Home: Where Everyone is Welcome
It’s a beautiful place to be, to be able to serve a higher purpose and, in my case, to earn a very good living from it. This is a great blessing, a great blessing for me.
Victor Fuhrman: So, what is the secret to composing music that allows the mind to both expand and be fully present?
Paul Avgerinos: Well, for me, it starts with a very clear intention or what the Indians would call Sankalpa.This is where you make a very positive intention, or we might call it an affirmation. Then to quiet the mind and quiet the emotions and quiet the ego and allow the spirit, the higher spirit, the universal consciousness to flow through you, to use me, to use the artist as an instrument.
I, the Paul, the eye, the small, I disappear, and the music just flows through me, and I’m a servant of that music. I give it voice, or I help it as a midwife, I help it to come to life.
But, it’s not coming from me. It’s coming from a much higher, bigger place and just happens to be flowing through me on the local level. As Deepak would say, the local aspect is Paul, but what’s coming through is pure consciousness.
Victor Fuhrman: Paul, how did your collaboration with Deepak and Kabir come about?
Paul Avgerinos: Well, Kabir and I were talking last year about doing a project together, and I was thinking of doing something called Oneness, which would be a tour of all the major fates and philosophies and showing how they had in common have their heart, love, and compassion. And as the political situation thickened and intensified, Kabir started thinking, well, you know, wouldn’t it be great to do something about immigrants and about our wonderful history that we have here because Kabir and I are both first generations, and we knew that Deepak is an immigrant himself.
And so, we all started talking, the three of us, and the project came about in a very serendipitous way and very quickly, too. It was just wonderful. It just was meant to be. It very much felt like it was meant to be.
Victor Fuhrman: It’s like the Buddhist concept of readiness in time when everything comes together at a specific time, and the people who are supposed to be involved in it are together, then the magic happens.
Paul Avgerinos: Yeah, exactly like that. It’s very beautiful.
Victor Fuhrman: Now, the project, as you intimated, comes at a time when xenophobia is being promulgated by some of our leadership. Were any of you concerned about this, or did it, in fact, make the inspiration greater?
Paul Avgerinos: It’s very true. We all are very concerned about this, and we felt that the best response was a positive response. As Deepak says, you can’t fight darkness with darkness. But if you just shine your light more brightly, it will help to illuminate the darkness, and it will help people to see that being welcoming, compassionate, accepting wisdom, which is expansive and inclusive, feels good. It’s a very simple test. If something feels bad, it is bad. It’s based on fear. It’s grounded on falseness and based on ignorance.
And so, we were so happy to find this vehicle to contribute a positive message to the discussion and the thought that the idea that we would like to move the discussion in a more positive direction.
While we are doing this book of poems and music, we’re also active in various publications with op-ed articles, where we’re sharing some of the wonderful facts about how wonderful immigrants are, and how they are basically the engine of our economic prosperity and our cultural success.
The founder of Google is an immigrant. I mean, it’s the most powerful, innovative company in the world. It wouldn’t have been started if he had been banned from coming to America. So, there you have it. It’s easy to go on and on with it because it’s based on the truth.
Victor Fuhrman: Extending that to how many wonderful physicians who have saved countless lives started as immigrants coming to this country. How many people who are spiritual leaders came as immigrants to this country. Let’s say, of someone who is an immigrant today, how does that immigrant see and relate to people who were born here and who seem not to understand their culture and experience? What do you think that feels like?
Paul Avgerinos: It’s hard to actually know exactly what it feels like because I had the blessing of being born here. It can be very hard. Deepak has related some stories, personal stories of discrimination and misunderstanding about him.
I think it makes them stronger. They just realize that ignorance is not a reflection of them. It’s a reflection upon the person that’s expressing any type of prejudice or an unappreciation.
It’s important to stay true to yourself and your values, and eventually, these things resolve themselves, although they can be very uncomfortable and painful for people at times. In the long run, the country will grow stronger and more diverse. It’s inevitable that America will continue to become more and more diverse. Some people want to go back to some imaginary world that actually never existed. Eventually, they will fade out, and more open-minded people will take their place.
Anytime anyone expresses any anger or hatred or intolerance, it’s because they’re afraid. There’s some deep-seeded fear. They’re afraid they’re going to lose something, or something will be taken away from them, or things will be out of their control. It’s simply fear based, and the only remedy for fear is love. As always, love is the answer.
Victor Fuhrman: Absolutely. Extending it to the position of the first generation American who may experience prejudice or intolerance based upon being a different race or having a different faith, how do we address that?
Paul Avgerinos: I think it’s important to remember that the majority of the American population is very much in favor of diversity, inclusion, acceptance, compassion, tolerance, and oneness. Unfortunately, people forget this because a few people are able to make an inordinate amount of noise and grab the microphone, the public microphone, and make loud and boisterous proclamations, but, they do not speak for the American people.
Most American people are wonderfully kind and compassionate and loving and giving: they will give you the shirt off their back. It’s one of the difficulties of this digital age that we live in is that there’s a lot of noise in the public discourse, which is very short-lived, and people mistake the short-lived noise for the actual feelings of the country at large.
That’s something that we’re learning to coexist within this modern digital age of sound bytes and Twitter proclamations and such. That’s something we all have to remember.
Don’t believe what you’re told on Twitter or on Facebook or wherever. Ask your friends and neighbors how do they feel. Talk to each other. That’s one of the points of this project is to get people to ask each other, well, tell me about your family’s history, where is your family from.
Victor Fuhrman: I must share with you that my family and I are very blessed to be living in a part of New York, a neighborhood in Queens, New York. There we have so much diversity and so many immigrants from so many different places and cultures living together side by side, sharing the richness of their culture, sharing the richness of what they bring to this country. I have people from Croatia, on the right side of me, I have people from India and Pakistan, across the street from me, I have people from China. I have people from all parts of the world living on this one block here in Queens, New York, all living together in harmony, sharing this wonderful American dream together and sharing the richness of the cultures and the faiths that they brought with them. It’s just truly a miracle, a living miracle right here. And if everyone in the world could come and spend a few hours on my block, what a lesson they would learn – just truly amazing.
Paul Avgerinos: That’s for sure. That’s exactly right. That’s what Deepak always says. It’s just so rich, and it’s all interacting and creative in fantastic ways. That’s the future. That’s a good thing. That’s a very, very, good thing, because then everyone realizes we’re all basically the same.
Victor Fuhrman: Paul, how did you folks come up with this lovely format of a book of poems along with a disk of music and meditation?
Paul Avgerinos: Well, we thought it would be wonderful to tell the stories of these wonderful immigrants. There are actually 36 poems in the book and 12 songs on the album. We thought we would take a few of our favorite poems and just use little snippets of the poems, key phrases that Deepak could just sing or whisper or speak to give a meditative, contemplative space for the listener to find their own home in, whether it’s a place or a state of mind.
