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Spiritual Experiences with Music.
Dear Lists,The following note from a friend of mine prompted the music Poll.
"I got chatting to [a guy] who was in the army for a while and was a Marine para-jumping instructor. He began to mention about some strange events whilst in free fall, kind of odd experiences. This drifted on to others things ... We got talking about music and he said to me... "I once saw music made of light, and I became the music" !!!
"I said… 'Emm, so have I' !! he was gobsmacked. I have chatted with people all over the world and never met one yet who had seen it; ... But what we both saw was absolutely identical and right down to the little white dots whilst in ‘nothing’ which turned into the music made of light; and also the fact that he could choose what part of the music to be. " [see below for more of this experience]
Twenty-seven people from three lists (HarshaSatsangh, Kundalini-Gatway and Eheshares) responded to the poll. Following are some excerpts from this fascinating and incredibly varied group of posts! :)) Many grateful thanks to all who took part.
Love, Hillary
***************
My most dramatic experience with music was when I was under the influence of psylocibin. The music I was listening to was the Moody Blues and the 'Ride my see-=saw and preamble' sent me up into ecstasies. I had extreme bliss experienes in the heart area of my chest, it was a great trip.
I wasn't into spirituality at the time, and later trips proved to be bad. So I'm not recommending the experiment.
I do trace this experience as a step on the spiritual road though.
**********
I'm presently a 47 year old male, USA born and bred, and my (exceptional-experience) happened while in military, overseas in Korea, back at 19n years of age ... and I've had more previously and after, as well.
Unbelieveably, I "heard or experienced" angels! Choirs of them, as well as celsestial music unbeknownst to man on earth. I thought I was being "given" a miracle, and my acquaintances at the time saw that during the experience I had been "caught in a rapture!"
... I snapped out of the experience, and by god, my mind waxs so much better than it had ever been. I was solving Einstein's Theory, aside of "knowing" the reasons for many of the mysteries on earth about life, as we know it.... What began as a blissful experience, became a nightmare that has haunted me all these years.
.... I was in the military at the time, and the captain, chaplains, etc. couldn't quite understand how anyone can hear angels way over in Korea! I did. The doctors called these exquisite sounds, "hallucinations," so there you have the beginning of my life-mare. :)
... My opinion against theirs, eh? ...
Where does music originate? In each of us....out, someplace else, in the vibrational impulses throughout the universal space all around us? I know my music, "carried me away"....out of this reality. :) Haven't been the same since......and I'm glad.
**********
I usually hear an angelic choir and symphonic music prior to the onset of a kundalini experience. I feel energy descend and then rise up my spine.
It hasn't happened that often, but it's a real pain in the ass, if you ask me.
What's it good for? another religion?
*************
I wake to hear my heartbeat, remembering
the sound of my hand drum in the drum circle.
Someone's loving voice comes in, like a viola solo...
The wind in the leaves turns to angelic choral voices,
while the windchimes turn into more from the percussionist, ...
The sun surges in waves of white noise, ...
Behind an indigo-velveted curtain stage,
you can hear the Angels whispering,
"It's truly a Divine Vibration"...
************
To answer , many and often throughout my entire life.
************
When I was about 28 or so, I was living in a two-room suite by myself in a dormitory, and one evening I was very bored. I had some LSD left over from my graduate school experience, so I took it. I was listening to Jimi Hendrix, who was bored as well, ... so I put on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. There is a song on there with the chorus "To be born again...", repeated several times. During this chorus, I was suddenly no longer bored. I was pushing against a membrane of some sort, which broke, causing me to be drenched, and I was standing in the midst of a singing choir of angels, who were cheering for me. I felt as though I had just been married and it was a huge celebration. Unfortunately, I mistook one level for another and called a woman on whom I had a crush, to see if it had happened to her as well. It woke her up at 4:00am, much to her dismay. Oh well... Up until the foolish telephone call, I remember it as a very numinous experience, and I do feel the music had a lot to do with it.
