12

Well-Being

143-60

"music like that of Mozart and Madonna is so popular because it inspires a sense of happiness. Such music has the capacity to lighten a heavy or depressed mood, which is its primary function in the yoga of listening. When played in the background ..., ... music creates a ... festive mood."

"Each life purpose is unique ... . ... . ... the ability to blend identity and union is one of the key lessons in our spirtual development. The trick is to do so without fearing that our individuality will dissolve while we're experiencing union -- whether with a single person, humanity, or the divine; or that we'll lose our sense of union by focusing too exclusively on our difference from others. Our life purpose is what allow us to blend identity and union in just this way".

p. 144

"the lifestyle we create through integrating the following modes of service :

(1) service to the body (diet and exercise);

(2) service to the soul (... interpreting dream

pp. 144-5

(3) service to [creativity] (activities that develop our creative abilities);

p. 145

(4) service to the personality

(5) service to family (not just blood relatives, but the spiritual family ...);

(6) service to humanity

(7) service to all life

"Many social dances, from tango to waltz to square, contra, and folk dancing, involve elaborate steps and gestures, as well as clearly defined roles for each gender. Such movements serve to tame, condition, or socialize physical and sexual attraction, as well as public displays of affection, from flirting to the deeper intimacy of long-time married couples."

"Social mores represent a feeling-based intellectuality ... .

Rock music, too, has a set of values and a lifestyle to promote ... . The values and lifestyle presented in MTV and CMT music videos couldn't be more different, and are almost diametrically opposed to each other."

p. 152

"Most dance music, whether rock, big band, jazz, country-western, or folk, expresses the joy ... intended to encourage our willinglness to be present in the body and on the planet. ...

The music of Jimi Hendrix's song "Spanish Castle Magic" targets ... joy, even though the lyrics, which speak of flying to a place far away, have a visionary aspect".

p. 153

"brisk tempo ... results in in a mood of exuberance. ... .

... upping the tempo increases the sense of well-being from contentment to ... exuberant laughter."

p. 154

"Manic music often requires extremes of instrumental and vocal virtuosity. ... Manic virtuosity .. is especially noticeable in improvised music in which the performers pass beyond exuberance into sheer technical display."

p. 155

"My image of musical exhibitionism comes from the first Back to the Future movie, in which the character ... gets carried away with improvising in the atonal, heavy-metal style of his own time period,

twenty-some years in the future".

{suggesting that "musical exhibitionism" is of the nature of an exhibition by the deities who (possessing the mortal player) therethrough disclose, miraculously, the destined futurality.}

p. 156

"Free or manic jazz can be exciting, even liberating ..., especially when a jazz ensemble temporarily allows ... free improvisation ... . ... The improvisational sections push the envelope of mania".

"Inner listening

{to divinely-disclosed music -- similar to "hearing voices"}

as a basis for improvisation can result in moving and impressive performances regardless of speed and volume. ...

p. 157

In the yoga of listening, when you're an improvising performer, the best way to create TMEs in yourself and an audience is through inner listening."

13

Command

161-79

"Much rock music takes the form of clever social satire ... . Many Beatles songs are of this variety. The lyrics mock social mores while the form of the song parodies musical conventions. For example,"Back in the USSR" is a parody of the Beach Boy, with words that can be read equally as

an indictment of Socialist {fake Socialist, actually State-Feudalist, USSR} or American {Capitalist, i.e. greed-motivated} values."

{or, rather, the hypocritical "values" both of fake Socialism and of stark Capitalism}

"Another example of ... wit with an edge of protest is the famous solo electric guitar rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Jimi Hendrix."

"Symphonies frequently include a movement called scherzo, Italian for "joke," ... fleeting, constantly darting about from one musical idea to another."

"Typical reactions ... from knowing smiles to delight ... and laughing out loud ... is often created by brilliant composer/performers, from the nineteenth-century violin virtuoso Paganini, the best of whose Twenty-Four Caprices for solo violin ... cleverly extend the techniques ... to the limits of playability".

