During the Delta wave of covid, when images of pyres burning day and night on the banks of the Ganges pulsed through the media, TikTok (a suspect platform, but that's another topic) broke out in sea shanties, those songs of communal motion and effort (leaving out the problematic whale hunting), as if the terrible fear and grief roiling in the collective unconscious was answered in the motion towards communal music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ2HbYnlc3s
I have, in an armchair, lay, uncredentialed way been studying music as a potential salvific force since I read in The Master and His Emissary this: "One possibility is that music, which brought us together before language existed, might even now prove effective in regenerating commonality, avoiding the need for words, that have been devalued, or for which we have become too cynical. Let's not forget that it was with music that Orpheus once moved stones." (page 458) I have mostly focused on music in evolutionary biology and bicultural evolution, disagreeing with Dr. MacGilchrist about us not being "conniving apes." I instead think we are DIVINE conniving apes, and that much of what is called sin or evil, is vestigial and evolutionary, *but* so is music if we can reclaim it. Ellen Dissanyake, in Art and Intimacy, proposes, since music creates oxytocin (the motherhood hormone), that after the hominins left the trees for the savannah, and became bipedal, that birth needed to occur earlier, so infants couldn't cling, and the mother hominin would sing or hum or grunt to the infant she'd hidden away for a bit while gathering. In that dyad, she thinks, begins relationship, ritual, and communality.
Thus, I find this essay, and this project, ****genius****. We live in a vivisecting neo-Puritan age, so it may be that the pleasure itself (in part oxytocin) makes us discount music. The late poet Galway Kinnell said all Americans read poetry nasally as we unconsciously remember our Puritan heritage, and music is perceived by scientific orthodoxy as a byproduct (not an adaptation) of evolution, "cheesecake," but if one doesn't think it is perhaps one of the deepest, oldest, most powerful aspects of being, resonating with potential, watch this from the documentary Alive Inside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWn4JB2YLU
My deepest longing these days is to be in an amphitheater or a beautiful auditorium, with a huge audience, listening to a requiem, a recognition of all that has been lost, that is still being lost, during which I know I would bend double with weeping and fall to the floor. And that perhaps to be followed by a second line, from the tradition of the Jazz Funeral in the American South.
Thanks for your rich comment Cynthia. I hadn’t seen that particular video of the sea shanty. The chorus of voices gave me chills especially in the context of your words “the terrible fear and grief rolling in the collective unconscious was answered in the motion towards communal music.” 🙏
I absolutely love this deeply felt and considered, beautifully crafted article Michael. Can't thank you enough for putting your thoughts and experience down. I'm dancing around to the tune of the thought of a music based religion. Music - especially music without discernible words about less than sacred things - is surely the true language of humans, free from agenda and transaction. If you can't dance something, does it really exist?
I loved this article and it aligns with work I am doing at the moment to bring music into my coaching more to elicit metaphor. I have signed up to all the sessions - just wondering if the sessions will be recorded as I am likely to miss one?
As a lifelong musician and music educator for over 25 years, I so appreciate your writing and thinking in this essay. Thank you for getting these thoughts out to others, especially in the way you tied several threads together from recent/current Perspectiva publications and articles. But overall, I hope music will continue to remain a deep foundation for humanity as we muddle through, and perhaps even to help clear the way too. I believe your drawing my attention to these three modes will help me, at least.
Great essay Michael, that reminds me of these lyrics, "There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold. And she's buying a stairway to Heaven. In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings. Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. Ooh, it makes me wonder. Ooh, makes me wonder." - Led Zeppelin, Stair Way to Heaven.
