1. Spiritual Music
2. Love
3. Meat
4. Finding Good Teachers
5. Reincarnation - The Effects
6. Reincarnation - A Story
7. Positive Books
8. God is like Mozart
9. Proving God
10. God and the Banana: A Story
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Music can have a good and a bad effect
on us. It depends on the music - and on us.
Most music
has an effect on our body or on our emotions; for example: popular
music, jazz and classical western music.
Some music brings
our mind to a higher, more subtle state, in which we feel more inner
peace. The latter we could call spiritual music.
Music
and emotions
Most classical western music (like
Mozart's and Beethoven's) affects our emotions and to a small extent
our body. This music can make us happy or sad, relaxed or energetic
etcetera.
It is rarely able to bring us deep peace, because
there is always some emotion in this music. Emotions don't make
it impossible to relax somewhat, but they prevent deep inner peace.
Feelings are not emotions
Now
to be clear, I need to explain that I make a difference between
emotions and feelings.
Sadness, anger, physical or emotional
attraction (often called love), jealousy, bubbling over with mirth
-they are all emotions. They can be pleasant or unpleasant, but
they all make us restless.
Feelings, like spiritual love,
compassion and joy, are different. They can exist in a peaceful
mind.
Feelings don't disturb our inner balance. Emotions
do. Emotions are of course human; they are perfectly natural. We
should never try to kill - to suppress - our emotions. But we can
try to change them into higher, less disturbing emotions, so that
we feel more balanced.
We always need to keep place in ourselves
for feelings . Without love, without compassion, without joy, our
life is gray!
Music and our body
Music
that affects mostly our body - disco music and certain other kinds
of popular music - stimulates the lower cakras. It can, for instance,
create anger and sexual emotions in us.
We may think that
aggressive music makes us feel strong and energetic. What is does,
is making us aggressive, and though we may feel good for a while,
we are also feeling negative and out of balance, and soon afterwards
we'll suffer the consequences.
Sometimes it is good to
be angry, but the best is to be strong and forceful without anger.
Because anger is an unbalanced state of mind, we lose part of our
force.
Sexual emotions are natural and without them the
human race would be extinct. (Suppose everyone would rather listen
to spiritual music than make love...!)
Nevertheless, sexual
stimulation that comes at an inconvenient moment, is disturbing.
And if we only have intense sexual feelings when we listen to certain
kinds of music, we'd better have a look in ourselves and find out
what makes us block our natural physical feelings.
So
music that stimulates anger and sexual emotions is more harmful
than good. This music controls and disturbs us. It manipulates us
into feeling things that don't help us.
Music and inner peace
Spiritual
music is giving us peace and opens our mind for higher feelings
like spiritual love .
Much of the music that we normally
call "spiritual", does not have this effect on us. Most
of the New Age music is positive, but it only gives relaxation.
If we are looking for inner peace and spiritual love, we need other
music.
Which music can we call spiritual? Only music that
has been made without restless emotions from the composer or performer.
And without ego. Without those, but with feeling. The most spiritual music has been made
with a feeling of love and openness for everything that exists.
If we are looking for such music, we can try out certain
pieces written by Bach, or Bruckner, or listen to the singing of
mantras or bhajans or to Gregorian music and other religious compositions.
We may not find all of that music spiritual - it depends on who
performs it, too.
Certainly check out music from other
cultures as well!
Good and bad music
What
about classical western music, that brings out emotions in the listener
- is it bad? Certainly not. Good or bad depends very much on ourselves.
When I heard about spiritual music, I had just finished
my conservatory studies. Many years I had been practicing the piano,
to be able to play classical music. I despaired at the thought that
I should throw out of the window everything I had learned ...
It took me a while to understand the situation. If we are in
a deeply peaceful mood, we may not want to listen to stormy music
from Beethoven. But if we feel very angry about something that happened
to us, Beethoven's emotional - but always positive - music will
bring us more in balance!
My own experience is that when
I am upset about something, I don't want to listen to spiritual
music, its atmosphere is too far away from my mood. In that case
I want to hear Mozart or Chopin or other such music. A bit later,
when I feel better, I may want to listen to spiritual music.
Even when we are not particularly upset, we usually have a
restless mind. For most of us, classical music brings us more into
balance.
I certainly experience that with playing classical
music, I can make people feel better.
I don't, however,
play all of the classical music that I used to play. Some music,
I feel now, is much more positive than other.
But most
of all, the effect of what I play depends on how I feel. When I
feel stormy, Beethoven sounds stormy. When I feel peaceful, I can
make other people feel peaceful.
So no need to throw out
our whole collection of recordings. We just need to become aware
of what effect music has on us, and then choose.
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