Music is my Religion

I believe in Music. And though I cannot see music, or touch it, or smell it, I have faith that it truly exists, it is all around us, omnipresent. Music is a force that guides my every step, my very soul. Music is a sea of sonic bliss and my guitar is a tiny ship sailing the gently folding waves. Music is the ultimate key to harmony in the universe, the one song we all share. We are but single voices singing out in a great choir of voices filling the air with music, with energy that infuses spirit with our matter. Even when we are silent, or when we sit in silence, music, notes, voices sing to us from just beyond the veil of reality. The greater the silence the greater the pitch whistling in our ears. Could it be that our ears are still ringing from the big bang? Perhaps the universe is just one big drum head and the big bang was the last time the drum was struck?

Time is nothing but rhythm, and our actions are notes coalescing into harmony and melody, our world, everything that is, is music. Instruments are merely a way to tune into this higher order, to begin to explore it and contemplate it's design. To study music, to play an instrument, to sing, is a spiritual practice that can bring one closer to their spiritual center and more in tune with the greater spiritual reality. To express ones self in words does not guarantee that the content of those words will be a greater truth. But expressing ones self, right or wrong is how one processes information in a healthy way, letting it come out rather than holding it inside. Someone may listen to a song you wrote in a dark phase and think it represents who you are, but the song represents who you were before you expressed the darkness. We are not what we ex-press, we are what we re-press. This process is natural and can be enhanced with conscious intent, music leads us to our next step if we are willing to follow it.

With music as a religion all one has to do to "pray" or "worship" is to pick up an instrument and play, or sing, hum, or whistle. When you walk become conscious of the fact that you're really dancing to a song in your head, your steps keep the beat or keep shuffling it up. Writers, performers, and fans of musical theater are well aware that anything spoken can be sung, and all of the unspoken words are best expressed in song. One does not need to write a song to have a song in their head, or their heart. To "write a song" is to tune into a cosmic radio station and take from it what you will because our Earth bound plagiarism laws don't have jurisdiction outside of our stratosphere. Music can be molded like a lump of clay and we can learn much from doing this in every which way, but music often comes to us already formed with little else to do but work it out on our instruments. Music can be your "church" and there is no right or wrong time to go there, and there is no need for someone to stand between you and your "god."

Music has many prophets, those whose words were intentionally enlightening, if not revolutionary. In the human story music has always been a magic spell that allows one to say what otherwise cannot be said, the music forgives the words. With music one can win favor while simultaneously using the favor, if the music feels good the message feels true. This is especially true if the words are coded or difficult to understand, one can listen to Bob Marley singing "Talking Blues" and love the song without ever really hearing the line "I feel like bombing a church, now that you know that the preacher is lying." This is one of his more revolutionary lyrics seamlessly placed over one of his usual feel good reggae riddems. John Lennon wrote a "Christmas song" towards the end of the Vietnam war with a children's choir singing these simple lines "War is over if you want it" in direct defiance to the powers of the president, Richard Nixon. And to take it a step further, he used his own money to rent billboards around New York city to display those words in large print.

When we look back over human history we can see that music is and always has been a religious experience, institutionalized religions would be nothing without music. Our music theory is the result of hundreds of years of monks chanting incantations. Today music is still an incantation, a prayer, a walking meditation. From the many masters whose words and works have stood the test of time, music as a religion has more saints and prophets than all other religions combined. Pythagoras is perhaps the "Jesus" of this musical religion, if a religion really needs a "Jesus." He understood the music of the spheres, that the planets were singing in their orbits, that the world is a great song. To Pythagoras the three essential elements of education were not "reading, writing, and arithmetic" but "Astrology, Numerology, and Music." But something tells me that Jesus the man understood this musical reality, anyone who speaks (or thinks) in terms of allegory can see that life is "like" a song. And when you are a deeply spiritual thinker, you know that the analogy is true, life is a song.

DIY Reality!

Before the world was dark with threats of terrorism and worse, constant Bushisms, there was a flowering of consciousness that was quickly labeled the "New Age Movement." And as labels go, this period was quickly labeled and as quickly dismissed by many as a marketing ploy to sell books and dream catchers. Of course this "movement" didn't just disappear but it did submerge under the gravity of the Bush years in much the same way the flowering consciousness of the 1960s' receded during the Nixon years. Many of the books that came out in the 90s' had the theme of "Create your own reality" and this became something of a slogan among many who followed in kind. But there was an over simplification inherent in the slogan itself leading many to a quick disillusionment that soured them on their own creative potential. On it's face it comes off as a false promise, and many people were led to expect something for nothing. But in it's oversimplified form, it is a puzzle, a riddle for us to unfold.

