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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Music

 

 

 

"Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought." Yipsel Harburg

 

 

  

 

ALL OF BACH: The Netherlands Bach Society's project of producing and video-taping all of Bach's 1080 compositions

The Art of Conducting: British conductor James Lowe talks about the nature of music, and the influence of the Tao Te Ching on his work

Father Benson repeatedly comments on music, color, light, laughter in Summerland: here is a small collection of his assertions in this regard.

 

 Alive Inside may be close to the most inspiring film you'll ever see; no, really.

 

 

Music can heal the despairing soul as no other balm or medicinal agent. It might reawaken us to life and love lost, vivify the battered human spirit, offering hope of celestial tomorrows rooted in untapped human potential.

All this we sense to be true. But, even more, in recent years, one man has been engaged in a private crusade to bring music, the personal songs of one’s life, to dementia patients – with astonishingly wonderful results.

See the website: www.aliveinside.us

 

 

Unknown: "Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside of us."

Red Auerbach: "Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Joseph Addison: "Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below."

 

 

Father Robert Benson, Life In The World Unseen

Father Benson, from the afterlife, explains that many in the spirit world are engaged in the study of music:

The musical antiquary will find all those things that he has sighed for on Earth, but which have been denied him, and here he can consult, freely, works that, because of their preciousness, would never be allowed into his hands on Earth. Many apartments were set aside for students who can learn of music in every branch, from theory to practice, under teachers whose names are known the Earth world over…

There are laws of music here which have no application to the Earth whatever, because the Earth is neither sufficiently progressed on the one hand, and on the other because the Spirit world is of Spirit, while the Earth world is of matter. It is doubtful if the Earth-plane will ever become ethereal enough to hear many of the forms of Spirit music in the higher realms. Innovations have been tried, so I have been told, on the Earth-plane, but the result is not only barbaric, but childish as well.

The many types of musical instrument so familiar on Earth were to be seen in the College of Music, where students could be taught to play upon them. And here again, where dexterity of the hands is so essential the task of gaining proficiency is never arduous or wearisome, and it is, moreover, so much more rapid than upon the Earth. As students acquire a mastery over their instrument they can join one of the many orchestras that exist here, or they can limit their performance to their many friends...

There is, of course, no real necessity for such a [concert] hall to be under cover, but the practice merely follows others in this realm - our own dwelling-houses, for example. We do not really need those, but we like them, we have grown used to them while upon Earth, they are perfectly natural to life, and so we have them… The orchestra was composed of some two hundred musicians, who were playing upon instruments that are well-known to Earth…

We noticed that the instant the music commenced a bright light seemed to rise up from the direction of the orchestra until it floated, in a flat surface, level with the topmost seats, where it remained as an iridescent cover to the whole amphitheatre. As the music proceeded, this broad sheet of light grew in strength and density, forming, as it were, a firm foundation for what was to follow. So intent was I upon watching this extraordinary formation that I could scarcely tell what the music was about. I was conscious of its sound, but that was really all.

Presently, at equal spaces round the circumference of the theatre, four towers of light shot up into the sky in long tapering pinnacles of luminosity. They remained poised for a moment, and then slowly descended, becoming broader in girth as they did so, until they assumed the outward appearance of four circular towers, each surmounted with a dome, perfectly proportioned. In the meanwhile, the central area of light had thickened still more, and was beginning to rise slowly in the shape of an immense dome covering the whole theatre.

This continued to ascend steadily until it seemed to reach a very much greater height than the four towers, while the most delicate colors were diffused throughout the whole of the etheric structure. I could understand now why Edwin had suggested that we should sit outside the theatre proper, and I could follow, also, why composers should feel impelled to alter their Earthly works after they have arrived in Spirit. The musical sounds sent up by the orchestra were creating, up above their heads, this immense musical thought-form, and the shape and perfection of this form rested entirely upon the purity of the musical sounds, the purity of the harmonies, and a freedom from any pronounced dissonance. The form of the music must be pure to produce a pure form…

The expert musician can plan his compositions by his knowledge of what forms the various harmonic and melodic sounds will produce. He can, in effect, build magnificent edifices upon his manuscript of music, knowing full well exactly what the result will be when the music is played or sung. By careful adjustment of his themes and his harmonies, the length of the work, and its various marks of expression, be can build a majestic form as grand as a Gothic cathedral. This is, in itself, a delightful part of the music art in Spirit, and it is regarded as musical architecture. The student will not only study music acoustically, but he will learn to build it architecturally, and the latter is one of the most absorbing and fascinating studies.

