Gary David, PhD

Gary David has led two lives simultaneously: musician and epistemologist. Each informs the other and they blend like music and words in a song. Gary was interested in music from earliest childhood and has been told that he sang before he spoke. After performing all through his school career, he eventually graduated from Sacramento State University with a BA in political science.

After a 1958-1959 stint in the US Army, he moved to San Francisco to begin a professional musical career. He led a jazz trio, singing and playing in clubs, recording there until 1964 when he moved to Los Angeles and formed an experimental vocal-instrumental group he called The Sound of Feeling. The group featured both Gary's compositions and arrangements and twin sisters with remarkable voices. In 1967, the group was discovered by well-known jazz critic Leonard Feather, who took them under his wing. (Pun intended.) Author of The Jazz Encyclopedia, Feather identified the group as an innovation in the history of jazz singing, and took them into the recording studio in 1968 to record their first album for the Verve label with Oliver Nelson as guest soloist on soprano sax. After appearing opposite Duke Ellington at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, the group was signed to the Mercury-Limelight label where they recorded their second album, Spleen. Both Sound of Feeling albums received Grammy Award nominations.

Simultaneously, Gary had begun his studies in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. In 1964 he met Canadian J. Samuel Bois, an ex-Jesuit, psychologist, general semanticist, and epistemologist. Bois was in the process of transforming epistemology into a new field he called Epistemics: the science-art of innovating in the field of "human being theory." It was Bois who introduced Gary to the work of Silvan Tomkins not long after its initial appearance.

With Bois as his mentor, Gary studied and eventually taught from 1964 to1976 at both the Viewpoints Institute and the UCLA Adult Extension School. Under Bois' tutelage, at the age of 40, Gary received a doctorate in Epistemics in 1975 at the Union Institute, the first such degree given by an accredited college. His thesis, entitled, "Participating," stressed the coordination of affect and cognition within the whole of organism-environment. He used Bois' model of the human being as a semantic transactor - a transactor of significance on both the non-verbal and symbolic levels - in which the electro-chemical, self-moving, affective, cognitive processes are all implicated in space-time transaction with a physical-psycho-social environment. As Gary explains, "participating" could be seen as the central theme that has infused his whole life movement regardless of what he does.

The Sound of Feeling broke up in 1972 and David went solo, but devoted more time to teaching and counseling others while writing and learning in the field of epistemic. His ongoing interest in affect as motivation came to a head in the mid-1990's on reading "Shame and Pride" by Donald Nathanson. Nathanson's writing galvanized him both personally and professionally, and Tomkins's work leaped a power or two in significance. He contacted Nathanson in 1996 and joined the Silvan Tomkins Institute where he began to study the work of Tomkins in earnest. He has incorporated its insights into Epistemics. Gary's presentation at the 2000 Tomkins Institute annual conference "Optimizing Connections" allowed him to show how participating in music can allow people to come together in freedom from scripts that might otherwise prevent joining.

In 1999, with science writer Brian Rothery in Ireland, he helped create the website Philosphere, dedicated to the promotion of those 20th century writers who form the major influences of David's epistemic world: L.L. Whyte, J.S. Bois, Alfred Korzybski, Silvan Tomkins, David Bohm, Gaston Bachelard and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This year, he and Rothery were instrumental in getting two major works of L.L. Whyte republished after they had been out of print for many years. Together, they wrote new introductions for Whyte's "The Next Development in Mankind" and "The Universe of Experience." These books are available through Transaction Publishers of Rutgers University. Gary is also the editor of Bois' textbook, "The Art of Awareness," now in its fourth edition since 1966 and still used as an introduction to the subject by individuals and in colleges.

Gary David continues to make music, doing occasional concerts and releasing recordings. Easily available are two vocal CDs, Never Laugh At Stars (1990) and the new release Thanks For You, a musical tribute to the early jazz work of Frankie Laine. Currently, he gives seminars and has a private practice in epistemic counseling, including affect education, and hopes to introduce Nathanson's innovative work on shame to Southern California.

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