Scott Lawlor returns to eM with a deeply personal album about love and loss. The work herein is Scott at his absolute finest, and is best described by the artist himself.

"The idea that something is dying needs to be investigated to see what it is. It is not we who are really dying but only the false self that is experiencing the end of its illusory view of life — our personal, homemade self, which has been the object of our efforts and is secretly present in virtually all of our good deeds.

What’s dying is not the deepest self, but our dependence and over-identification with the mental ego and its projects, and our cultural conditioning and over-identification with it, including our roles in life.
From this perspective, the dying process is the culmination or the peak of the whole development of the spiritual journey, in which total surrender to God involves the gift of life itself, as we know it.
For that reason it’s not really death, but life reaching out to a fullness that we can’t imagine from this side of the dying process.

So death is . . . the final completion of this process of becoming fully alive and manifesting the triumph of the grace of God in us."

Thomas Keating with Carl J. Arico, The Gift of Life: Death & Dying, Life & Living Companion Book

"Death could be looked upon as the birth canal into eternal life. A little confining and scary, maybe, yet it’s the passage into a vastly fuller life. Eternal life means perfect happiness without space or time limitations. It is spaciousness itself. You begin to taste it in deep contemplative prayer. You realize that you don’t give it to yourself; it’s already within you."

Thomas Keating, From the Mind to the Heart

"Our new body will be spiritualized and not limited to its present physical presence and limitations. One aspect of creation is that, once you have been born into this world, you never die because, as the Hindu religions teach, each of us possesses deep within us an inalienable spark of divine love."

Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle with Lucette Verboven, World Without End

I found these three tracks when I was listening to some of my unreleased archives during the time shortly after Joe Lawlor's first angelversary, the day before Thanksgiving of 2018 and still not feeling in a space to celebrate the holidays, I listened to these improvised space pieces in the background while reading my email. Finding the above quotations seemed to put into words what the music was conveying to me and looking at the dates on the tracks, I discovered that I wrote them between September 27 and October 10, 2017...just a short time before he would return to his true home.

As I have said on notes of other albums where I attempt to process all that has happened, the pain I feel is because of the emptiness of Joe's absence from my life but these tracks provide a foreshadowing of what his soul must have been experiencing during those last weeks, an inexorable pull toward the eternal love and light of the great divine, a theme that I would subsequently explore in later albums.

This album then, is the lost link between Look Unto the Heavens and Transition and I hope that the music herein will bring you a sense of comfort and peace as it has me during this difficult occasion.

For me, this music touches a sublime note - suspended perfectly between an aching longing for something lost and a profound joy in surety of faith. I am honored and truly humbled to release it here on earthMANTRA.

As always, all eM releases are free for download. Should you choose to pay for any music here, all proceeds will go directly to the artist.

Please enjoy.

Geoff Stewart - eM