Recordings

When I received this first hymn, I had been to a Santo Daime “work” (ritual), and I was staying at the house of a friend. For some reason, I began to pray to the Virgin Mother, expressing how even though I knew that She was a significant figure in the Santo Daime, I had not felt Her Presence within.  I then went on to ask if it was possible to deepen my connection to Her.  Sometime the next day, after having endured the hours of travel and stress needed to get back home to Dallas, I collapsed on my sofa and had a much needed nap.  After about an hour of lying there, almost paralyzed with fatigue (while also feeling the  typical post-Daime work “anti-hangover”), I woke up humming a lovely melody to myself. It just wouldn’t leave my mind.  And there were some words that seemed to want to accompany that melody: “Come down, Virgin Mother, come down, and be with me.”  And so, it continued for the next hour or so: the stanzas of the hymn just poured down, and knowing how easily I could forget what was coming through, I’d periodically record the new words that were arriving into my tiny hand-held recording device.

Receiving this hymn felt like I was simply taking dictation: the words would rise into my consciousness from some mysterious place, and it seemed that my primary job was to pay attention and to sing whatever came into the recorder.  The heartfelt words began as a plea to the Divine Mother, asking Her to come into my awareness.  They then spoke about Her arrival.  Then the lyrics asked for healing and blessings.  And finally, the words of the hymn thanked Her for those gifts.  The hymn had this lovely “developmental arc” to it.  It began with me feeling estranged and expressing my longing for Her Presence; it grew into me singing out my joy at having received her blessings; and it culminated in a sense of contentment and fulfillment, with me feeling so deeply grateful to Her for everything that She had so gracefully given to me.  

And once I received the hymn, my sense of thankfulness and awe continued to deepen, since the hymn itself demonstrated to me that my prior prayer had been answered, in that it appeared that, below the surface of my conscious awareness, the Virgin Mother and I did have a very loving and intimate relationship.  And She was letting me know this, in-and-through that hymn, as it  poured from Her Heart to mine. While the overt words of the hymn were asking Her to come down to me, in reality, the hymn was, in fact, Her coming down, gracing me, and all those who would later sing it with the energy and blessings of Her Presence.

There are times in which receiving a hymn is utterly straightforward.  On March 21, 2009, for example, I woke up from an extremely vivid dream.  In the dream, I was with numerous friends in a large, contemporary, open house with tall white walls and lots of light. A young man was sitting on the wooden steps leading down into the living room area, and he was playing a guitar – in a very “Spanish” style – and he was singing the words to “You Start by Loving Yourself,” my second hymn.  In this case, all that I had to do was to get up out of bed and immediately sing the words that I had just heard him singing within the dream into my small handheld recorder.  (I also went through a short period of hemming and hawing within myself because I recognized that the hymn was structured in a rather un-orthodox way and so I questioned whether it was really a hymn.  In the end, because the energy that accompanied the hymn was so powerful, and because the inner “Yes” felt so right, I was willing to say, to myself, and then to others that it was indeed a hymn.)

I received this hymn during a retreat in a national forest outside of Montreal, a retreat graced by the presence of Baixinha, a gifted “Mãe de Santo” of an Umbanda community in Brazil, as well as a beloved daimista elder.  (The hymn is offered to her.)  One morning during the retreat, I woke up singing the melody of the hymn in the tiny room that I was staying in with my wife.  I groaned inside because I could tell that the hymn wanted to come through in Portuguese, and my ability in that language was, shall we say, somewhat less than polished. But I did my best, and because of my linguistic “creakiness,” the rhythmic structure of the hymn is not typical for a standard Santo Daime hymn.  But Baixinha (oh-so-graciously) seemed to be genuinely pleased with it when I sang it for her a couple of years later during a trip to Brazil. 

I received this hymn towards the end of my two and ½ month visit to Céu do Mapiá, the eco-village in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest that is the “Mecca” of the most prominent line of the Santo Daime. When the lyrics began to surface within me, I knew that it was emerging in large part due to the extensive time I had spent going to the Santa Casa (the Holy House), a healing center in the village run by Isabel Barsé, a woman who, for many years, has been channeling powerful and beautiful messages from the I Am Presence, the Presence of the Christ within. This hymn is offered to Isabel.

