“…as a musician bring yourself into a certain state of mind, body and preparedness, then you can bring yourself to the altar of music and pray there and then sometimes music takes you for a ride.”
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Siberian shamans say that it is the sound of their frame drum that is the horse that carries them into the beyond.
In my experience some music can do this for us. How is this possible? ‘Music as a Mystical Journey’ explores this. The book is about spiritual transformation and our search for happiness and harmony.
My thanks go to
Marie Perret for editing and discussing the manuscript; to Eva Høffding for letting me use some of her channellings; to Emmanuel Rousseau for his beautiful poem.
Like a feather carry me
Light footed
Light hearted
Light minded
Introduction
My musical background
How does the soul manifest?
Deeply moved by listening
Playing music
On cooperation and: Who’s actually singing?
Musical scales and systems as frames of mind
Spiritual transformation work
Healing potential of sound
Appendices
- The practice of the Trinity
- Four Meditations on sound
- My musical journey
- Different tuning systems
- Personalized CD
- Colour rays of our Spiritual qualities
- The human energy fields
List of books mentioned
As I walked out
One morning in May
I thought I heard
My true love say
I thought I heard
This lonesome sound:
Won’t you turn around
And look this way.
This is the beginning of a song by the New Lost City Ramblers - I chose it as the title for the first album I ever recorded, with my first group, the Country Ramblers.
The words of that song have a strong parallel to Sufi poems, where the beloved is a metaphor for the divine. The ‘lonesome sound’ is a good metaphor to describe the feeling of the inner call that I felt when first hearing the NLCR on the radio.
It started my journey into music and its deeper aspects.
It is all about ‘self’ realisation, joy and spiritual transformation. The longer I walk this path the less I am convinced that it is about the ‘self’ and certainly not the isolated ‘me’. This concept of the ‘me’ seems to increasingly fade away. I’m not quite sure where it is all going to end, if there is such a thing as an ‘end’. I just feel an inner pull towards what one might call the ‘divine field’. The loss of connection with our soul and the non-visible worlds has also affected them. Reconnecting is bringing about new life and a stronger circulation between us, our soul and the beyond.
Music reflects and restores harmony by weaving together threads of inspiration from different levels of consciousness. It is about how well we all blend and cooperate. Much is pointing to the fact that the physical and non physical worlds are getting closer again, that the veil is getting thinner by the day.
Perhaps the first book I ever read on deeper aspects of music was Hazrat Inayat Khan’s beautiful ‘Mysticism of Sound’ 9. Sufis have celebrated the divine through amazing poetry and music, maybe like few other groups before. They would call God or the divine ‘the beloved’.
In fact when we fall in love with someone there are usually three aspects woven together. The first two are projections, which don’t really belong to the other: the wounded part of us that wants to find wholeness and healing, and there is our deep search for the divine that we think of finding in the other person. And only then there is the love that actually belongs to the other. We tend to mix up these three aspects and think it is our beloved that all of these intense feelings are aimed at.
“The sacred ecstasy which the Sufis experience (through singing and music) …may be said to be the union with the Desired One. There are three aspects of this union… First: … the heart of the devotee, filled with love, admiration and gratitude. Second: … union with the beauty. The third stage in ecstasy is union with the divine Beloved.”
Hazrat Inayat Khan
The Native American influence is also present and a dear memory to me. They knew how to move into ecstatic spaces through venerating their link to the Great Spirit in all its manifestations in Nature in a simple, natural and direct way. Every ethnic group has this wisdom in their tradition; some musicians perpetuate the tradition of a timeless, classical type of music of high spiritual value in a way that is essentially a dialogue with the divine. We have often erroneously called it Folklore or folk music and tend to feel superior with our classical music. I am very happy that my musical education began essentially through an oral tradition and folk music. I feel that this is the way my soul guided me into music the day
…I heard that lonesome sound.
For some mysterious reasons music has been and still is an absolutely essential part of my life. I’ve studied it from all sides. I worked for nearly 20 years as a music therapist. I have played music for almost 45 years by now. I have written about music in books and in music reviews. I have listened to an enormous range of music and thought a lot about it. I have been teaching people how to go deeper with music for 30 years. Above all, I’ve been extremely moved by music and still am at times beyond reason. As music is such an important part of our culture I am convinced that teaching through music is a playful way of making our pilgrimage towards some universal truth, some deeper meaning in life. That is why this book is about ‘self’ realisation through music.
There are many ways to self realisation. Music is a particularly enjoyable one. It is one of the great celebrations offered to the creator, to life, an expression of joy, even ecstasy, it is a wonderful way to connect to meaning, to beauty, to the deepest part in ourselves, which we shall call the soul and, just beyond this, what might be the divine field. Although mantras are a very important aspect of self development through sound I do not have enough experience to write about them.
