the hardest knocks opened the door to the new now.
3. Personal development has dissolved
I no longer believe in personal development in the way I once did. I see that everyone is already living as they want to, already has access to the highest state, already is their current fullest expression. Not potentially — actually.
It appears to be the luxury of the ultimate to act ignorant of its own nature. Human life — partial, perishable, fragile — is dramatic, and the drama is attractive. I don’t mean this coldly. I feel for suffering. I root for the underdog. I try to help. And still, I no longer see anyone as less than I am — not in potential, but in being. We are facets of one infinite diamond. None above, none below. Just present. Ordinary. Obvious as up is up and down is down.
4. I am finally at home in normalcy
I used to need to be special — to oppose the masses, to carry a different view. Now I don’t care. Life feels pedestrian in the best sense. Daily. Undramatic. Easy.
This was never my experience before. My life used to swing in extremes — loneliness, ecstasy, insight, despair. Now everything moves inside a space, and that space is who I am. Drama still happens, but it’s all within the space, and that is the real echo — the ultimate echo. Events rise and fall like a film, interesting regardless of tone, but the popcorn remains the same.
5. The gong plays itself
Sometimes I’m not playing — it’s happening by itself. Decisions occur, effort is made, craft is cared for, and simultaneously the entire event — audience, room, vibration — is the artist. I am simply one aspect of it. This is not poetic. It’s observable.
6. Thoughts are like movie scenes
Because of this spacious awareness, I no longer wrestle with thoughts. Sixteen-year-old me would be horrified at the thoughts I laugh at now. Their quality doesn’t matter. They arise like film scenes — dramatic, absurd, tragic, brilliant — and I don’t edit the reel.
You don’t grab the television to stop a character from dying. I don’t grab my thoughts to stop them from being what they are. Even when I sweat, even when it appears otherwise, something in me holds them loosely. This is not a stance. Not an attitude. Not a technique. It’s a realization — born of effort dissolving.
7. The ultimate echo arrives uninvited
These are the gifts. The ultimate echo appears on its own. There is no summoning. Letting go does not cause it — it reveals that effort was never needed.
A stone does not invite sinking to the ocean floor. It simply sinks. This is what effortlessness is.
And that is enough.
To be effortless is to allow what is, without needing anything more from it than the fact that it is.