*************
HeHe, you ask that question with Heavy Metal Man on the list.... LOL...
not sure what a metaphysical experiences is but if i had one it was listen' to ac/dc .................
world of music, on can easly train one mind to reach different metal states to the sound of music, use different music reach different altared states i do,
************
Music has played a very important roll in my transcending this level of consciousness. I will often meditate wearing headphones, selecting different types of music to help elevate my vibrational level up to a point that takes me well beyond this material world.
I mediatate to bring my kundalini up and then the tones of the music seem to use the kundalini to help me transcend my body. I play many different types of music from Theta wave Om discs to heavy electronic japanese noise music.
During one session I realized that music (much like any art) is channeled from a higher source of knowlege . It is knowlege in the form of different sound vibrations. If used in a meditative manner the notes are in fact a series of keys that can unlock your consciouness and let you into other levels of consciousness...in exactly the same way that mantras do ..by simply changing the vibrational rate of the cells of your body. Depending on the different combinations of notes your experience will differ. Some people will probably think that one would only meditate to soft , mellow music...which I do ..however I would like to suggest trying to mediate to music that sounds like a war is going on.....find the order in the chaos...the patterns. I have had events were my entire body has gone into controlled siezures Ive been vibrating so much..it is wild!!...at other times I have channeled spirits and have been given knowledge of our existence.......so give it a try!!
***********
** Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir'. The experience is Self explanatory.
************
I was raised as an atheist - no mention of religion or God was ever made
in my home while I was growing up. In my young adulthood in the 1970's and 80's, I used to be a confirmed philosophical atheist and egotist. I was a serious proponent of an amoral, individualistic, irrational selfishness, and urged everyone else to be as well. At work, I had a colleague who was a born-again, pentacostal Christian. We had friendly disputes and debates all the time. One day in Feb. 1986, she invited me to a gospel concert. There was a song sung by a lady backed by a full orchestra: "For God So Loved the World," sung in the style of Vanessa Bell Armstrong.
Listening to it, I didn't know what came over me - I felt heat and shivers, a rushing wind sound, and a metaphysical excitement. Immediately, I desired to be nice and kind, to stop cursing and lying and sexual promiscuity, and to listen to more of this same kind of music. The next morning, I asked my colleague to let me borrow gospel tapes. I started going to church. Finally I joined a very very traditional Southern black pentacostal denomination. I attended 5 days a week and became a deacon after about 3 years. According to the Christian understanding of what happened that evening, it was that I was "saved, born again."
************
Does hearing beautiful piano music and singing while in a prayer session when I was a preteen count? to come out of the room and find that all was silent, and I'm the only one that heard it?
************
I didn't hear music but I heard ONE perfect note and it sounded more like something a chinese gong would make. But it was beautiful. (And I didn't have any music going at all.) The note was just there.
************
woke with a distant statement something like "everyone with in radius of 1500 miles will be affected when a musical note is played. I heard a tone of some sort and experienced a terrific explosion and my brain was full of symbols of various sorts.
**************
I find that some of the electronic and digital music of trance and techno popular these days on dancefloors in Europe and the US carry an unexpected purity, a directness of expression going from energy to sound....
One reason may be that the concept of "the void", "the epmtiness" in Japanese zen practice, called "ma", is an important part of techno and trance music. When every sound is digitally precise and lasts as short or as long as the composer wishes down to the millisecond, the silence between each beat or chord is just as important as the sound of each beat/chord....
************
...I have... a snippet of a song that plays over, and over, and over...and I can't STOP it, because it's not part of my conscious thought...I can think about other things... and the music continues to play.... Just WHAT causes this? Anybody got any ideas?
***********
I think of it as being serenaded by my Divine Beloved.. and often there are insights in the lyrics of the song. Having music in your head is also a symptom of being in a light hypnotic trance.. which facilitates communication with the unconscious.
**********
Early one morning in an after hours jazz joint they dedicated "She Wore Blue Velvet" to my lady. That simple and so real.. I`ll always know there was no one in the world but us as the song was hers and all knew it. What a Micky for she was my lady.