I received this upbeat hymn in the kitchen of my home in Dallas, Texas. Usually hymns come through in just one language, but this one alternates between Portuguese and English.

This hymn is offered to Jonathan Goldman, the man who served me my first drink of Daime. This hymn (like many Daime hymns) appears to be in the “voice” of some divine Being, asking all of those who sing it to wake up and realize their spiritual greatness. 

I received this hymn while sitting in the central administration building of Southern Methodist University, where I am a professor of Religious Studies, as I was waiting to talk with an administrator about how to best apply for fellowships in order to write Liquid Light.  (Unfortunately, I never was successful in getting any major funding for the project.) It came thundering into my consciousness with the knowledge that each time the hymn is sung, I should focus my mind on each of the seven chakras, from the bottom up, ending with humming the melody as a way to integrate the entire energy body. 

I received this hymn while falling asleep in a bunk bed in my sister Julie’s lake house. It just seized me and shook me with its Force.  I couldn’t go to sleep for over two hours –  I would receive one round of lyrics, get up and sing them into my I-phone (my melodic memory is abysmal), and then lay back down, only to have to get up again (and again) as I kept receiving new lyrics.  It is offered to my wife, Sandra.

I received this hymn waking up from a dream in which I was watching/listening as this small brown-skinned man in a rough monastic robe was singing it, playing the frame drum.  I’d like to think that he was St. Francis, but one way or the other: “Viva St. Francis!”   

I received this hymn while driving in my car in Dallas (on my way to aikido practice).  As it was coming into my consciousness, it seemed to me to carry the energy of the Shakers with it.  It is offered to Jane Seligson, the wife of Jonathan Goldman, and my baptismal godmother in the Santo Daime.  (This is another one of my hymns that came with a non-standard rhythmic structure.)

This hymn is offered to Taran Rosenthal, a beloved friend and spiritual brother (as well as my Santo Daime baptismal godfather.) This is another hymn that came carrying with it the Energy of the I Am Presence.

I received this hymn to the Queen of the Sea, the Goddess of the Ocean, while staying at my brother David’s beach house south of St. Augustine, Florida.  I strongly felt the Force of the hymn arising within me and I told my wife what was happening, saying that I needed to go for a walk on the beach.  As soon as my bare feet touched the water of the ocean, the first lyrics of the hymn emerged, with me joyfully singing “Yea, Yea, Yemanja!”  The rest of the lyrics surged up quickly afterwards.

I also received this hymn while at my brother’s beach house.  The melody came first, very strongly, and so (yet again) I felt pulled to go for a walk on the beach.  But this time the initial round of lyrics felt blocked within me.  I knew that they came with a lot of distress and sadness with them, and I wasn’t personally feeling those emotions, so the first few stanzas were a bit of a struggle to receive.  But the final, more hopeful and joyous, stanzas came quite easily and quickly.  

I received this hymn in a powerful download that began in the kitchen of my house in Dallas as I was washing dishes.  This is yet another hymn to the Queen of the Sea.

I received this hymn after taking part in a beautiful Santo Daime work in which, after the work was done, I was feeling very energetically connected to everyone, seeing/feeling the golden Light that was shining forth from each of our hearts – each of us transfigured.  The hymn itself emerged a few hours later after I finally lay down to sleep, and woke up singing the initial lyrics of the hymn.

I received this hymn in the shower in my home in Dallas – it poured into me in one continuous stream that only lasted about five minutes – basically the time it took for me to take that shower. 

When I received this hymn I was swept away by the beauty of the melody, and how familiar it seemed.   When it arose within me, at first I thought that I was just humming someone else’s Santo Daime hymn.  But the Force of the hymn was so insistent that I opened up and let the lyrics pour through.  And after receiving the hymn itself, I continued to be a bit was a bit nervous that I had unknowingly “borrowed” the melody of another pre-existing Santo Daime hymn, but after singing it to several daimista friends (who know hundreds, if not thousands of hymns really well), and being assured that they didn’t recognize it, I finally relaxed.  

