Music, Our Lover: The Restoration of Trust Through Altered States of Being
Much of what we experience today as individuals falls into a predictable bandwidth of emotion. We are mostly happy enough, though not usually in an outstanding way; often times bored, generally resigned to the facts of work and other cares and not really expecting as much out of life as we perhaps might have when we were younger. This is especially true for many married couples, certainly if there are young childen in the picture. Kids take effort: lots. As anyone who has raised kids will tell you, once you cross into parenthood, your life becomes exponentially less carefree and exponentially more demanding, and rewarding. The demands and responsibilities that fall on most of us shape the scope of our normal emotional responses in the day-to-day, along with the common shared behaviors of the society to which we belong. The “normal” behaviors, the ones deemed socially acceptable in our shared understanding of the world, dictate that we perceive reality though a very specific filter, never overstepping conventional modes of interaction with one another. Sure, many of us do things alone we would not dream of doing in public. People who do not consider themselves musical will often sing in the shower or in their cars. Some people talk to themselves, a practice which many find to be thoroughly grounding and even cathardic, allowing one to better understand and approach their reality through vocalization; yet to do so anywhere near the domain of the public eye would seem, to most, unthinkable. Only crazy people talk to themselves, after all.
Crazy. Weird. Generally unhinged.
The catch-all terms that the poor, terrified public will use to describe anything that does not fit its extremely narrow understanding of the world. An understanding firmly rooted in fear: the fear of failure, but more than anything the fear of being disconnected from the group. Of being forcibly and unavoidably alone. Once again, it is the first fear we know that is the strongest. Don't leave me here by myself. I'm sorry. Please. I won't do it again.
Could anything else well ensure a more certain death for us? To be cut off from our peers has meant only one thing throughout our history. Shame. Self-loathing. Humiliation. The inability to provide for oneself. To be forever alone is a fate, many would agree, worse than death. Our “normalcy bias” exists, then, and above all else, to protect us from this unthinkably awful reality. The scorn of our fellow human beings, and more importantly the fear of their unacceptance, dictates to us very clearly what is and is never ok. This is a reality we live with every day, all day, all night, everywhere we go, whosoever we are. It is, generally speaking, inescapable, immediate, and terrible.
Little wonder then that most of us would do anything in our power never to experience it. Enter the “naked at work” dreams. Enter the “finals week at school” dreams. Enter our self-esteem issues, our body issues, our search for unattainable perfection. Enter eating disorders and the need to feel loved and please others at any cost. Enter our discomfort with undressing in front of cats. Enter the fear the we are not enough, for our loved ones, and for ourselves. Enter insecurity, jealousy, rage, pain, and the cycle of darkness perpetuated by the cultural landscape of our modern world. We forgot how to love ourselves. We forgot how to see the divine spark burning away in every cell of our bodies and our being. Most of us are too afraid of letting down our lovers, our families, our peers, our jobs, and ourselves to remember to stop and appreciate any good thing that we already are. The reality, though, is quite the opposite.
We are enough. We will always be enough. We can be no more fully loved than we are now. We are not alone. The pressure is artificial, always has been. The social norms are all artificial, too. What's left for us, then?
Freedom. Love. All good things in all good time.
To be sure, there are certain energetic constants that must always be adheared to, ones with lasting and serious consequence, good and bad. Do not hurt, do not sow negativity; the golden rule; the golden light that suffuses all things; that teaches peace; that teaches harmony; that finds redemption for those who need it and grace for all things as the reflection of itself. The universe, multiverse, multiplex whatever-it-is, is written with great artistry, great beauty, and great care. Decisions were made to stand true for all beings, and all energy acts in the same way. There is no law higher, older, or more immediate than that of the energetic cosmos we inhabit. It is all we need. It supercedes our understanding of reality through the sciences. It reinforces the depth of our feeling through the arts, through love, through war and atrocity, through nature, through the senses. To be sure, everything known and unknown can be expressed as energy, for that is exactly what it is. Insomuch as our brains form the vehicle for most of our experience during our time here, we look to our gray matter that we might empirically measure, deduce, unravel the unknowns and make them go to work for us. We forget that energetically speaking, everything has already been established, is already written, and that despite what we think we know, there really is only one true litmus test for its veracity: the energy, experienced by us as “love,” that is us and is the fabric of all our reality. Put another way, everything is love, the vibration, and worthy of love, the intention. The sameness far outweighs the differences, and we can never be rejected by it because we ARE it. It's us.
Enter Music with a serious capital “M.”
How immediate, how astoundingly appropriate, is our close companion of sound stretching back through a rich tapestry of feeling, of weddings, funerals, rituals, cocktail hours, chance meetings, confrences, jogs by the river, dances, festivals, memorials, little moments of magic made real by the exhaltation and the reverence of listeners over milennia. Music is sadness, hope, frustration, a counter and riposte to justice and injustice, a mystery and an unknowable answer to mystery. It is a boon to us, an unexpected phenomenon unique to our understanding, and more than this, it is the sound of our experience, ourselves. It is felt, more than understood by our great gray minds. It has been codified, and yet supercedes all efforts to quantify it. It is foreign and also intimate, trustworthy, always giving of itself.
Music is as a lover to us, quietly insisting we let ourselves be known by it, compelling us to exit our bias for normalcy together, as one being, as a whole. To dance like a madman in a quiet room full of “strangers” is bizarre, says society. To do so with a good tune playing is—well, perhaps not necessarily normal, but understandable. More than that. Contagious. Get one person going at it, get a good tune with a fun beat, and before you know it, it's bizarre NOT to dance. Music, even as it stirs us to action, makes our actions seem plausible, seem real and necessary. It is the context for our creative impulse, that takes many forms. Without music, there would be no explanation for this impulse, no understanding of this drive to branch out and create.
Well wait a second, you say, obviously there is more to the arts than just music. What about visual art, wordplay, dance, what about nature, the art of watching the leaves fall, what about the sound of one hand clapping and the meditative art of just being? Surely everything in this life can be art, surely we have the capacity to frame any experience to allow ourselves to feel, to tell a story, to say whatever we like. Why is music alone so special?
Of course you'd be right. In a place where, unbelievably, everything upon everything can be and is unique and known to us in infinite pretexts of meaning--a contextual carte blanche of expressivism, I guess you could say--how can one kind of art alone be so worthy of our attention? Yes, it's awesome. But what really sets it apart?
Well, actually, a lot. In fact music has the capacity to influence our brain chemistry in ways that almost nothing else can do so profoundly and so reliably. I never get tired of this song, people will say. Sure, others might respond with something more like shut that bloody bouzouki up! and that's fine too. Of course everything we perceive is subjective: that's how we all know our world, through the lens of ourselves. But everyone has some kind of sound that does it for them. Every bit as potent as any drug, it's almost as though our brains were designed from the ground up to respond to musical stimuli from the start, almost like we were made with it in mind (hint, hint.) And this means that music becomes an incredible tool for us to use to know and to influence ourselves.
In the grandest tradition of Love--that everything is a part of everything else and so all things are equally worthy in Creation--music stands out to us as a tried-and-true door to catharsis. It's our constant companion, our trusted partner, our good friend and our radiant muse. Through it we begin to see ourselves with gentler eyes, freed from the dread fears of rejection, and we allow our true character to shine through. We realize our own validity, and our hearts are exonerated and lifted, our feelings vindicated to ourselves and to the world. For it is feeling that moves us! It is expression that stirs our souls! Whose scorn can touch us, then? We, who have been given new eyes to see ourselves; we, who have a song in our hearts; we, who sing to the river of life even as we are washed away in it.
Music is our healing—our way forward—our way back.