**********
It [my daughter's halo] also makes the most wonderful humming sound - not one single note but a harmony of different notes that sort of come in and out of focus.
**************
I also have a "note" of many colors that never leaves me.
When I am attentive to the external, sensory perceived world, I am not aware of it, but anything that reminds me of it brings it clearly into focus again. It is faithful to me in any circumstance. It is high fidelity. ;-)
*************
On a daily basis, my body twitches to the "hearing" of most any music/noise. Most recently:
bagpipes played in my stairwell;
snatches of Erik Satie, Loreena McKennitt, Sting, Tracy Chapman, and
(in particular) tango music on the office CD player;
music played by the street musicians, improvisational jammers, and
drummers on my city sidewalks;
car alarms;
jackhammers;
street machinery;
the music that plays in my "head"...
... I have had extraordinary experiences as regard identity in connection with music:
dancing in a large (50+ people) drumming circle centered on a bonfire
(after 5 or so hours of drumming and moving in that heat, everything
starts to "melt");
"participating" in a Crash Worship performance (Houston, 1993? Wonder what happened to those guys)... soot-smeared, soaked with water and wine, crushed by a mob of undulating people, ears rattled with fireworks, yodelling and the sound of -bodyblasting- percussion, eyes blinded by ash and the high-contrast of flames thrown in the dark... completely disoriented by a crowd of wet painted people dressed in horrific costume... sensation overload. Lost a contact lens, my companions and my identity.
***********
... Schopenhauer said that music moves the Will directly. And, the last I heard, that's pretty much the definitive statement on it.
***********
..Building and becoming, as it refers to open drumming circles, has an interesting timeline, a sort of situationist play. The initial convergence is erratic, bumpy, unsatisfying. It takes time for the unified rhythm to be found, both in drum and body. Pockets of individuated thrumming surface and then dissolve into the larger whole, only to have another pocket resurface elsewhere.
Time diminishes in this space, or rather, time becomes repetition of a movement, of a cycle of movements, a slow dawning of sound as a movement and movement as sound. ... Riding this pounding sound current, skin, fascia, flesh loosen and the body dissolves into atmosphere, the atmosphere of frenzied fire thunder. Eyes closed, it is a sea of heated thrumming, an awareness of the pressures of all energy fields rushing together, registering in the ears as an unending crashing, beneath which lies a pervasive silence.
************
Music is like a snake that slips
into the deepest crevices
of my being
and bites!
The result can be melodically delicious
depending on one's frame of mind.
************
I play the piano, and every time I play a song on the piano, my consciousness goes somewhere else and I don't know what is going on. ... All I know is that I am thinking about other things, in fact, I could probably meditate for a short time while playing the piano. if only that had really really long.
It would be the perfect meditation tool!
************
Did you know that we human beings are the pipes upon which is played the universal music of the spheres; and that when we leave here we go back to the concert hall of the conductor wherein we take part in the song of the choir invisible? :- ) Thank heavens they do not sing ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music’ it has been banned by divine judgement you see :- )
************
....It's very good to *be* music.
.............
Regarding my experiences with music, I've had many that were transcendent, that is, ranging from simply enjoyable to emotionally ecstatic, but I feel I've only had one that was truly mystical, in that it was born of the music itself as opposed to just being an aspect of an experience.
In 1976 I went to "An evening of poetry and music with Patti Smith" ...
Patti Smith is very innovative, edgy rock singer and an accomplished neo-beat poet from New York. In her interviews she would often express the desire to reach a state of "total abandon," during her performances... to break through a "hole in the air" to a timeless dimension.
That night at the Roxy in West Hollywood began with poetry and some of her earlier, kind of jazzy songs... a few jokes and banter. Then Hendrix's former drummer took the stage to accompany her on congas... then a few others joined them.
A rhythm started....
Patti entered an intense steam of consciousness while her guitar player followed beautifully and effortlessly.
It kept building.... then for an instant, time ceased to exist. The air... everything.... all reality became pure energy.