When I received this hymn, it came with the Knowing that this hymn was referring to that time (somewhere in the future, or perhaps in the deepest dimension of the Now) in which everyone in the world (the universe?) Wakes Up to their divine nature – the moment of cosmic Awakening.  And the vow “to recover all, to redeem the Fall” refers to the bodhisattva vow, the pledge to be reborn time and time again in order to help all sentient beings to wake up to their Buddha nature (and to the salvific activity of the Christ within each one of us.)

What strikes me about this hymn is how it switches its “voice” in the middle of the hymn.  In the beginning verses it is the divine which is singing, affirming its Oneness and its other divine qualities, such as Love, Peace, Power, Light.  (And by the way, also affirming its Twoness as the Knower and the Known, or God and the Goddess; and its Threeness as God the Father, the Mother God, and the divine Son/Daughter; or the Beloved, the Lover, and Love itself; or the Holy Trinity; and much more.)  Then the hymn shifts to the voice of a thankful devotee of the divine, affirming her/his solidarity with other beloveds of God and the divine Mother. This hymn is offered to Padrinho Alex and Madrinha Sonia.

I received this hymn after a very powerful work in which a woman diagnosed with terminal cancer drank Daime for the first time.  When I last saw her, more than four years later, she was still alive, after having gone through a deeply courageous healing journey.

I received this hymn just a couple of days after Trump’s election.  It felt as if it “came down” bringing the energy of comfort and the blessings of the divine Mother.  I received it, along with an accompanying ritual, while driving to get a massage, which meant that I had to work really hard to remember what was coming through until I could get to where I could record it.  The envisioned ritual, by the way, involves each person, one by one, standing in the middle of the circle of the other members of the group, all of whom are holding hands.  As this hymn is sung, the group holding hands walks towards the person in the middle, compressing the circle and raising their hands up at the end of the first and third lines of each verse to shower the person in the center with blessings, and then lowering their hands and returning to the expanded circle size during the singing of the second and fourth line of each verse.  Each person in the group takes a turn to be in the middle receiving this cascade of blessings from all of the other members.  

I received this hymn within a dream on January 10th, 2017.  I was lying in bed in my house in Dallas.  I had recently been struggling with a bout of pneumonia, so I was really fatigued.  I lay there in bed, in the dark, listening to powerful gusts of wind that were rushing through the leaves of the trees.  And torrents of rain would come and go in waves as well.  I lay there on the bed, feeling all of that aliveness, and then, all of the sudden, I could feel the Force of a hymn welling up from within me.  But I was so exhausted that I began to sink back into sleep, even as I continued to try to align myself with the Force of the hymn.  The next thing I knew, I was in a dream world.  I was in a noisy room, filled with people talking, and I was listening for the hymn, futilely attempting to hear it. In the dream, I then left the noisy room, and entered into a large, spacious and quiet commercial kitchen where I found one of my wife’s students, who is also a dear friend of mine.  Seeming to sense that I needed quiet, she asked, “Am I in your way?”  I told her: “No, it’s fine for you to be here.”  Almost immediately, I was finally able to hear the melody of the hymn.  And right after hearing that melody, I woke up, and I began to repeat it to myself, letting my body sway softly while lying there in bed.  And then, in a rush of inspiration, the words came pouring through “My Iansa,” the hymn that focuses on the Yuruba Orixá/Goddess of the Wind – yes, the Goddess of storms and tornados, but also the Goddess of soft warm breezes and the gentle rustling of the wind moving through the leaves at night. Iansa is also, by extension, the Goddess of Breath – the Goddess of Prana, of Qi, of the Cosmic Force of Life Itself – a particularly poignant and important connection for me to make, given my battles with pneumonia. 

You’ll find a word in the “My Iansa” hymn which I think I can safely say you’ll not find in any other Santo Daime hymn: “Lover.”  To me, divine Love comes in numerous forms. We can love God as Lord, as Father, as Mother, as Son, as Child, as Friend – but (at least according to Hindu devotional categories), the highest form of divine Love is to envision God/Goddess as our Lover – a Lover we long to merge with; a Lover we adore, with our entire heart, soul, and body, not caring what society’s rules might say. And so, this is a hymn that opens into and embraces that very specific, highly exalted, quality of Love – a Love that flows like an infinity sign between Lover and Beloved; a Love that is deeply intimate, pleasurable, free, alive, joyous, and passionate.  The hymn, in essence, is singing about the eroticism of the breath.

