A forthcoming book by Jeremy Kurn

Playing in the Flow

Music and Primordial Consciousness

An applied spiritual path for musicians—and a practical training manual for using attention, improvisation, meditation, and altered states to cultivate creative freedom, healing, and collective coherence.

10 Chapters
5 Domains
1 Integrated Practice
Playing in the Flow: Music and Primordial Consciousness by Jeremy Kurn
First edition · forthcoming

01 · The Premise

Music is not only something we make. It is a way of knowing.

Musicians already cultivate many of the capacities associated with contemplative practice: sustained attention, disciplined repetition, embodied awareness, sensitivity to feeling and time, interpersonal coordination, improvisation, and flow.

Playing in the Flow gathers those capacities into a unified practice. It explores how sound can become a medium for perceiving the mind, loosening habitual identity, and participating more consciously in the reality we create together.

02 · The Five Domains

One practice. Five lenses.

The book joins creative practice, direct experience, meaning, perception, and embodiment into a single path of inner cultivation.

01

Music

A living system for making inner states audible, relational, and shareable.

02

Consciousness

A practical study of attention, perception, and the mechanisms that construct experience.

03

Spirituality

An embodied discipline for making ordinary consciousness more coherent, connected, and alive.

04

Psychedelics

Tools for loosening fixed perception and opening creative, relational modes of awareness.

05

Healing

The recovery and integration of parts of self separated by trauma and conditioning.

03 · From Theory Into Practice

A philosophy you can hear, feel, and train.

The ideas become meaningful through practice: first learning to perceive how experience is constructed, then training new states of attention and relationship, and finally bringing those capacities into life.

A

Perceive

Learn how attention, memory, belief, sensation, and social conditioning organize the reality you experience.

B

Practice

Use meditation and free improvisation to move from analytical control into embodied, relational flow.

C

Integrate

Apply heightened awareness toward creative agency, nervous-system regulation, healing, and collective coherence.

04 · Inside the Book

A map from first principles to lived application.

Ten chapters move between philosophy, cognitive science, spiritual practice, music, healing, and psychedelic work, then return those ideas to the body and the instrument.

01

Foundations & Applications

The five domains, duality, ego, and spiritual cultivation.

02

The Brain, Abstraction & Reality

How the nervous system turns environment into meaning.

03

Music, Flow & Feeling

Sound, trance, belief, history, and practical awakening.

04

Theory

Systems, emergence, the self, and music as organized reality.

05

Meditation & Personal Growth

Daily practices for awareness, embodiment, and change.

06

Musical Exercises

Listening, silence, intention, voice, structure, and solo practice.

07

Healing Applications

Ritual music, music therapy, and the mind-body conditions of healing.

08

Psychedelic Applications

Preparation, navigation, safety, integration, and group playing.

09

Other Applications

Performance and personal growth beyond the practice room.

10

Conclusion

The layers of a lived spiritual path.

05 · About the Author

A lifetime at the intersection of music, consciousness, and altered-state practice.

Jeremy Kurn is a pianist, composer, arranger, music director, educator, and writer with a B.A. in Music from the University of California, Davis, emphasizing composition and accompaniment.

His work combines more than three decades of professional musicianship with long-term contemplative practice, altered-state cultivation, and independent interdisciplinary study of consciousness, philosophy, religion, psychology, and the cultural history of psychedelics.

Playing in the Flow develops these strands into a practice-centered approach to music, consciousness, and creative agency.

Through Reflexivity Studios, he is developing a training system for musicians and creative practitioners who want to use sound as a disciplined path toward awareness, connection, and transformation.

More about Jeremy →

Forthcoming from Reflexivity Studios

Learn to participate in what is already unfolding.

Publication details and selected excerpts will be announced here.