My Favorite New Song: When I Close My Eyes

When I Close My Eyes

music and lyrics Dada Nabhaniilananda & Josh Friedman                                                                         video production Liilamaya Mark Benson

When I Close My Eyes

©2015 Dada Nabhaniilananda & Josh Friedman

With my hands I’ll build a spaceship ‘case we run out of room
like a wizard who helps everybody’s dreams come true
with my hand I only want to do good
wouldn’t you do that if you only could?

With my head I’ll write a song about saving the world
every river every robot, every boy every girl
singing, wisdom is the one missing link,
connecting, what I feel to all that I think.

When I Close my Eyes
My heart can open wide
Now I see
Who I’m meant to be

When I Close my Eyes
I no longer wonder why
Now I see
Who I’m meant to be

With my heart I’ll turn your sadness into unicorns
and rainbows with more colors and roses with no thorns
With our hearts we can travel so far
Together we can aim for the stars

When I Close my Eyes
My heart can open wide
Now I see
Who I’m meant to be

When I Close my Eyes
I no longer wonder why
Now I see
Who I’m meant to be

Baba Nam Kevalam
With our hearts we can travel so far
Together we can aim for the stars

Baba Nam Kevalam
With our hearts we can travel so far
Together we can aim for the stars

On the Writing of This Song

I wrote this with Josh, my super talented song writing partner, in 2015. I needed a purpose written song to enrich the keynote presentation that I use at technology corporations titled The Enlightened Leader Project: Cultivating Love, Creativity and Wisdom through Meditation. Doesn’t sound very romantic does it? But Josh, who is a much more prolific and experienced songwriter than me, was undaunted, and at least I had the germ of an idea, which was this. The three verses could be about love, creativity and wisdom, symbolized by the heart, the hands and the head.

I don’t recall where that verse melody came from. I think we might have borrowed it from another unfinished song we’d been working on. Anyway, we wrote a set of lyrics, but they didn’t grab us so we decided to scrap most of them and go more crazy. That’s where the wizards and robots and unicorns came from. We had a lot of fun writing that. And yes, that ‘I’d build a spaceship ‘case we run out of room’ is a nod to Elon Musk. I’d just finished reading an early biography and was inspired by his vision of the power of technology for good.

Please Note: I’ve since become seriously disillusioned with Elon Musk and his behavior, so I’m rewriting this first line before we go into the studio next year to record my next album.

I had no clear idea of what the chorus was going to look like but I need not have been concerned. That melody and first line ‘when I close my eyes’ just came right out of intuitional space unexpectedly. No effort – it just appeared when needed in one of those moments when you’re reminded that music is a gift from a higher place.  right after we’d finished the verses.

Now if you know a bit about Ananda Marga philosophy and practices, you’ll also understand this. The hands, the head, the heart are the components of the namaskar mudra which is used as a spiritual greeting. This same idea can also represent the three-fold path of Karma (hands = action), Jinana (wisdom = head) and Bhakti (love = heart) Yoga embodied in the pratik yantra that is the symbol of Ananda Marga Yoga. So there you have it, an entire super-sophisticated philosophy re-packaged in a three minute song about spaceships and unicorns.

This song satisfies me absurdly. The chorus can make me cry (happy, spiritual yearning type tears), and that nutty ‘every river, every robot’ line still makes me laugh. But I mean it. Robots deserve love too. Somehow we’d managed to squish into one song a great many of the things I care about. Spiritual Meditation, doing good, and being wise and loving and kind, and this being the key to we struggling humans fulfilling our great promise, all those high concept ideals. But at the same time, embracing humor and playfulness and unicorns and wizards and robots and spaceships and all the absurd, beloved children of our hopes and dreams.

Baba Nam Kevalam: Love is the essence of everything.