And finally, many months after receiving this hymn I noticed an interesting linguistic overlap: the chorus goes “My, my, my, my, my, my Iansa.” In Portuguese, this sounds very similar to “Mãe, mãe, mãe, mãe, mãe, mãe Iansa,” that is, “Mother, mother, mother, mother, mother, mother Iansa.”  For myself, Iansa is both a Lover and a Mother, and much, much more. 

This hymn focuses on the Sanskrit yogic mantra, Om Namah Shivaya (Om I bow to Shiva ), the Source of all, my inner divine Self.  After I received this hymn, I was intrigued to discover that in the final line of the second to last verse, where it says “We’re that Light, the Light of Love Divine,” the words “Light of Love Divine” translates in Portuguese to Luz do Amor Divino, the name of a Santo Daime church that I dearly love. 

This hymn emerged when, in between waking and dream (a potent place for the Tantric tradition), I saw within myself a shimmering cross made up of crystalline “diamond” Light.  As I was receiving the hymn, I was fascinated to observe the way in which the various stanzas began to honor the various senses, culminating in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the living expression of the I Am Presence within each one of us.  And finally, when I shared the hymn with my Portuguese tutor (a conselheira within the UDV – another Brazilian ayahuasca religion), she noted that the term “dew of light” (which is a key term towards the end of the hymn) also appears as a Portuguese expression (“sereno de luz”) in one of their important musical invocations.

When I received this hymn, I also received the insight that the title of the hymn refers to the divine process, found in both neo-Platonism and in Tantra, in which the divine, as it were, “falls” into the world of limitation, on one level of its being “forgetting” its true divine nature in order to create this universe and to experience life as you and I, only to then, at some later point, rise back to the state of Being that “it” never left, returning to a state of full awakening, perfect and utterly Self-Luminous.   

On December 25th, 2017, on Christmas morning, I received “Your Love.”  My family enjoys hearing my hymns, and so I sang the hymn for them a few days later at my brother’s beach house in Florida.  A married couple who were long-time friends of the family were there also, and after I finished, the woman, who is a musicologist, said, “That’s almost exactly the same melody as the Coventry Carol.” It ends up that the Coventry Carol (a Christmas carol) was a well-known carol in 16th century England.  It is a lullaby in the voice of the mothers of the slaughtered innocents, i.e., the babies who were murdered by King Herod.  Although my hymn is about divine Love, the theme is actually not so different, because since when is the purity of a mother’s love for her child not divine?  

This hymn came through me on May 13th, 2018 – Mother’s Day. I was once again gripped by that very Force-filled feeling of a hymn wanting to emerge within my consciousness, with that “virtual hymn” saying, in essence: “I’m coming through: pay attention!”  I was at my sister Brenda’s house and I had been having an extremely vivid and powerful dream in which I was seated with a large group of friends in front of a huge brass cauldron – perhaps 15 feet across – that was sunk into the earth.  The cauldron was filled with serpents that extended up from the cauldron like five or six-foot-tall slithery pillars – dancing, intertwining, very alive, very potent.  But then someone had the not-so-great idea to put a brass lid on the cauldron and things then immediately went badly – a stream of poisonous ooze began to seep out from under the lid of the cauldron and began to flow out towards all of us.  Immediately, however, those of us who were gathered around the cauldron began to sing the words “Oh Mother God” to calm and heal the situation.  When I awoke, those three words flowered into the rest of the lyrics of the hymn that I was receiving.  To me, the teaching of this dream was all-too-apparent: putting a lid on our own Life Energy isn’t exactly a great idea

