A Musical Quest for the Self (Part II)

Music as an expression comes from a place, or places, not always reachable by our conscious mind or mere desire. There is something else. There is a lot more in our beings that makes connections with the tangible world.

In some cultures the connection between music and spirituality is even more developed. I would even venture to speculate that those cultures that have deep-rooted spiritual beliefs/practices have used music as a mean to achieve that connection, such as the Central Javanese musicians and their stories, outlined by Judith Becker in Gamelan Stories,
“While these stories focus on the events of music and dance, those activities also become metaphors for the strongly felt, extra mundane connections between human and cosmos, between individual and a greater, more enduring, more powerful realm…”

And I believe that in a way we are all trying to transcend that window of existence between the “real world” and the spiritual one in one way or the other, weather we realize it or not, and that is the very reason we look for answers in many different places and continue to go to church and pray in silence every night. Even if a person claims to be an atheist, the very moment he turns on his radio he or she is having a spiritual experience related to him/her by the artist who created the music, so that this person who believes in no god can find himself singing along ecstatically and completely oblivious to the external word, feeling whatever emotions the sound evokes in them.

“Traditional spirituality, according to Wuthnow, emphasizes habitation- ‘the notion that God occupies a definite place in the universe and creates a sacred place in which humans can dwell as well’”.

The more I learn about music and its vibrations, and the more I read about the soul and the source of inspiration I can see that is evident the connection between these two. I can see the strong correlation between a feeling and a beat. I can see the harmonious way in which a soul vibrates and how sound, existing in a plane of existence closer to the spirit, can connect with it in a much closer level, and thus bringing it forward to our awareness.

Something similar happens in shamanistic ceremonies. I had the opportunity to experience it firsthand when I attended a spiritual ritual with a Peruvian Shaman, a female Shaman, in which the rhythmic beats of the rattles and harmonious whistles by the performed by the female shaman transported one to remote corners of the Amazon rainforest. It is difficult to explain the experience just as it is difficult to attempt to explain love in scientific terms, but the feelings were there. The experience was real. The music had a tremendous impact on those of us who were present in the ceremony, and when talking about it afterwards, the general consensus was that the melodies did, indeed, had the power to evoke powerful feelings and a sense of peace.
The closest evidence I found to this experience is Gamelan Music and Meditation, which is said to bring a person “to achieve the desired spiritual state of heightened aesthetic perception”