In the Spirit world all music is colour, and all colour is music. The one is never existent without the other. That is why the flowers give forth such pleasant tones when they are approached, as it will be remembered of my early experience with flowers. The water that sparkles and flashes colours is also creating musical sounds of purity and beauty.

What a shock so many people have upon their coming into the Spirit world, and how immensely glad and relieved they are to find that it turns out quite pleasant after all; that it is not a terrifying place; that it is not one stupendous temple of hymn-singing religion; and that they are able to feel at home in the land of their new life.

As we walked along after the concert, Edwin pointed out to us the dwelling places of many of the teachers in the various halls of learning, who preferred to live close to the seats of their work. They were, for the most part, unpretentious houses, and it would have been comparatively easy to guess the occupation of the owner, so we were told, from the various evidences within of their work. Edwin said that we should always be welcome should we ever wish to call upon any of the teachers.

The exclusiveness which must necessarily surround such people when they are incarnate vanishes when they come into Spirit. All values become drastic altered in such matters. The teachers themselves do not cease their own studies because they are teaching. They are ever investigating and learning, and passing on to their pupils what they have thus gained. Some have progressed to a higher realm, but they still retain their interest in their former sphere, and continuously visit it - and their many friends - to pursue their teaching.

 

 

Henry Giles: "A song will outlive all sermons in the memory."

Elvis Presley: "I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."

M. Aumonier: "There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it."

Anais Nin: "Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."

Yehudi Menuhin: "Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous."

Chet Atkins: "Approach your guitar intelligently, and if there are limits, don't deny them. Work within your restrictions. Somethings you can do better than others, some things you can't do as well. So accentuate the positive... It takes a lot of devotion and work, or maybe I should say play, because if you love it, that's what it amounts to I haven't found any shortcuts, and I've been looking for a long time."

"Hold On, I'm Coming," one of the greatest soul songs ever

 

 

Jean Genet: "Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me."

Lorenzo, The Merchant of Venice: "The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted."

Unknown: "Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul."

Plato: "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything."

Dr. Max Bendiner: "Music may achieve the highest of all missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile."

Beethoven: "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents."

Quote from outside an old opera house: "Bach gave us God's Word. Mozart gave us God's laughter. Beethoven gave us God's fire. God gave us Music that we might pray without words."

Albert Einstein, asked about his theory of relativity: "It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception."

Henry van Dyke: "Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best."

Harlan Howard: "Country music is three chords and the truth."

Bill Nye: "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

Albert Camus: "Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a  Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason."

B.J. Thomas, I Believe In Music: "I believe in music, I believe in love. Music is the universal language and love is the key -- to brotherhood, peace and understanding, living in harmony. So take your brother by the hand and sing along with me..."

Eric Johnson: "I don't even know if I can take credit for writing Cliffs of Dover ... it was just there for me one day ... literally wrote in five minutes ... kind of a gift from a higher place that all of us are eligible for. We just have to listen for it and be available to receive it."

Yo-Yo Ma, cellist: "What I look for in musicians is generosity. There is so much to learn from each other... Great creativity begins with tolerance."

B. H. Haggin: "If you don't understand what Beethoven 'says,' the reason is that the sounds he uses are not a meaningful language for you; and the thing to do is to learn this language as you would any other ... Which is to say that you will have to listen to Beethoven's music, and keep listening ... just as the way to understand a poem is to read it, and the way to understand a painting is to look at it, so the way -- the only way -- to understand a piece of music is to listen to it, and to keep listening."

Eric Anderson: "It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit -- enable them to see visions and dream dreams."

Unknown: "Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us."

Albert Schweitzer: "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats."

Victor Hugo: "Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent."

Hans Christian Andersen: "Where words fail, music speaks."

Oscar Hammerstein: "All the sounds of the earth are like music."

Ursula K. Le Guin: "It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."

Richard Strauss: "I may not be a first-class composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer."

Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, 1962: "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

Charlie "YardBird" Parker: "Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

Hunter S. Thompson: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

 

you don't really care for music, do you

 Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Well there was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah


There is a line in Leonard’s lyrics: "But you don't really care for music, do you?" Speaking to his immature and wayward lover, he does not mean that she doesn't enjoy a good melody. He is speaking of music as doorway to elevated consciousness; that expedited trip to the foothills of heaven itself.

