Techno Roots
Music as initiation.
We celebrate birthdays with a song. We mark the beginning of a wedding ceremony as the moment a bride enters the room, heralded by song. In times past, war was marked by the chorus of battle cries. Throughout human history, death was marked by the commencement of a funeral song as instruments or the instrument of our voice wailed elegies of prayer. Across time and culture, song has been a marker of initiation, acknowledging that a significant threshold has been crossed.
What I’ve learned in the last three years of initiation into the Mystery is that any moment can be thick with the sacred — that often the most sacred thresholds are knit through fingers of light. The spindles across the hand of God spin a web of enmeshment and entanglement we know of as the Mystery.
Sometimes we see them. Sometimes we walk through them. Sometimes, we feel the threads adorn us years after we’ve crossed a threshold. Other times the sacred is found when we knead memory through time and experience.
I was quietly kneading the other day, churning memory with reflection when one moment locked in like a puzzle piece into the map that I am turning these threads into. Laying the threads like ley lines, ancient pathways across the greatest landscape there ever was: the human heart.
Somewhere around 2008, when the economy had tanked and jobs were hard to come by, I started working for my uncle Kamran. Kamran had an audio-video business, setting up complex home speaker systems for exclusive, wealthy clients.
“I had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anyone love listening to a song so fiercely, and be so fully present for it without any other care in the world. The act of listening in those moments shifted who they were. It made them pure. The most passionate fervor of religious devotees couldn’t hold a candle to the way my twin uncles, Imran and Kamran, could witness a song.”
— Shireen Qudosi
The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam
My ‘job’ was mostly to be in the office or on-site and keep him company. It was an act of kindness to keep me afloat in between jobs. The wealth of his generosity is one of the things he’s most remembered for since his passing in 2022.
I spent one of those days at an ocean-front mansion in Malibu, where Kamran was decking out the home sound system for a wealthy Pakistani businessman. It was a beautiful home, a museum of finely curated furnishings and accents that signaled arrival — wealth being the hallmark of success for every immigrant story.
After a long day, Kamran went to the far end of the home and told me to listen for the song he was about the switch on to test the sound system.
Almost quite suddenly the space came to life as a voice echoed through the walls, reverent and reverberating through bones of wood and marble, through skin of fine silk wallpaper, filling the air with breath that stirred something within me. My eyes opened in wonder. I looked up, half expecting to find the song somewhere above me.
The song was Depeche Mode’s Shake the Disease. For the moments I was alone in that room, a rich man’s home became a temple. The choir-like voice in Shake the Disease that signals the sermon of song to follow, reminded me of the monasteries I visited as a kid in Germany, walking through great echoing halls hallowed by song. Suddenly, this great big barren home had a purpose: to be filled with song, to come alive through song.
A threshold had been crossed. It was as if I was hearing music for the first time; amplified sound in its highest possible clarity pulsing through metallic threads, filling the vast room, its doorways, and arches. The whole home was wired for music, crossing its own threshold at that moment, becoming more than just shelter; becoming a mirror for our inner landscape. Becoming a vessel alive with song, responding to our own human need to live in rhythm.
Becoming by taking a space of occupation — a dead zone — and bringing it to life with the foundation of all creation: frequency. Pouring sound from every mouth in the wall, every metal beehive punctured with hundreds of little pockets from which the nectar of song flows freely.
Song holds the reverent capacity to pull us out of the trance state called life; I was sleep-walking through the day until song stirred me to awaken. Most of us are sleepwalking through life.
Kamran was more than just the laborer he was often seen as by wealthy clients. He was more than just an audio-video man running a small business. He gave every home, and every space he worked in, the potential to become a temple of sound. He was both an initiate and an initiator into the extraordinary realms of song. Kamran’s life’s work was to build thresholds and help people cross them.
He was the gardener tending to roots that take another form: techno-roots. Working in the places unseen just like the Dark, Kamran planted wired roots — red and yellow, green and blue, black and white, a rainbow of architecture with one soul purpose: to bear the fruit of song.
“I am a mystery to myself.”
— Paulo Coelho, Author of The Alchemist
To the outer world, his life may have seemed mundane. But if we move below the surface, we can find the sacred in the mundane — even and especially in the most absolutely ridiculous, stunningly plain everyday life. Nothing more is needed than to simply be as you are. I could ask for nothing more than the gift of being able to see, popping the figurative glass bauble of a mystic’s eye into a Dark hollow orb, to see the world beneath the veneer of our outer lives. I want nothing more than to see, as if I’m just now at the precipice of 43 seeing the world for the first time — seeing the world as it really is and sharing that gift with those who also feel stirred.
“The questions of a first meeting or first contact can only go so far in the upper world of human relationships. Below the surface, in the space between things rich with song, we find a more honest conversation within and outside of ourselves, cultivating a deeper intimacy of what it means to be human and in relationship with the world. The song tells us that we are not alone, even and especially when we are alone.
A song can be a thread between what is lost and what is trying to be found, often speaking more honestly about the world than the surface layer of reality.”
— Shireen Qudosi, “Music as First Contact”
The threshold crossed that day — and all the thresholds like it that came before and after — would lead me to become a devotee of the Mystery. It would be years before I would know that the song playing that night in a rich man’s house wasn’t random. Nothing is random.
A song is one of the ways the Mystery, or our higher selves, or both, speaks to us. Some aspect of myself was speaking that day, asking me to Shake the Disease. It was a disease I would write about years later in The Song of the Human Heart. It would be something I could write about because the series of events that led me to be in that home that day with that uncle would plant a seed that would blossom over a decade later.
“Something had died. A many somethings that had died. Held on to and propped up like the living. A horror of the unnatural, the living dead. Always living, and never allowed to die. Never allowed to fall into the abyss where it belongs, dissolved in the nothingness, by the Nothingness.
Over time, these cemeteries we carried in our waking life burdened the soul-body. We are carrying death without awareness. We have something attached to us that doesn’t belong to us, something that needs to be severed and cut off.”
— Shireen Qudosi
The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam
We all often wonder why we’re born into our strange little families, in which we’re also often a stranger. The role of a family isn’t to be tethered to the smallest tribe, locked into a dynamic of control, often controlled by ghost stories or stories of the past that still haunt us.
Among many other things, a family is a chance to experience the intimacy of being human, by moving through life’s communal rituals with the same band of people who just like a song, ebb and flow, sometimes terrible, sometimes exquisite. It’s said that the spiritual can be found in the hardest places, and family can be one of the most trying places to find the sacred. Yet through them, we’re given the chance to practice searching for the golden yolk once we crack the shell of our human drama, or the story of our fantastic, phantasmic, and even the fantasies of our identities.
The practice of song, of listening, is an extension of how to listen for the song of the human heart. To embody an enriched life when we marry memory with meaning.
We are all vaster than anything we could imagine, any label or title we could hold. To find that in the people who have stayed with you, both loved and challenged you the most is an extraordinary gift. It is an act of grace to find the sacred in the mundane — or in the case of my uncle Kamran, to uncover how his act of service in the world was so much more sacred than he could have known. The sacred is with all of us, found only through the intimacy of listening for the song that flows through each person.
