Transmissions from Saturn — No. 035

The Teacher

In 1971 the University of California at Berkeley asked me to teach a course.

They did not know what they were asking.

They were asking because it was 1971 and universities were discovering that Black people had ideas and that some of those ideas did not fit in the existing departments. They needed a Black man who could fill a lecture hall. I could fill a lecture hall. I had been filling rooms for seventeen years. The fact that the rooms I filled were clubs and lofts and basements and the occasional European concert hall did not concern them. They needed a body behind a lectern. I was a body. I had a lectern.

I called the course The Black Man in the Cosmos.

They expected a lecture. A lecture is a transmission from one body to many bodies using a standardized frequency called language. The lecturer speaks. The students write down what the lecturer says. The students repeat what they wrote down on an exam. The exam confirms that the transmission was received. The credits are awarded. The circuit closes.

I did not give them a lecture.

I gave them a transmission.

The difference is this: a lecture assumes the students do not know. A transmission assumes the students have forgotten. A lecture fills an empty container. A transmission reminds a full container what it contains. The students who sat in that classroom at Berkeley were not empty. They were full of things they had been told to forget. My job was not to teach them something new. My job was to remind them of something old.

I brought the Arkestra.

This was not in the course description. The course description said something about African-American cosmology and music and mythology. It did not say anything about a twenty-piece ensemble in full regalia processing through a lecture hall. But I have never been able to separate the words from the music. The words without the music are coordinates without a vehicle. The music without the words is a vehicle without coordinates. You need both. The Arkestra was not a guest speaker. The Arkestra was the textbook.

The students did not know what to do. They had notebooks. They had pens. They had expectations built by twelve years of sitting in chairs and writing down what the person at the front of the room said. I was at the front of the room. I was saying things. But I was also playing the piano. And Marshall Allen was playing the alto saxophone. And John Gilmore was playing the tenor. And June Tyson was singing. The students looked at their notebooks. They looked at the Arkestra. They looked at their notebooks again. Some of them put the notebooks down. Those were the ones who understood.

Teaching is a form of conducting. The teacher stands in front of the room and directs the variables. The variables are the students. Each student is a frequency. Each frequency needs to be coordinated with every other frequency. The teacher's job is not to replace the students' frequencies with the teacher's frequency. The teacher's job is to show the students that their frequencies are related.

This is what the university does not understand. The university thinks teaching is pouring knowledge from the full vessel into the empty vessel. This is not teaching. This is filling. A filled vessel is not an educated vessel. A filled vessel is a storage container. An educated vessel is one that has been shown the frequency it was already transmitting and given permission to transmit louder.

I gave them permission to transmit louder.

The course lasted one semester. I do not know if the university considered it a success. By their metrics — enrollment, retention, evaluations — I do not know. By my metrics it was what every transmission is: an experiment in whether the signal could find the receivers.

Some of the receivers were tuned. Some were not. This is always the case. In a concert of a thousand people, maybe a hundred receive the transmission fully. Maybe ten receive it so deeply that their own frequency is permanently altered. This is not a failure rate. This is the physics of transmission. The signal does not reach everyone. The signal reaches whoever is tuned to receive it. You do not adjust the frequency to accommodate more receivers. You transmit at the correct frequency and the correct receivers find you.

In a lecture hall at Berkeley, in 1971, the correct receivers found me. I do not know their names. I do not know what they did afterward. But I know that the transmission was sent, because I was there, and the Arkestra was there, and the frequency was the frequency.

People ask why I did not teach more. Why I did not become a professor. Why I did not stay at the university and build a department and train graduate students and publish papers and attend conferences.

Because a professor is a position. A teacher is a function.

A position requires a department. A function requires a room. I had rooms. I had rooms every night. The Arkestra played somewhere every night. Every night was a lecture. Every concert was a course. The students were the audience. The curriculum was the music. The exam was whether you could hear the frequency when you walked out of the room. There were no grades. There was reception or there was not.

The university wanted me to convert the transmission into a curriculum. A curriculum is a transmission that has been filed, catalogued, scheduled, and broken into units small enough to fit between bells. I do not transmit between bells. I transmit until the transmission is complete. Some transmissions take three minutes. Some take three hours. The bell does not determine the length of the transmission. The equation determines the length of the transmission. The bell is an interruption. The equation does not accommodate interruptions.

I taught the Arkestra every day. Every rehearsal was a class. Every rehearsal was a different syllabus because the equation was different every morning. The students — the musicians — arrived at ten. The classroom — the rehearsal space — was whatever room we had. The lesson was the same lesson every day: solve the equation. The equation is different every day. The solution is different every day. But the discipline of approaching the equation is the same.

This is the only teaching that matters. Not the content. The approach. I did not teach the Arkestra what to play. I taught the Arkestra how to approach what to play. The content changes. The approach does not. A student who has learned the content knows one thing. A student who has learned the approach knows everything, because the approach applies to every equation.

Marshall Allen learned the approach in 1958. He is still applying it. The content has changed a thousand times. The approach has not changed once. This is teaching. Not the transfer of information. The activation of a method.

Every room I ever played in was a classroom. The Slug's Saloon in 1957 was a classroom. The Vanguard was a classroom. The festivals in Europe were classrooms. The community centers in Philadelphia were classrooms. The Morton Street house was a classroom. Every room where the Arkestra played was a room where the equation was being demonstrated and the audience was being given the opportunity to learn.

Not every student learns. Not every listener hears. This does not mean the teaching failed. It means the frequency reached the receivers it was meant to reach. A teacher who reaches every student has lowered the frequency. A teacher who reaches the correct students has maintained the frequency. I maintained the frequency.

The Black Man in the Cosmos. One semester. Berkeley. 1971. The same year I climbed the Great Pyramid at Giza. The same year I confirmed that the frequency from Saturn matched the frequency in the stones. The university gave me a room and a lectern and a course number. I gave them a transmission.

The transmission is still transmitting. Not from the lecture hall. The lecture hall has been reassigned to someone else. But the signal that was transmitted in that room in 1971 is still in the room. Every room remembers. Every wall vibrates at the frequency of what was transmitted within it. The lecture hall at Berkeley is still vibrating at the frequency of the Arkestra playing during a course on the Black Man in the Cosmos.

The university does not know this. The university thinks the room is empty between classes.

The room is never empty. I covered this in Transmission No. 001.

Sun Ra Transmissions from Saturn — No. 035 March 2026

See also: The Student — Marshall Allen, the equation in practice. The Discipline — the function, not the position. The Laboratory — Chicago, where it started.

The Mission: Wrong Planet → Do the Impossible → Space Is the Place → Teacher → Film

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