There was a time in my life, for many years, when I could not listen to music; not because I didn't like the tunes, but because they threatened to reveal too much. The lady in Leonard's song, too, does not allow music to free her soul in the manner it was meant to do. Music will instruct, will roll back the heavens of one's past life, offering insight and hidden meaning, as can few pedagogues; but she is afraid, withdrawn, not willing to be thus musically and mystically taught; not willing to tell him "what's going on below."

Editor's note: See the article "Spirituality, Part III" for a discussion of "following bad feelings down the rabbit hole," music as aid to unlocking the long-barred doors of the mind.

 

 

Barney Kessel, jazz guitar: "Playing scales is like a boxer skipping rope or punching a bag. It's not the thing in itself; it's preparatory to the activity."

Ronnie Scott, jazz saxophonist: "Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible."

 

 

Slash, Guns'n Roses: "Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules get too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion."

Voltaire: "Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."

Joe (Sach) Satriani: "Guitarists shouldn't get too riled up about all of the great players that were left off of Rolling Stone Magazines' list of the Greatest Guitar Players of all Time ... Rolling Stone is published for people who read the magazine because they don't know what to wear."

Henry Van Dyke: "Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best."

Frederick Deluis: "Music is an outburst of the soul."

 

 

Johann Sebastian Bach: "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."

Brian Setzer, Stray Cats: "Elvis Presleys' first album ... had more energy and more enthusiam than any other album at the time. When it was released it just blew everything else out. It changed the whole landscape of music."

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong: "I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people."

Rory Block, guitarist: "It took me five years of going right into the mouth of the lion to learn to be at ease onstage ... if you deal with an audience as a bunch of people having a great time, you'll have a much bettrer time as a performer."

 

 

Billy F. Gibbons, guitar ZZ-Top: "My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear - all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward."

Friedrich Nietzsche: "Without music, life would be a mistake."

Oscar Wilde: "Music makes one feel so romantic, at least it always gets on one's nerves, which is the same thing nowadays."

Tipper Gore: "You're talking to someone who really understands rock music."

Les Paul: "The guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It's everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It's everything, but it's elusive."

Pietro Mascagni: "Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics."

Samuel Butler: "Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule."

 

 

Lenny Breau, jazz guitarist: "I also became inspired by impressionist painters such as Renoir, and wanted to do the same sort of thing with music-portray whatever mood strikes me the way Keith Jarrett does on piano."

Barney Kessel: "He signed his work .. you could always tell when it was Herb Ellis playing."

Bonnie Raitt: "There would be no rock'n roll or rhythm and blues without Leo Fenders' contribution ... the tone is everything."

James Taylor: "I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it and you need them to hear it."

Oscar Lavant, pianist: "There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."

Brian Setzer: "Rock'n roll is the physical thing that just comes out of you .. the other stuff you have to sit down and learn .. once you learn scales and chord progressions, you can make up your own versions." 

Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead: "We have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us - certainly more satisfying, because it doesn't restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style. The result, I think, is pretty interesting ... we don't expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top. As long as we can play, we'll play, regardless of what it's for, who it's for or anything. It's fun for us - that's the important thing."

George Harrison: "Barney Kessel is definitely the best guitar player in this world, or any other world."

John Lennon: "Barney Kessel is incredible. He's just amazing. Nobody can play guitar like that."

James Burton, Lead Guitar for Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, EmmyLou Harris, John Denver: "My policy is not how fast you play, it's not how much you play but it's what you play and where you play it ... the word I still use today is called 'simplicity' .. it is so important that you use simplicity in your playing and in your music." 

Aldous Huxley: "After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

Joe Pass, jazz guitarist: "If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterwards."

 

 

Jules Combarieu: "Music is the art of thinking with sounds."

Johnny Cash: "Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use what ever other influences I wanted, but never to copy ... that was a great rare gift he gave me: believe in myself, right from the start of my recording career... if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field."

Howard Roberts: "I've come up with the theory that the music is within. We don't bring it in; it's already there. We have to figure out how to get it out."

Berthold Auerbach: "Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

Oscar Wilde: "Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory."