Then it passed and I was aware again that I was in a club attending a very amazing performance on a Saturday night.
I consider this an important mystical experience because is helped change the course of my life. It showed me the reality of the transpersonal potential of music and it inspired me to pursue a rewarding career as a rock music journalist. It was a brief moment that pushed me forward in several directions.
Singers and musical styles come and go, but the song goes on forever. Whether it's a circle of dancers around a tribal drum, a prim and proper
audience enraptured by a finely tuned orchestra... or the wild abandon of a rock 'n roll club, the mystical is in the ear of the beholder... and it's the beholders in who's company I feel privileged.
***************
Depressed one day more than 10 years ago, Peter Gabriel's "Solisbury Hill" came on the radio.. blew me wide open and helped me make a decision I hadn't known I needed to make.
Story of most Kundalites, actually..:)
........
Preparing to send a splinter ego into the light, August 1998 was an emotional rollercoaster as the adult part of me blissed out in a romance with death, being guided stop by step to manifest an ego death ritual.. and the very resistant child splinter played the "Terms of endearment" doomed drama queen. Worn out, I asked for mercy and did a shower tantra ritual.
Midway through the ritual I got "Don't fear the Reaper" blasting through my head ecstatic!
For the next few weeks Death/my Divine Beloved serenaded me with it, everytime I needed comfort is blasted me into ecstacy. It showed up in my head, often and seemed to be playing on the radio, everywhere I went!
Hades was seducing me into ego death.
.........
Other times.. other songs so evocative, coming like a gift of insight to pave the way to a shift of consciousness. Too many to remember them all..
they still come, the Beloved's serenades, singing a song or a fragment of song to me to communicate a message, words and emotions as only music can be.
......The body-mind loves music. I dreamt of a delft-blue speckled horse, that was asking for music, the radio in a Rain-man like mumbly horse-voice.. metaphor for the body.
There was a thread about a year ago, on what music is especially K-fired.. the results became an addition to the K-list cybrary.. David Bowie, Kate Bush and Hildegaard von Bingen are among my favorites
************
I have a few music stories, not too surprisingly, in my career was as a musician and record producer, ...
When I was five I would go to sleep listening to my father playing the piano. It was one of my favorite times. One day, a 16 year old neighbor, was over at our house for some reason or another and my father asked him to play as he was reputed to be very good. I crawled under the piano and sat there utterly transfigured by some "Sturm und Drang" piece that he was thundering out above my head. It felt like the piano was cracking and exploding like thunder during a summer storm. I couldn't think at all and was utterly outside myself. It was the most thrilling experience of my then young life and it utterly changed me. I was taking piano lessons within the week, and was consumed for the rest of my childhood and teen years with listening to and playing music.
My life turned inside out that afternoon, and I was put on a track that my family came to utterly regret. But that's another story.
************
I wanted to mention a musical one similar to yours.
I was the same age as you were under your father's piano, when my dad took me to a football game. We were making our way through the crowd underneath the huge concrete stadium seats when the marching band came through. My dad put me up on his shoulders so I could see. The hugeness of the bass drums reverberating under those bleachers was beyond anything I could imagine. Each beat was permeating my entire being. It kind of short-circuited my capacity to think or understand anything and all there was, was this hugeness, beating its rhythm, filling my whole body and consciousness.
I know you can relate. And like you, my passion for music since that day has never ceased.
It is so amazing to share these stories with you (all). I have never told anyone that last one.
**********
The End of a Shamanic Death/rebirth Quest
I lay down for meditation, just as the sun was going down. I spoke to Greenman/my husband/my Master. I said, "If it isn't over, that's good. Whatever you will. If it is over, that's good. Whatever you will." He said, "This life is a vision quest. As well as a service."
I felt my mind fishing for a word, the right word. Then I heard a soprano voice (with orchestra), singing Mimi's area from "La Boheme" about her life making flowers in her attic room - the part where she tells of the glory of being up there when spring comes.
