While visiting Minneapolis as part of the Advanced Initiator Team, I had an interesting conversation with one of the local Brethren during which there was some lamentation that the Local Body hadn’t made more of an effort to promulgate to the late recording star Prince before he became a Jehovah’s Witness. A recent article in Rolling Stone drew on a previously unpublished 2014 interview which might indicate that Prince came to accept some non-JW spiritual principles into his life not unlike those he might have developed if he’d joined our most Holy Order. To wit:
“He tries to explain why he can imagine playing into old age, with a dizzying detour into mysticism via the Wachowskis. ‘Life spans are getting longer,’ he says. ‘One of the reasons is because people are learning more about everything, so then the brain makes more connections. Eventually, we’ll be in eternal brain mode because we’ll be able to hold eternity in our minds. A lot of people can’t do that. If you can’t think all the way back eternally, you can’t think all the way forward eternally. Everybody usually thinks about a beginning, a big bang. If you take that event out, then you can start to see what eternity is. Remember in The Matrix where they said the only thing that has an ending had a beginning, and vice versa?'”
These concepts are not voiced in orthodox Thelemic thaumaturgical vocabulary – but some of these concepts sound awfully familiar to me!
Read the entire interview here: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/a-final-visit-with-prince-rolling-stones-lost-cover-story-20160502#ixzz4DjfPSvDw
One might also note albums made after his conversion like The Rainbow Children that include references to the Akashic record and reincarnation. Prince was a devout Jehovah’s Witness but seems as orthodox in that faith as the lovely David Tibet is in his Roman Catholicism – both sincere but feeling themselves free to choose exactly what they believe or don’t.
PS what does it sound like “when doves cry”? I think all EGC clergy know!