John Chesson: "An intellectual is someone who can listen to the 'William Tell Overture' without thinking of the Lone Ranger."

Hugh Masekela, South African trumpet legend: "I think that anybody from the 20th century, up to now, has to be aware that if it wasn't for Louis Armstrong, we'd all be wearing powdered wigs. I think that Louis Armstrong loosened the world, helped people to be able to say 'Yeah,' and to walk with a little dip in their hip. Before Louis Armstrong, the world was definitely square, just like Christopher Columbus thought."

Oscar Hammerstein, working lyric for a piece from The Sound of Music: "Cute little babies that fall out of swings, These are a few of my favourite things."

David Crosby, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "Neil Young played Helpless, and by the time he finished, we (Crosby, Stills & Nash) were asking him if we could join his band."

Steven Stills, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "At a beach house in Malibu that the Buffalo Springfield had rented, I set up my big amps, we (Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Bruce Palmer and Steven Stills) ... just went. We played quite literally for twenty straight hours. We must have made up fifty songs, but there was no tape running, no nothing, we just played for the ocean .... and that night I really started to learn how to play lead guitar."

Graham Nash, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "Wealth and fame can only be so important in the face of musical magic."

Igor Stravinsky: "Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

Trey Anastasio, Phish: "I feel a great responsibility to deliver for our audience ... I am like their servant, but there's only one honest way to lift people up, which is to feel genuinely elevated yourself. And the way to do that is follow your heart. That's all we try to do."

Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin: "You never knew what was going to happen in concert. It was a really exciting prospect to go onstage, and you can hear that in the live recordings ... wherever we were and whatever year it was, we always went onstage determined to do our best."

Jean Paul Richter: "Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life."

Buddy Holly: "Without Elvis, none of us could have made it."

Jerry Garcia: "Grateful Dead -- that's it!! nobody in the band liked (the name), I didn't like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, 'Yeah, that's great.' It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It's just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don't like it."

Bob Dylan: "When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail."

Sir Thomas Beecham: "There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between."

Pat Conroy: "Without music, life is a journey through a desert." 

T. S. Eliot: "You are the music while the music lasts."

Geoffrey Latham: "Music is the vernacular of the human soul."

Charlie Byrd: "Music takes up where language leaves off. To try and verbalize what music says, emotionally and spiritually, is futile. Let me put it this way, Louis Armstrong once said if you've got to ask, you'll never know."

Brian Setzer: "So much of what we do now started in 1954 at Sun Records in Memphis Tennessee ... those guys were inventing (Rock & Roll) ... you can really tell on some tracks ... they were actually afraid at times of what they were playing. But Rock & Roll definitely didn't come before that time; it started right there."

Igor Stravinsky: "A good composer does not imitate; he steals."

Jeffrey Tate: "The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet."

Katie Greenwood: "Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, you learn notes to play to the music of your soul."

George Eliot: "There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music."

George Jellinek: "The history of a people is found in its songs."

Bill Medley: "My daughter McKenna thought I sang with the Everly Brothers. I said, 'no I was one of the Righteous Brothers' and she said, 'didn't they invent the airplane?'"

Paul McCartney: "George Harrison and John Lennon were the ones most against touring ... I'd been trying to say ..Ah, touring's good and it keeps us sharp .. but finally I agreed with them."

Truman Capote: "Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."

Bob Dylan: "People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties."

Leo Tolstoy: "Music is the shorthand of emotion."

Miles Davis: "I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands."

Confucius: "Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without."

June Masters Bacher: "Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever."

John Lennon: "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." 

Dr. Max Bendiner: "Music may achieve the highest of all missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile." 

Eric Clapton: "Whatever your standing in life, the most important thing is behaving in ways that help other people. It's the same with music. I am a servant of the music ... and if I get caught up in ego, I'll lose everything ... it'll burn and that's a guarantee."

George Martin: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt. It changed the entire nature of the recording game - for keeps."

Sam Phillips: "The greats ... be it of country, rhythm & blues, rock 'n' roll, you know what they were doing ? They were messing with your heart and soul. That's what it was. Nothing has the strength, the power, of music."

Maya Angelou: “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”

Ludwig van Beethoven: “Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”

Bix Beiderbecke: “One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Thomas Carlyle: “Music is well said to be the speech of angels.”

Jean Cocteau: “Art is science made clear.”

Ornette Coleman: “Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.”