However, when I woke up from this dream, I didn’t really have time to record anything, since everyone was already hustling around in the house getting ready to leave for a family breakfast in honor of my mother. I had to quickly hop into the shower.  And so, with the hot water pouring over me, the first verse arrived, and I managed to record at least that part of the hymn when I was getting dressed, but because everyone was already heading out the front door, I sent up a prayer to Whoever/Whatever was the Source of that hymn, agreeing that when I had a moment I would give it my full attention, and inwardly asked if we could just put it on hold for a while.  I’m not sure if that prayer was answered in quite the way that I had hoped, since during the drive to the restaurant, and during the breakfast itself, and during the drive back to my sister’s house, the energy of the hymn just kept gripping me, for hours. What this meant was that at times I felt pulled within so strongly that it was hard to interact with everyone. (I’d occasionally have to work to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head.)  Thankfully, I don’t think too many people noticed. (My mother was the exception.  At one point she even asked: “You’ve been really quiet – is everything ok?” I was able, truthfully, to say that everything was going really well and that my heart was filled with love for her.)  However, as soon as I got back to my sister’s house, I rushed to the bedroom to record the words to “Oh Mother God” that came pouring through me.

And finally, this hymn, to me, carries with it the “patina” of entering into a pre-existing higher archetypal world, and singing it often creates an aching feeling of poignancy within me.

I received this hymn on Father’s Day, while driving my car (in this case, to a yoga class on the other side of town).  My musical memory is so rudimentary that I simply had to keep singing each line as it arrived, over and over again, hoping against hope that I would remember these lyrics when I finally arrived at the studio (most of the drive from in which the hymn began to emerge was on an interstate, and the traffic was really thick and intense, so it didn’t feel safe to pull over any earlier).  Luckily I did, but it was close: for a while I actually did forget a line from one of the stanzas, but I just kept humming the melody and tried to relax, and it finally (thank God!) re-emerged not long afterwards.  Interestingly, the hymn just sort of percolated under the surface during the yoga class, and more lyrics began to emerge on the drive home, so a similar process repeated itself, including almost forgetting another line of another stanza. 

This hymn emerged extremely easily and quickly, coming through as a “finished product” in probably less than ten minutes, surging up right/pouring down from my Heart. 

On October 12, 2018, I received “Come Right Now and Set Me Free.”  I was in the kitchen of my house, and I had been humming this beautiful melody as I was cleaning dishes in the kitchen, and I was thinking to myself that it was such a “Daime-esque” melody. I wondered if it was a hymn that I had sung in some Santo Daime ritual in the past.  (My melodic memory is so poor and the hymns can often sound so familiar.)   But at some point I realized that it was probably a hymn coming through.  So, I shifted gears.

[Over the years, I’ve noticed that there are times – that are becoming increasingly common – in which the “inner signals” by which I can tell that a hymn is arriving are, as it were, turned down a notch, even if the Force of the hymn, as it is emerging, is if anything even more powerful.  In the beginning, there was no doubt that a hymn was coming up within me/pouring down into me.  At times I would almost feel as if I was being shaken in the jaws of some sort of benevolent lion.  But in the past few years, in a way that echoes my incorporation mediumship, recognizing that Something wants to express Itself in-and-through me (in this case, a hymn) has become an increasingly subtle process – something that feels less like being shaken and more like savoring the smell of roses drifting past, or feeling my cat softly rub up against my legs.] 

When I was receiving this hymn, I soon found myself in my bedroom, letting myself twirl in the Force – almost like a combination of a whirling dervish and an early Hasidic rebbe, with my arms over my head, “lassoing in” the energetic fluxes that were pouring into me, my body moving and swaying and spinning in genuine ecstasy. I was singing the tune over and over again to myself, letting sounds just bubble up from within me, in a kind of loving babbling, my head swaying from side to side, my body undulating.  I was feeling myself swept up by the currents of Life that were pulsating in me, as I was moved (on all levels) by the Force of the hymn itself as it was manifesting within me.  I worked to just let myself lean back into the Light and Love that I was feeling so strongly, sinking softly back into an ongoing, subtly shifting state of responsiveness.  