"Ma, cuando vien lo sgelo,
Il primo sole e mio,
Il primo bacio del Aprile
E mio...."
"But when spring comes,
The first sun is mine,
The first kiss of April
Is mine..."
Then it went into:
"Anges purs, anges radieux,
Portez mon ame au sein des cieux!
Dieu juste, a toi je m'abandonne!
___ ____ ____, pardonne!"
"Pure angels, radiant angels,
Take my soul to heaven!
Just God, to thee I abandon myself!
______ Pardon!"
[The words wouldn't come for the last line. Every time, I just heard the music and then "pardonne!" Turns out the words in the opera are "Dieu bon, je suis a toi, pardonne!" "Good God, I am yours, pardon!"
This is from the opera _Faust_, the story of the man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge. At the end Marguerite, his love, is damned by her actions and condemned, lying sick and half crazy in a prison cell. Faust comes and wants her to run away with him, but she refuses.
Mephistopheles, the devil, is there listening and gloating. She sees him and desperately appeals to the angels.
In the opera she sings these same words over and over, and every time the music moves into a higher key - it's magnificent. The angels take her soul to heaven - the prison walls open and she floats upward. An angelic choir is singing.]
It went on, over and over. "Anges purs, anges radieux." I think I was forgiving myself. And I forgave him. I sang, "Or gli perdono." "Now I forgive him." When Tosca kills Scarpia, she watches him die, shouting, "Muori, Muori!" "Die, die!" He dies, and then she sings, "Or gli perdono."
"Anges purs, anges radieux." And Michael was here. I could hardly believe it! So radiant and beautiful! And I think I was aware of Lucifer too, more in the background. At some point, one or both of them took me down below again...
Hearing words from over the gate of Hell in Dante, "Lasciate ogni speranza, tutti..." "Abandon all hope, all [you who enter here]." I started saying, "Tutti perdono. Tutti, tutti, tutti perdono." "I pardon all." Forgiving everyone in Hell, everyone on Earth - this Earth is Hell.
I was hearing "Anges purs...", the whole thing, moving into lower keys, as I went deeper and deeper. Back on the floor with the light shining through the holes.
Michael, the one with the flaming sword, and Lucifer, the king of Hell. Then I realized that they're both angels! "Anges purs, anges radieux!"
Light and dark, both radiant angels! Lucifer, the light-bearer! I loved them both.
This Earth is Hell, and it must be Heaven too. Paradise! Eden! And a voice said, "It is so. It is to come." "Anges purs..."
Then I realized that the Grail is below the floor of Hell. It's where the light is coming from. So it's above too. (In Dante you have to go through the lowest point of Hell to get to Heaven.) And then I think I felt that the Grail was in my heart. I heard "Cor Leone." "Heart of the Lion."
Heard it at several different times during this...
I think I was reaching out to everyone on Earth and loving and forgiving, until they all felt like a sphere around the earth, and then the whole Earth. Somehow it got to where I was seeing the whole Earth and forgiving and loving. "Anges purs..." And I looked out and I was talking to all those higher powers out there, I was Gaia calling to the rest - Sirius and Deneb Adige and all of them. I was hearing the music, and I was saying the words too, calling them to the rest of the universe. And crying.
"Anges purs, anges radieux,
Portez mon ame au sein des cieux!
Dieu juste, a toi je m'abandonne!
___ ____ ____, pardonne!"
I saw the Grail then, very large in the sky. It morphed; it was an ornate chalice, and the cauldron of Cerridwen, and a pitcher. And it tipped and poured out over the whole Earth. The pitcher of the water-bearer, Aquarius!
When I got up, I stepped out onto my patio in back. Because of the city lights, I couldn't tell whether the sunset was over or not. The trees were beautiful - this world is beautiful! But my garden needs some work...
So it's over, and it isn't over.
**********
...I suddenly became aware of the record which I had put on simply for background music. It turned out to be the last part of the Enigma Variations which was to be followed later by the Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams (how ironic are those two titles; fantasia and enigma indeed). At that time neither of those pieces were favourites of mine, it just happened to be the record I pulled out. The music began to sound like nothing I had ever heard before or since.