Reminds me of the 1960s cultural revolution and Eric Burdon's trans-love airlines flight to San Francisco and Janis Joplin's performance at Woodstock. Reminds me too of Carlos Santana and his wife's vision of how music heals our troubled souls and Santana's aptly titled non-lyrical song, Europa (Earths Cry, Heavens Smile). Especially the version performed live in London in 1976 which some people described as a musical orgasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVI7ZDDQXKA
I often play the studio version when using the visceral level of my human form of consciousness to self-correct the optical illusion of the sun appearing to move above a horizon at the birth of every new day and thereby heal the epistemic delusion inherent in my unquestioning use of the suspicious word 'sunrise.' Feeling the sacred nature of life within a universal environment overwhelmingly hostile to my existence, as I contemplate the existential meaning of:
“Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing," (Mark 16:6-8).
"Is the cosmos a tomb or a womb," I often think as I face the risen sun and the earth-turning reality of time for all forms of life here in heaven, as I experience this participatory relevance realization. A divine realization that can be experienced by anyone willing to allow salient information to profoundly 'affect' their sense-of-reality beyond their suspiciously conditioned mind-set. Discovering the speed of earth-axis rotation at their particular cosmic location here: http://www.unitarium.com/earth-speed
While my comment is based on a hermeneutics of suspicion approach to Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things and his apt subtitle; Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. A world unmade by the way we humans reify reality (make the abstract real) in order to communicate our experience of life.
Which Iain alludes to in the chapter on the sacred, which many people want to see published as a separate book, wherein Iain suggests we need an un-word? While from a hermeneutics of suspicion perspective on all words, I would argue that we need to realize that human languages created a communication biased consciousness that is effectively a sophisticated form of survival oriented suspicion.
A worldview suggesting that our grasp of language is how we unmake the world so we can manipulate it for the purpose of survival, while maintaining the epistemic delusion that enables the existential stupidity of humanity's rank and status societies, the world over.
BTW didn't the ascension philosopher from Nazareth say something about the possibility of being psychologically, born anew? Or is such an interpretation far to suspicious to be true?
Yes David! Something akin to the 60s/70s musical wave is needed, but fitted to the nature of this historical moment and going further in terms of civilisational impact
During the Delta wave of covid, when images of pyres burning day and night on the banks of the Ganges pulsed through the media, TikTok (a suspect platform, but that's another topic) broke out in sea shanties, those songs of communal motion and effort (leaving out the problematic whale hunting), as if the terrible fear and grief roiling in the collective unconscious was answered in the motion towards communal music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ2HbYnlc3s
I have, in an armchair, lay, uncredentialed way been studying music as a potential salvific force since I read in The Master and His Emissary this: "One possibility is that music, which brought us together before language existed, might even now prove effective in regenerating commonality, avoiding the need for words, that have been devalued, or for which we have become too cynical. Let's not forget that it was with music that Orpheus once moved stones." (page 458) I have mostly focused on music in evolutionary biology and bicultural evolution, disagreeing with Dr. MacGilchrist about us not being "conniving apes." I instead think we are DIVINE conniving apes, and that much of what is called sin or evil, is vestigial and evolutionary, *but* so is music if we can reclaim it. Ellen Dissanyake, in Art and Intimacy, proposes, since music creates oxytocin (the motherhood hormone), that after the hominins left the trees for the savannah, and became bipedal, that birth needed to occur earlier, so infants couldn't cling, and the mother hominin would sing or hum or grunt to the infant she'd hidden away for a bit while gathering. In that dyad, she thinks, begins relationship, ritual, and communality.
Thus, I find this essay, and this project, ****genius****. We live in a vivisecting neo-Puritan age, so it may be that the pleasure itself (in part oxytocin) makes us discount music. The late poet Galway Kinnell said all Americans read poetry nasally as we unconsciously remember our Puritan heritage, and music is perceived by scientific orthodoxy as a byproduct (not an adaptation) of evolution, "cheesecake," but if one doesn't think it is perhaps one of the deepest, oldest, most powerful aspects of being, resonating with potential, watch this from the documentary Alive Inside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWn4JB2YLU
My deepest longing these days is to be in an amphitheater or a beautiful auditorium, with a huge audience, listening to a requiem, a recognition of all that has been lost, that is still being lost, during which I know I would bend double with weeping and fall to the floor. And that perhaps to be followed by a second line, from the tradition of the Jazz Funeral in the American South.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQoreoDSqEE
So my intuition is that this is utterly brilliant, and deserves wide,wide attention, and Bring Em All In
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxPl9Ka4yD4
Thanks for your rich comment Cynthia. I hadn’t seen that particular video of the sea shanty. The chorus of voices gave me chills especially in the context of your words “the terrible fear and grief rolling in the collective unconscious was answered in the motion towards communal music.” 🙏
Beautiful, full, and fulfilling piece/writing/insights, especially with clips of music. Thank you so very much.