"The following TME, which occurred when I was in college, was induced by listening to ... Bach's only six-voice fugue, entitled Ricercare, from The Musical Offering ... . Most fugues are made up of only three or four voices ("voice" here is the technical term for the number of musical lines to be played together simultaneously), so the work is a tour de force. ... Closing my eyes to listen to the music, I was surprised to see the score of the piece, divided into six lines called staves, one for each voice. Each of these staves had the usual five lines ... upon which the notes appeared ... . But the score that I was seeing inwardly ... I was not just looking at it, I was in it. The five-line staves were like bars on a jungle gym. I seemed to be physically climbing from one to another as I tried to follow the fugue theme."

p. 169

"composers often ... represent other realities in sound. By "other realities," I ... mean other planes ... .

p. 170

... Thus the upper range of ... fantasy, embraces ... musical ideas ... to create new worlds and present them to the listener. The traditional musical forms, stretched to their limits by extremes of invention, begin to dissolve. The composer tries ... to make the audience see or experience ... a magical fairyland. ... At the other end of the scale from ... musical realism are Stravinsky's The Firebird and Ravel's Ma Me`re l'Oye (Mother Goose). These ballets are musical depictions of fairyland. The element of the fantastic in such pieces is an indication of the proximity of the soul and its nonphysical reality. ... We're standing on the threshold of what Scott called the ethereal realms, about to leave the human behind."

"Stravinsky's 1911 ballet Pe'trouchka involves a fantastic situation, rather than a fantastic land, in which the characters in a puppet show magically come to life."

"the ego begins to feel the presence of the soul, whose guiding influence is distorted by ... transcendental fear [on the part of the ego]. Transcendental fear is compounded of two things : a sense of the soul's alienness and the ego's fear of losing its autonomy. ... The soul, however, has its being in a nonphysical realm, in which space and time are experienced differently ... . ... The soul wants us to expand ourselves until we can see our lives from the soul's perspective ... . ... Having gone through the development of embodiment, motivation, identity, union, life purpose, and analysis, we must be ready to expand ourselves beyond our groundedness in physical reality ... . We do this by willingly ... making the transition to the expanded consciousness ... as we welcome the soul as our guide. ... We can have no sense of our immortality without accepting our relationship with the soul."

"Saint-Sae:ns's Danse Macabre, which portrays a dance of the dead with death as the fiddle player, and the final movement of Symphonie Fantastique, entitled "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath," are also examples of the music of ... the supernatural and our transcendental ... soul ... .

Totentanz (Dance of the Dead) ... by Franz Liszt (1811-1886) and Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, another depiction of a witches' sabbath, are more ... examples".

"When I was in college, my {music} composition professor told me about a group of music majors at his alma mater that would periodically hold parties to get high on marijuana and listen, in darkness, to a recording of Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird. ... The students at those parties must have responded intuitively to the visionary aspects of the music. ... The Firebird exists in multiple versions, including the complete ballet, which lasts about forty-five minutes ... . I recommend listening to the complete ballet, which will prolong your exposure to ... the transitional music between scenes ... . ... The fantasy ... is also present throughout because the ballet is a musical depiction of fairyland. ... From time to time this wandering inner eye comes upon a scene or vision ... that seems to emerge from nowhere, as if crystallizing ... from ... the magical elements of fairyland. Such moments of magic, which resemble the lucid dream experience of seeing ... our dream reality ..., are easier to hear in the complete ballet ... . In the yoga of listening, the complete ballet music of The Firebird could be useful ... for encouraging the development of lucidity in the dream state."