"Create your own reality" sounds like a command or suggestion, as if there is some element of choice over whether or not you will or can do it. The first thing one must discover is that they are creating their reality now, always have been and always will be. Perhaps the only choice we have in the matter is whether we create consciously or unconsciously. This realization sets us on the path of reconciliation and recapitulation with the world, there is so much in our past to reconsider. If one truly wishes to create consciously one must first take full responsibility for everything in their world, and see all of their experiences as their own doing. This is perhaps the most difficult task one can engage in, you never know how much you blame on others until you try to take it all back. It also sets us up for a battle between our mind and our spirit, one must completely rethink the law of "cause and effect" in order to take full responsibility for their experience. And to look at the world through the same lens many serious moral questions arise as one tries to eliminate the "victim" and the "criminal" from the narrative of the daily news.

The process of reconciling one's past experiences with this new conscious responsibility is where we hash out the mechanics of how we create our own realities. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to forgive your older brother for holding your head underwater in the pool when you were 10, or if you're theoretically contemplating how a baby could create it's own death, this victim-less world is a challenge to realize. Needless to say, for those of us who are passionate about equal rights and justice, it can be extremely difficult to reconcile the political world view with this rather uncompromising spiritual world view. It's not easy to ask yourself "How did Africans create their own slavery?" or "How did the indigenous peoples of the world ask to be colonized?" These topics may spur lively debates, but we may never truly know how and why other people, or groups of people create their experiences. Asking ourselves a lot of "what if" questions may or may not be fruitful either because we can only truly discover what is. Each of our own personal experiences are enough to keep us contemplating our creations for an eternity.

There is a simple answer to how we create our own realities, and it brings us to the place where our power truly lies. Our minds are not unlike computers, we run programs consisting of lines and lines of code. And just like computer code our minds use words, characters, and numbers. Whatever we program into our minds begins to create the world around us, but much of it comes to us from the external world. Just like computers our minds are vulnerable to malware, spyware, bugs and glitches, and it's up to us to keep them protected. Sometimes we need to clean house so to speak, go through our code and look for old outdated patterns that no longer serve us or do not align with our higher order. The lines of code in our minds are what we call "Beliefs" and we run them without deliberation the same way a computer unquestioningly obeys it's program. Virtually everything we say, every sentence, is a belief, a line of code that helps to create our reality. Even when we say the opposite of what we believe we use a sarcastic tone so that our belief is still implied.

It is not enough to program a few positive beliefs and expect the world to instantly change, or to change at all, and this is how many people approach this concept. There are many beliefs that must be eliminated before a contrary belief can operate unimpeded. One may want to believe in the positive idea, but when we believe in the negative idea for so long we must build the positive idea to be at least as strong. Our minds are not computers of course, in a way our minds are more like gardens and everything in our garden represents a belief. A well tended garden is one that only grows what is intended, and each item in the garden receives all of the vital nourishment from soil, water, and sunlight. If the garden is over run with weeds one must first remove the weeds before planting the new additions, otherwise they may languish due to lack of sufficient nutrients and space. In this world however, we must stand guard at the garden gate and carefully inspect the seeds that others are pitching us, which may subvert our intentions.

It can be a stressful and dizzying affair to try and tackle each one of these beliefs one by one and determine which must go and which can stay, and which ones just need a little tweaking. It may help to make it a top down affair so that all of the little beliefs can be aligned with one over riding belief, a cornerstone for our whole belief system. Asking one's self to choose a single belief to be the foundation for the rest brings us to the depths of our spiritual capacity to emerge with a key, a guide in our quest for reconciliation. It's not at all necessary that we agree what this belief should be, but I suspect that in essence many of us agree on what this fundamental truth is. So I'm happy to volunteer my personal foundational belief, the one I check all others by and toss out those that are not in harmony: ALL IS ONE. Though many institutions and individuals can say that they do believe this, they also believe a lot of things that contradict it. So to suggest this as a criterion for all other beliefs is subversive to most people, but ultimately leads one to create their dream garden, and reality.