Being invisible, music links us with and reminds us quite naturally of the invisible. There is magic in it, mystery and a call that draws us on a pilgrimage. We may not know exactly whereto, but a bit like the story flute player of Hamelin: if we ‘become like children’, we can follow him. Christ taught this: to become like children we need to connect to our feelings, and to an enthusiasm for life (‘en theos’ meaning ‘in God’ in Greek) that leads us to playfully explore and discover, without thinking about why and how long or what other people may think.
Music and sound is a great asset on the path: they communicate directly with our right brain, our feelings and bypass our intellect. I have written about the neuroscience approach to music in ‘Roots of Musicality’4.
The main ingredient in the mystical journey of music seems to be the deep feelings that certain types of musical activity always stirs in me. It is like a particular perfume that you know so well, that carries you away each time you smell it. Church bells do this to me, the cry of migrating cranes and wild geese as well. Of course, metaphorically, church bells call you to the spiritual service, to remember your origins and the reason you are here on earth. In some Native American languages they call the wild geese ‘The Dream of the Earth, probably referring to how the birds connect peacefully distant areas of the planet.
To start with we need to define how we are going to use the word ‘mystical journey’, ‘soul’ and what lies ‘beyond’. Starting with the word ‘soul’, we will use it as the individual core entity of consciousness that sends out incarnations into the physical world so as to gather experience and to be able to evolve. The soul is clearly beyond any painful emotions. We shall come to how it manifests and makes itself felt, later on in the text.
The ID-Point or individuality point, as Bob Moore used to call it, can be considered as the nearest manifestation of the soul and can be felt and experienced above your head, in the spiritual part of your aura, I would think that the soul lies beyond it.
The spiritual aura reflects the qualities you bring with you for this particular incarnation. In themselves these qualities do not represent your soul fully as they are only a temporary manifestation of the soul. Though specific qualities seem to stay for more than one incarnation, they do change and evolve over time so as to give the soul the whole range of experience. Possibly the essence stream of energy inside your spine may be the physical location that comes closest to the timeless dimension of your soul. See the appendix for the list of the seven rays or spiritual qualities.
The essence of what the soul is and what lies beyond, can only be experienced through feelings. Though unexplored by western science, feelings are an amazing tool of observation that allows quite a deep and exact discernment. Here I’d like to include Bob Moore’s explanation of ‘feelings’:
It's very difficult to produce descriptions of feeling. Having worked with people for many years now, it seems to me that the word feeling has been strongly related to emotion. One can look at feeling and find that if one follows the movement through emotional conditions within us, one of course is drawn to feeling. One can look at that and say that it is the upper bracket of emotion. It is. But then that doesn't end the connection to feeling. In fact one can say that is only the beginning.1
Usually the notion of mystical journey is referred to in the search for the divine as a something beyond our soul. It is an inner journey towards home, towards the place where we come from and go to. I would agree that ‘the kingdom of heaven’ is here on earth, in us and everywhere, if we have ‘eyes to see’ and ‘ears to hear’. In the appendix I propose a simple spiritual practice called the Practice of the Trinity.
I am writing this book because music and the deeper feelings that come with it have always felt to me like an inner call from the beyond. I feel that the mystical journey is this quest to find out what the call, what these inner feelings are about. A lot has been written about the ‘beyond’ and the goal of a mystical journey. I will stay with my experience and my faith, that all of this is connected to the intelligence that created the beauty of this world including all ‘invisible’ creation. I feel that a mystical journey is bringing about an alignment between our present personality, our soul and what one might call the divine or the divine field.
All I know is this feeling of being drawn deeper and the need to let go of anything that I may hold onto, which seems to be mainly emotions and the useless habits they generated.
If you decide to go on or find yourself on a mystical journey, you cannot copy. You often need to walk alone although you might walk some of the way with other pilgrims and this takes courage. Let me include here a teaching from Ignatius, channelled by Eva Høffding:
To be authentic
To be authentic you must follow your innermost longings. What else can you do? This longing within you is connected to the truth about you – who you really are. In this you must be brave. Sometimes – in fact often – it takes great courage to follow your longings – as this will penetrate every neurotic or destructive pattern you are holding onto. Please contemplate this.
Many of you wish to be in a process where you wish to open your heart more deeply. It requires great courage because it requires your willingness to let go of all that is not you. When you let go of that, you see, you become more authentic. This is a process of transformation – of healing inner wounds. And we can be of assistance – we can be of help. You must understand that we love to see you become your true selves, because in this way you will be able to circulate with us more deeply and we can share the experience of Divinity which is the deepest reality there is... And then you can bring this into the world … You see, this is the whole idea … to give it out.
Ignatius 25.5.2012
“The heart of man,
if once expanded,
becomes larger
than all the heavens.”
Hazrat Inayat Khan