And then the words themselves started to come through – clusters of lyrics surging up as complete, self-contained “packages.”  And so, I wrote them down, right away, on sheet after sheet of paper that I set down on the top of the two oak dressers in the bedroom.  At times I’d take periodic breaks to just sway and dance, my hands raised, my head tilted back, feeling such gratitude, awe, and wonder at the grace of receiving a hymn in this way.  I would watch from within as the words would almost stitch themselves onto the melody, or seen another way, as the words emerged organically from the melody and rhythm of the hymn itself.  I also noticed, even in the moment it was happening, how the lyrics themselves at times reflected/expressed the states of consciousness and energetic pulsations that I was experiencing as I was receiving the hymn itself: “Crystal beams of Liquid Light, shining now for my delight.  Waves of grace are pouring through, my eyes are filled with You. Embracing Love with every breath is what I want to do.” I watched in wonder as the lyrics arose from some deep place within me and I would periodically think to myself: “Oh my – that’s really beautiful”; or, “Oh my – where did that little word play come from?”  And the melody and the rhythm of the hymn was just so hypnotic and gripping and I’d find myself swept away in it as those rhyming, often startlingly profound, lyrics would bubble up. 

And then, there was that clear, yet subtle sense of: “Ok, that’s it – we’re done.”  

As typically happens, this hymn started with the melody, and the lyrics quickly followed, bringing with it a clear sense of the different Qualities of the Force, in this case, the elemental qualities (one linked with each stanza) of Water, Air, and Fire. 

This hymn came in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing with it such a sense of comfort and healing.  It is offered to my wife Sandra. 

I received this hymn, just like hymn #28, on Father’s Day.  It emerged from a dream, in which I was singing this melody, along with the first two lines of the hymn, “If I could I think I should, write a scripture just for you.”  The rest of the hymn flowed out soon afterwards, as I stood in front of the computer in the middle of the night, seeing (and feeling) within myself the “waves of gold and waves of blue” that the hymn expresses.    

This hymn feels like it has a type of “gallop” to it (when I received it, it came with the image of a Native American man riding a horse on the plains – relaxed, poised, and confident – while hunting buffalo.) I could also “see” the first few stanzas of the hymn being sung with children, with the children having been taught a series of simple bodily movements that they could “perform” while singing these stanzas of the hymn.  The final stanzas of the hymn appear to have embodied the teachings of a verse from a Tantric scripture that I was contemplating at the time (which meant that the day after receiving the hymn, I sang it out loud to the Tantric scriptural study group that I was facilitating).  

This hymn has a rather unusual structure, in that the middle two verses of each stanza rhyme (instead of the more typical first and third, or second and fourth).  The hymn is filled with heartfelt gratitude for the blessing of divine Love. 

I received the melody to this hymn in the middle of the night.  While waking from a dream, I kept humming this (rather insistent) tune.  Recognizing that it was probably a hymn wanting to come through, I finally, almost begrudgingly, and rather groggily, sang it into my phone, figuring that the lyrics would come if it was still “alive” within me when I woke up.  Sinking back into sleep, while still humming the tune, I proceeded to dream, on and off, for the next couple of hours, but during the entire time this tune was “singing itself” in the background, almost as if it were the underlying theme music of a movie. When I finally awoke the next morning, the melody was still going on, and after getting out of bed, the lyrics came pouring in.  I smile whenever I sing this hymn – it’s got an undeniable “twang” to it – I guess that after living in Texas now for so many years it had to finally happen: I’ve now “officially” received a “cowboy” Santo Daime hymn!

On the day that I received this hymn I spent almost three hours being interviewed by a filmmaker who was interested in hearing my life story.  I loved this opportunity to share, from my heart, some of my deepest spiritual experiences.  Almost immediately after she left my home, still feeling uplifted, I began to sing the melody of the hymn to myself, and the lyrics poured through me quickly afterwards. 

This hymn focuses on divine Light and Love – and the Santo Daime church that I am most closely associated with is Céu da Luz do Amor Divino – the “heaven” (or less literally, “church”) of the Light of Divine Love.

I received this hymn at the height of Spring.  May the outer blossoming of beauty and new life reflect our own inner opening into that Source of ceaseless renewal.

This hymn evokes a feeling of nostalgia for a heavenly paradise of hummingbirds, blooming flowers, and flowing waterfalls, a golden perfumed garden where we walk hand in hand with the divine Mother. This was also the first time that I received a hymn with a “mazurka” beat (most hymns are either a march or a waltz) – even if this mazurka is “softer” than a typical mazurka (daimistas know what I’m talking about – smile).