14

Expanded Consciousness

180-95

"Recently, I ... heard a piece of organ music unlike any I'd heard before. Within seconds, the piece produced a TME in which I felt as if the top of my head were being lifted off, a sign of the crown chakra opening. ... I learned that it was written by a French composer I'd never heard of, Charles Tournemire (1870-1939) : his Symphonie-Choral, Op. 69. ... I have no doubt that, in the yoga of listening, it could be useful ... for developing intuition and psychic abilities."

"In macrorhythmically composed music, variations in information flow take the form of a long gradual accumulation ... followed by a slow ... dissipation ... . The effect is like riding rising and falling ocean waves. The alternation of peaks and troughs in these waves creates a much larger (macro-)rhythm than that of individual beats and phrases. Macrorhythm corresponds to the larger individual rhythms of both consciousness and the universe. ...

At a certain point, this vibration takes the form of a "luminous sweep, a sudden flood of light." This sweep "... follows that of consciousness, with constant ups and downs."" (Satprem 2000, p. 205)

p. 183

"I mentioned in chapter 9 that Wagner identified the opening of the Prelude to Tristan with the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world -- the troubling of the primal cloudless heavens by ...

p. 184

"Desire, for ever expanding and retracting, for ever seeking to realize itself and for ever being frustrated."" (Newman 1949, p. 208)

"the soul perceives our world in terms of energy transformations. ... There are many kinds of energy transformations ... . The whole of our experience in the world will eventually be processed by the soul as energy transformations. Dreams often show us that process in action."

"The musical waves, in which an archetypal energy transformation ... is encoded, can be overwhelming in their power to move a listener or an audience. Coming from the level of the soul, such waves carry the force of truth about who and what we are. Their potential for creating TMEs is immense".

"By "transcendental longing," I mean an intense yearning for a world beyond the physical or union with the divine. Much New-Age music expresses this longing ... .

By "transcendental mirth," I mean the ability to look back on the physical world and find its failures and foibles more worthy of laughter ... . Much of Mozart's late music is full of such transcendental mirth".

"fear and awe ... are derived from the ego's approach to the soul. The soul is a more comprehensive consciousness than that of the individual ego. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, the soul exists outside of time and space, as experienced by the ego, and may feel foreign, even threatening to the ego. ...

For each of us the soul is like

a private God, or a highly personal ... God ... . ...

{i.e., a guardian-angel or fravas^i, a divine spirit-guide}

If we see the soul ... as expressing the God within us, then it becomes clear that the sacred and the secular ... are attempting the same thing : to help us overcome our fear of the soul and approach it,

to learn to embrace

{This is known to Kemetic lore as K3 (KL), which "was expressed by a hieroglyph depicting two upraised arms, which was usually the symbol of an embrace" ("AEK").}

and love it, and to move toward a sense of ecstatic union with it, in which

we're able to retain our identities".

{According to Kemetic lore, "One retained his identity after the ritual embrace" ("RE").}

"the divine nature of humanity, its nobility, ... does ... represent an embracing of life. In Maslow's terminology, such music expresses [1971, p. 265] the "high-plateau experience" in which one can "live casually in heaven and be on easy terms with the eternal and the infinite.""

"what overcomes our fear of God or the soul and turns it into love is transcendental longing. ... . ... transcendental longing for the experience of soul-to-soul union becomes strong enough to overcome the ego's fear of losing its identity, both to its own and [to] other's soul".

"Wagner doesn't go all the way to ecstasy ... . for him, spiritual union in love can only take place at the moment of, or after, death, when the separation and identity imposed by our physical bodies have been transcended."

"The desire for union with ... the soul has propelled us ... to an ecstatic recognition of God within, and of our own divinity. Yet the actual experience of union has continued to evade us. At this point, we may start

to lose our belief in the possibility of such a union."

{Although there may exist such a possibility, minor technicalities must be resolved by ourselves before our successfully consumating such a union.}

"Music ... allows us to experience a taste of the ecstasy that comes from opening ourselves completely to the divine and fully accepting ourselves as spiritual beings, as well as our relationship with the soul and its master plan for ... our lives in the world."