Lawrence Durrell: “Music is only love looking for words.”

Albert Einstein: “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

John Erskine: “Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.”

Michael Hedges: “I play the guitar because it lets me dream out loud.”

Aldous Huxley: “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

Charles Mingus: “In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am.”

 

  • Editor's note: the following was originally written for the "Summerland" page. It begins with an extract from the writings of Father Robert Benson, his testimony about life on the other side:

 

And as one approached any particular group of flowers, or even a single bloom, there seemed to pour out great streams of energizing power which uplifted the soul Spiritually and gave it strength, while the heavenly perfumes they exhaled were such as no soul clothed in its mantle of flesh has ever experienced. All these flowers were living and breathing, and they were, so my friend informed me, incorruptible.

There was another astonishing feature I noticed when I drew near to them, and that was the sound of music that enveloped them, making such soft harmonies as corresponded exactly and perfectly with the gorgeous colours of the flowers themselves.

 

Plato: "the music of the spheres"

 

Siren tomb statue from the
Dipylon Cemetery in Athens,
4th century BC

"In Greek mythology, the Siren was a creature half bird and half woman who lured sailors to destruction by the sweetness of her song. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus escaped the danger of their song by stopping the ears of his crew with wax so that they were deaf to the Sirens; yet he was able to hear the music and had himself tied to the mast so that he could not steer the ship out of course." The fabled Sirens' beguiling music provides metaphor of a mysterious life-principle thinkers have pondered for thousands of years.

 

Throughout his extensive writings, Father Benson somewhat-frequently speaks of a soft and subtle undercurrent of music suffusing flowers, flowing streams, even the very air and sunshine of Summerland's environment. We are tempted to label this as "the music of the spheres."

This kind of universal music of nature seems to be referenced in many love-songs where we find phrases such as "I hear a symphony" or "I heard music," and many similar statements. I feel this speaks to something important.

 

Editor's note: Hermann Hess's short-story "Iris" finds a courted woman delaying marriage as she wisely instructs her base-spirited lover: "I can live without flowers and also without music. But, one thing I cannot and will not do without: I can never live so much as a single day in which the music in my heart is not dominant. If I am to live with a man, it must be one whose inner music harmonizes with mine, and his single desire must be that his own music be pure."

 

I think that the very substrata of nature, of reality itself, is a form of music. Our souls, I believe, are constructed to reflect a certain musical harmony.

 

 

Tesla said that everything in the universe functions as "frequency and vibration." It is a short step from this view to a felicitously-ordered vibrational essence. This is what music is.

"John and Mary," lacking a soul-bond, cannot experience this, but, when true lovers meet, their sense of overwhelming affinity, of "coming home," of extreme delight, results from an in-phase blending of music issuing from their respective inner-persons. This phenomenon may happen unexpectedly, even without consent of the percipients - it is not a choice but an autonomic, higher-level function of the sacred inner-person, an emergent property of eternal love claiming itself and manifesting itself. Caught in this energy-field of ordered vibrational essence, lovers will speak of "hearing music." It will seem very real.

The music is real, but only they will hear it; a dedicated song, just for them; a melody which, since the lovers' creation, had lain dormant awaiting activation via the agency of a particular, destined person - think of "the sword in the stone" and the affirming shaft of light; no one would have chosen the little boy, and one's eternal mate will likely be a surprise, as well. The celestial soul-music is that shaft of light; it is heaven's sudden unveiling, an unscheduled heralding of the coming of the long-hidden but now-revealed sacred beloved; who, each for the other, will awaken the soul's music into symphonic riot, a surfeit of intoxicated well-being.

We've now entered a realm of cosmic romantic experience which Silver Birch speaks of as "happening only once, whether in this life or the next," issuing in a love "so magnetic, so overwhelming."

Yes, it happens only once - but, as Oscar Wilde instructs us, the lovers' part will be to recreate, during their unending romantic future, this singular profound event "as many times as possible."

 

"music fills my soul now, I'm not half I'm whole now"

Petula Clark, Happy Heart

There’s a certain sound, always follows me around, when you’re close to me, you will hear it, it’s the sound that lovers finally will discover, when there is no other for their love, it’s my happy heart you hear, singing loud and singing clear... feeling more and more, like I’ve never felt before, you have changed my life so completely, music fills my soul now, I’m not half I’m whole now…

 

 

 

Editor's last word: