My ongoing disco obsession deserves an explanation.

First of all, the word represents for me a comprehensive spiritual ethos stemming from an understanding that the universe is made of aural vibrations. Inaudible to the human ear, these vibrations possess creative power and are infinitely diverse. Their core vibratory essence is made of joy and beauty. It is inherently perfect and holy. These holy vibrations travel in spiraling octaves: the higher ones move faster, the lower ones more slowly. When vibrations slow sufficiently, we get material objects. When they move very fast, we get blazing, ecstatic light. All of existence, material and immaterial, is made of these holy vibrations, so that regardless of how profane we may find a thing, it is still divine.

Music partakes of this inherent divinity and connects us directly to the mind of God. Different sounds are iterations of the diverse auditory field of essential being, which is perfection itself. So why disco, particularly? The kind of “disco” into which I was initiated has a much broader meaning, such that any music at all technically qualifies as disco. I was initiated into the tradition by a legend of the underground—DJ Harvey. I knew nothing about this world of underground music practitioners until I met him and began listening carefully to the kind of music he played. The entire phenomenon was new to me, but I was quickly converted and felt that I had fallen face-first into what was essentially a predestined career path.

I first worked in this field in Honolulu’s Chinatown, where I had my painting studio in a second-story loft space inside Anna Fishburn’s casting agency. Once disco became my thing, painting ceased to hold my imagination. I threw out all my painting materials and converted the little loft space into Hawaii’s Quiet Storm, a free, private Sunday-night party that ran from 10 to 3. It was here that I witnessed how people—humans in their conglomeration of body, mind, and soul—would literally blossom like flowers if the environment, and especially the sound, was beautiful enough. The magnifying and enlightening energetic field of a properly sacralized room and a finely tuned sound system: these became the media in which I now worked as an artist. Quiet Storm was technically illegal, and we were eventually told to shut it down. A couple of years later, I opened thirtyninehotel, the now-legendary art space and nightclub that I founded, owned, and ran for ten years. My unshakeable focus on underground disco as a spiritual path of self-discovery earned me the nickname “disco gee-haad.”

When thirtyninehotel closed in 2014, I was good and lost—which is a great place to be when you begin studying Jungian depth psychology. As I traveled deeper and deeper into my academic work in this area, I began to understand my work in the disco underworld as essentially devotional. I felt the truth of my devotion to beauty and joy—the beauty and joy constellated within the soul through sincere and direct engagement with the vibratory patterns of divinity. I began to see similarities between the driving ethos of underground disco and ancient religious traditions whose practices were rooted in aural incantation and sound-based technologies of liberation.

Fanatically obsessed, I came to see disco as a new religion of freedom and peace, an insight I divulged for several years to a handful of fans in my weekly Disco Liberation Movement sermons. My doctoral dissertation gathered these thoughts together, and now I am, in a very real sense, a Disco Doctor—which is objectively hilarious, but also reminds me of Marsilio Ficino, who was himself, in a way, a disco doctor, famous for writing music and playing it for his clients to heal their ailing souls. For Ficino and other Renaissance thinkers, sounds, planets, and the perfection of universal harmonies were all interwoven strands of a single existential fabric, such that the human soul had only to connect with them inwardly to be healed of malevolent influences. Today, the profundities of yoga and tantra operate within similar categories, where mantra is practiced and understood as one of the most direct paths to union with the mind of God.