Chord Theory, Part 1

In my twenties, I was convinced the secret to writing a hit song was inventing some entirely new chord progression. A harmonic breakthrough that would make people weep and every A&R executive spontaneously combust with excitement.

After all, I was a rhythm and harmony guy. Melody and lyrics felt too fragile, too personal. I wanted something more visceral, more universal.

So I went in search of the lost chord.

In hindsight, it was arrogance masquerading as sophistication, a mere veil over a lack of musical vocabulary.

The Pattern

Here's what actually happened: I got better, my horizons expanded, and I learned something humbling.

Virtually every hit song in recorded history is built on slight variations of about six chord progressions. Not "inspired by" — the actual same progressions.

Decades ago, the music industry figured out what the spiritual marketplace still pretends not to know: originality isn't about discovering what's never been found. Those discoveries are vanishingly rare. Originality is about individual expression of what's already known.

Same raw materials + Different arrangement = Unique voice.

Consciousness Connection

Vedic philosophy says the same thing about you.

From the perspective of pure consciousness — that one, indivisible whole — sameness is what stimulates consciousness to express itself differently. Unity generates diversity.

Each of us is consciousness sequenced in a unique way. We're variations on a theme.

Individuality isn't some accident or illusion to jettison. It's essential. Your individuality is the mechanism through which consciousness experiences itself from your particular coordinates.

Contact Point

Your unique expression provides context for consciousness to show up in a way it literally cannot show up anywhere else.

Think about it like this: The way consciousness expresses through you is unrepeatable. Your particular window back into the unified field exists nowhere else in the cosmos. And, it will never exist again.

Most people have zero sense of their internal state of consciousness. Their self-definition stops at body, thoughts, emotions. What they also don't realize: so much of their activity is reactive — the aftershock of accumulated stress and trauma.

They're not expressing their unique variation. They're broadcasting interference.

Pollution

The Hudson River was once pristine. Crystalline water sustaining life all around it. Then pollution turned it into a delivery system for toxins. For a long time, the river was synonymous with its contamination.

But contamination isn't the nature of the river. It's the nature of the pollution.

The pollution is imported. It's not the river itself.

The river's actual nature never stopped being what it always was: a life-sustaining flow.

It's the same with humans. Past stresses and traumas create reactivity that pollutes our expression. We mistake the pollution for who we are. We judge ourselves by our contamination rather than our essence.

But you are not your stress any more than the Hudson is its industrial runoff. Who you are on the inside is a pure expression of the bliss of pure Being. The pollution just obscures the signal.