For singer-songwriter Don Ryan, the line between psychedelic abstraction and deeply personal revelation has always been a blurry one. His music frequently traffics in surreal imagery, unexpected wordplay, and a kind of kaleidoscopic lyricism that recalls the more adventurous corners of The Beatles' catalog. But on “Color-Way Point,” what initially sounds like another excursion into lyrical surrealism turns out to be something far more specific: an attempt to capture a profound, life-altering experience with consciousness itself.
Accompanied by a new, intimate, in-studio music video premiering today on Blood Makes Noise, the track explores the dissolution of the perceived boundary between the self and the world, a subject that Ryan acknowledges isn't exactly standard songwriting territory.
“‘Color-Way Point’ is an interesting song for me to have written, in that it has the same lyrical feel of the trippy, Beatles-esque near-nonsense that many of my other songs do,” Ryan explains. “Except this one is absolutely about something fairly concrete. It's just an odd and very esoteric subject.”
That subject is non-dual meditation, a contemplative practice that challenges some of our most deeply held assumptions about identity and consciousness.
“I'm a long-time practitioner of meditation, and in particular a secular, non-dualist meditation quite close to the Buddhist practice of Dzogchen,” Ryan says. “It's one of the most slippery and ineffable things in the world to try and describe, but it essentially digs into the fact of the primacy of consciousness itself, and that the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘free will’ are not only not what we think they are, but are, in fact, illusory.”
Although such ideas might sound inherently mystical, Ryan is quick to distinguish his approach from religious belief.
“I know that's an extremely tall order, and it sounds much more religious in nature than secular, but there's nothing about this proposition that need be taken on faith,” he explains. “These are very testable claims, to be undertaken in the laboratory of one's own mind.”
The practice, as Ryan describes it, involves a deceptively simple exercise: turning attention back upon itself.
“In a nutshell, the practice most often consists of essentially inverting consciousness upon itself, frequently meditating with eyes open and peering inward, looking for that which is looking outward.”
“Obviously, I've already lost many, if not most people here,” he jokes. “But that really is the meditative practice. The exercise of inverting consciousness upon itself, often with eyes open, can guide you toward the realization that there actually is no one doing the looking. That is, there’s no separable 'other' that lives inside the head that is looking out at a world that is fundamentally other than what it is. The 'one' who is doing the looking is really just consciousness itself, and isn’t fundamentally different from that which perceives an itch on your leg or a sound passing through the room.”
For Ryan, the exercise ultimately led to an experience that would become the lyrical foundation of “Color-Way Point.”
After about a year of meditation, during which he had experienced brief glimpses of what Buddhist traditions call anatta, or no-self, Ryan found himself standing in a sprawling pumpkin patch in upstate New York, facing the Catskill Mountains shortly before dusk.
What happened next would fundamentally alter his understanding of consciousness.
“I completely lost my sense of self, and it was perhaps the most amazing experience of my entire life,” he recalls. “It felt like pure consciousness. There was no ‘I’ anymore. The ‘center’ of experience that I call me dropped away peacefully, and there was just raw consciousness in its place: a simultaneous experience of the mountains, the pumpkin patch, the people around me, everything.”
“‘I’ essentially, in some very real but again, ineffable sense, became the mountains, and the people around me, and the pumpkin patch, and the clouds, and the blue sky, and the sunshine, and quite literally all things noticed.”
Unlike his previous fleeting experiences of this state, the sensation continued for five or ten straight minutes.
“I know, I know. To the uninitiated, it sounds like I've just described the total nightmare of psychosis,” Ryan acknowledges. “But not only was it perhaps the single most blissful and tranquil experience of my life, there really was a fundamental truth that was witnessed here. And once it's seen, it can't be unseen.”
That extraordinary moment provides the key to understanding the song's otherwise enigmatic lyrics. Lines like “Cracked a hole in the world / Eye-minded emptiness unfurled” and “Lose your head and find the world / Reduced all wisdom to this pearl” aren't merely psychedelic turns of phrase. They're Ryan's attempts to communicate an experience in which the familiar distinction between observer and observed seemed to disappear entirely.
What makes “Color-Way Point” so compelling is the tension between its playful, almost whimsical psychedelic language and the deeply sincere experience beneath it. Ryan transforms an extraordinarily difficult philosophical subject into something immediate, evocative, and unexpectedly accessible, creating a song that invites listeners to feel its meaning even when words alone can't quite explain it.
Ryan is candid about the limitations of translating such an experience into music, even admitting that a few lyrical details were adjusted for artistic purposes.
“The couplet ‘Feel the color tonight / Revel in the white’ is not 100% accurate,” he explains. “It was not night, but pre-dusk, and ‘white’ used as a lyric in this song is just meant to invoke a spiritual, ‘heavenly’ feeling, not a literal picture of what was experienced.”
“But honestly, aside from those two items, all the other lyrics fairly closely describe my actual experience in that field on that day, and all my subsequent adventures outside of this feeling of self as well. No set of lyrics set to music are going to capture this experience. In fact, no set of words could possibly capture it. But this was the best I could do with what I had.”
The accompanying music video takes a deliberately understated approach. Rather than attempting to recreate the Catskill Mountains or visualize the ineffable experience described in the lyrics, it follows Ryan in the studio as he records the song, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the creative process.
That contrast works in the video's favor. The song's subject may concern the apparent disappearance of the self, but its visual presentation remains firmly rooted in the tangible act of making music.
The result is a quietly absorbing marriage of sound and image. By allowing the song's vivid, consciousness-expanding imagery to coexist with the unpretentious intimacy of the recording studio, the video gives “Color-Way Point” a distinctly human dimension. It's a striking reminder that some of the most expansive artistic ideas can emerge from the simplest creative settings.
Where many psychedelic songs use abstraction to escape ordinary reality, “Color-Way Point” uses it to examine the nature of reality itself. Ryan's lyrics aren't an invitation to believe in something supernatural, but rather to reconsider something so familiar that most of us rarely think to question it: the feeling that there is a separate “someone” inside our heads, experiencing the world from behind our eyes.
“Color-Way Point” succeeds not by explaining away the mystery of consciousness, but by finding a musical language for the wonder of encountering that mystery firsthand. It's one of Ryan's most conceptually ambitious pieces of songwriting, yet its greatest strength lies in how effortlessly the philosophical and the personal become inseparable.
For an artist whose work has long embraced the surreal, the song represents a fascinating inversion: lyrics that sound like a flight of imagination, inspired by an experience Ryan insists was more real than the ordinary sense of self he briefly left behind.
And if the experience itself ultimately defies description, “Color-Way Point” makes a persuasive case that music might be one of the better ways to try.
Watch the Blood Makes Noise exclusive video premiere of Don Ryan's “Color-Way Point” below.