I absolutely love this deeply felt and considered, beautifully crafted article Michael. Can't thank you enough for putting your thoughts and experience down. I'm dancing around to the tune of the thought of a music based religion. Music - especially music without discernible words about less than sacred things - is surely the true language of humans, free from agenda and transaction. If you can't dance something, does it really exist?
Thanks Darren! Much appreciated 🙏
I loved this article and it aligns with work I am doing at the moment to bring music into my coaching more to elicit metaphor. I have signed up to all the sessions - just wondering if the sessions will be recorded as I am likely to miss one?
As a lifelong musician and music educator for over 25 years, I so appreciate your writing and thinking in this essay. Thank you for getting these thoughts out to others, especially in the way you tied several threads together from recent/current Perspectiva publications and articles. But overall, I hope music will continue to remain a deep foundation for humanity as we muddle through, and perhaps even to help clear the way too. I believe your drawing my attention to these three modes will help me, at least.
Great essay Michael, that reminds me of these lyrics, "There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold. And she's buying a stairway to Heaven. In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings. Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. Ooh, it makes me wonder. Ooh, makes me wonder." - Led Zeppelin, Stair Way to Heaven.
Reminds me of the 1960s cultural revolution and Eric Burdon's trans-love airlines flight to San Francisco and Janis Joplin's performance at Woodstock. Reminds me too of Carlos Santana and his wife's vision of how music heals our troubled souls and Santana's aptly titled non-lyrical song, Europa (Earths Cry, Heavens Smile). Especially the version performed live in London in 1976 which some people described as a musical orgasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVI7ZDDQXKA
I often play the studio version when using the visceral level of my human form of consciousness to self-correct the optical illusion of the sun appearing to move above a horizon at the birth of every new day and thereby heal the epistemic delusion inherent in my unquestioning use of the suspicious word 'sunrise.' Feeling the sacred nature of life within a universal environment overwhelmingly hostile to my existence, as I contemplate the existential meaning of:
“Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing," (Mark 16:6-8).
"Is the cosmos a tomb or a womb," I often think as I face the risen sun and the earth-turning reality of time for all forms of life here in heaven, as I experience this participatory relevance realization. A divine realization that can be experienced by anyone willing to allow salient information to profoundly 'affect' their sense-of-reality beyond their suspiciously conditioned mind-set. Discovering the speed of earth-axis rotation at their particular cosmic location here: http://www.unitarium.com/earth-speed
While my comment is based on a hermeneutics of suspicion approach to Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things and his apt subtitle; Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. A world unmade by the way we humans reify reality (make the abstract real) in order to communicate our experience of life.
Which Iain alludes to in the chapter on the sacred, which many people want to see published as a separate book, wherein Iain suggests we need an un-word? While from a hermeneutics of suspicion perspective on all words, I would argue that we need to realize that human languages created a communication biased consciousness that is effectively a sophisticated form of survival oriented suspicion.
A worldview suggesting that our grasp of language is how we unmake the world so we can manipulate it for the purpose of survival, while maintaining the epistemic delusion that enables the existential stupidity of humanity's rank and status societies, the world over.
BTW didn't the ascension philosopher from Nazareth say something about the possibility of being psychologically, born anew? Or is such an interpretation far to suspicious to be true?
Yes David! Something akin to the 60s/70s musical wave is needed, but fitted to the nature of this historical moment and going further in terms of civilisational impact