Biographical Fragment

I intuited something wrong about the game of life I was growing up into. The perversion of greed and lust on the faces of men and women, the unknown quality of need, the sorrowful darkness of a life driven to desperation in order to race and achieve purposeless aims At age six, I recall thinking how thick the cloth that man drapes upon himself with his own twisted thoughts. Also at that time, I was engrossed in understanding the basis of what reality appeared to be against what the raw input of the senses told me. It all seemed incongruous, and Mom and Dad seemed to be sure that life was something that I had completely opposite perceptions of.

I was horrified by life as a youngster, my sensitive eyes opened widely and a deep inner cry took seat in the halls of my own internal Sanhedrin as I looked out from above those eyes at a life filled with what I now know to be the common sickness of lust greed and sloth, those three tests meted out in exacting force by the Holy Master Himself. Later, as I came to understand the sounds that came from my parents bedrooms, the whole picture of life unfurled in front of me like an ancient tent-dwellers hanging scroll, portraying the three poisons of greed, anger and delusion, and how their seeds spiral out of control to produce a fantasy vision of life which all at once struck me as absolutely not the vision for my own future, as I always felt that in the past I had known something more recondite and certainly more interesting.

I remember that, at age eight and above, after class and practice and usually before composing, I used to ride my bicycle to nearby Cunningham park which had a massive green and a backwoods for discovering the old forested regions of a bygone Queens, NY, where I would sit on the grass for hours, cross legged, meditating and extracting the soul from its fragile bonds with the body. How did I learn to do this? None of my youthful friends did this, they often told me I was “weird”, in the language of a bicycle-riding skateboarding gangland of post-post-holocaust Jewish youth. Oftentimes, seagulls would land around me and just stand there in a circle, which I wouldn’t notice until my physical eyes returned. I recall the wonder of that infinity, of traveling the vast expanse of the universe, and riding the breeze of God’s magnificent creation. And especially, I noticed that upon return, I would have no recognition of whom I was, and sometimes it took a few minutes to remember that I was Daniel David Feinsmith, a Jew, a musician, a little kid, and I lived on 173rd street in Flushing, Queens. All of this always came as a shock. Finally I would be able to ride my bicycle to where I remembered home to be.

Later, as I was saying, with the infinity of desire that woman has for man, after thousands of flirtations, each of one bringing tears to the white heads of my internal Sanhedrin, I came upon a more distant past in a monastery. Dreams each night of talking to and working with an older mentor, and friends of mine, brother students and I talking and laughing in various places on a stone stepped interior of what appeared to be a monastic learning institution. Bronze and golden containers, oil-lamps and incense, a quality of mystery, and this odd and unrecognized life continued in my dreams without apparent purpose.

These meditations on the expansive lawn of Cunningham Park were featured by the visceral sensation of an explosion in the center of my head, each and every time. The pain was both extraordinary and at the same time oddly pleasurable. What was this? This happened hundreds of times as I sat alone on the grass unconscious to the world of apparent phenomena around me. Ten years later, a man, a French monk I later came to know as Tony, told me that he recognized me from a prior lifetime living as a temple monk and studying the practice of alchemy in a high solitude in the Himalayan mountains. He told me the story of my prior life, which was cut short in my mid teens. He told me the same story that was in my dreams, and I became shocked and also impressed. I was a monk, according to him, a youthful monk, who was shot in the head by the Chinese occupying Tibet during meditation. From this, I began to consider the possibility of either reincarnation of the soul, or of the soul being affected and connected to other souls throughout eternity in such a way as directly connect to it – A nascent consideration of the laws of harmonics that I had been a student of since birth to humankind and to my own personal life.