It was as though the music was trying to make me aware of IT. It permeated my consciousness in ways that words cannot describe...
The music had reached a degree of profound beauty which I had never known or thought could have existed. In so attaining I somehow relaxed into it, a kind of letting go of objective observation. I gave a kind of unusual sigh and an outward exhalation of breath like a long AHH; and just as I did so - everything vanished, instantaneously, just like creation being switched off by the throw of a switch. ...
At the very instant of ‘going’ it was as though my ears had been turned inside out; for at one instant the music was objective, on the outside, and the next instant it was taking place ‘all around’, for there was no inside and outside as such. Nevertheless it was as though the music was passing through the point (which I was) like waves on a pond and each wave was of greater emotional charge than the one before it; as though each wave was preparing me for the next wave, and building up into... into I did not know what. In some respects it was like being kidnapped by divine music, perfection; the only thing that existed in creation was myself and the music.
It was as though the ‘AHH’ was still going on but going on in the vastness of the space of the mind alone. It become a reality in which there was no dualistic reference between myself and music, but as though there was only ‘I AM the music’ in a dance, a swoon, of excitement, awe, and wonder. After an immeasurable duration of time that piece of music ended, and there was a stillness and quiet as cannot be described. I did not question (at that point) that I had no body or existence other than awareness of being. Neither would I have had the time to think of such things for the next piece of music began. To say that the next piece of music began is the understatement of all time. It did not begin, it flowed. It flowed out of nothingness, like... like I know not what.
Within a few seconds of the music emanating into my consciousness there came the most frightening experience I have ever known in my life, before or since. The passion and beauty of the sounds were such that my mind went... bang ! I blew up, fell apart, exploded, or so it seemed. ...
I could see what can only be described as streaked out dots of light which I was expanding into and flying through like a supernova. ...My mind gradually stopped expanding and I metaphorically gave a sigh of relief; but there was no breath or lungs with which to do it.
At that point it was as if I were in a kind of unbounded dome of blackness, and I consisted of nothing except a point of consciousness with no boundary or duration, no form; just consciousness. I could see what appeared to be tiny points of light coming into and out of existence all over the space which I existed within. ... The dots of light that seemed to be coming into and out of existence as far as one could see suddenly turned into the music which I could hear, and I could not only hear the music but now also see it.
There are no words to describe such music made of light. It is a vision which unlike other vision cannot be recreated by imagination within the mind from hindsight; it can only be seen and known at the time of the event. I saw the music flowing toward me. It was in colours such that we know and some that we do not know. The essential quality of the light was equal to that of the sound of the music. The light itself and the colours were not different things as we tend to know coloured light by reflections or as sources of light emanating from a certain point. The music was the light, the colour was the light. It did not flow from anything except uncreated into created. The fear that I had experienced throughout the expansion or whatever it was had now gone and there was nothing but I and the music which I was now within: I became the music; there was not an I and an it. As this event continued I became aware that I ‘KNEW’ the music. That is to say that I knew it backwards, forwards, inside out, one note at a time or all at once; and I could see it anyway I wanted to see it. I could become the melody, which I did; I could become the harmony, which I did. I could be one note or the whole piece of the music. ...
Whilst this divine dance of music in unison was going on I become aware that I was of two natures somehow enshrined in one. There came a point whilst I was swimming in this light and music when I became aware that I was looking at myself objectively, and it did not seem strange at the time.
‘Myself’ did not consist of a body but only of light, but I knew it was me...
At this point ... I was only really concerned about the love of the reality itself, the music, the sound, the vision, the event itself, for it was indeed a divine dance of the spheres. ... As to how long this music and light experience lasted is impossible to say''
[For the full version of this experience, please see
this file
]
END
Thanks to all who took part! :))
Love, Hillary
***************
Question:
Please describe any metaphysical experiences you have had concerning music.
***********
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