Music and Mysticism

[Oeaohoo]

Gold has always been the most highly valued metal. Egyptian pharaohs poured gold into the mixture of every sacred work, the alchemists sought to convert all base metals into Gold, and Zarathustra spoke of the bestowing virtue which compels all things to flow into itself that they may flow out again as love. The diamond, a multi-faceted jewel, is one of the most highly valued objects. It represents the multi-faceted unity of God.

Many mystics speak too highly of the heart. They speak the language of the heart, but the heart speaks the language of duality: life and death, love and fear, tension and release. The Sufis refer to these as the states and stations. The alchemists referred to them all as Solution and Coagulation.

Music is the art of the aether. The aether is the empty space in which all duality unfolds. It is only by harmonising all of the dualities of existence that everything may be resolved, purified and revealed as the multi-faceted unity of God.

Only a couple of modern composers penetrated the true depth of music, the Russian Scriabin and the Frenchman Messiaen. How could it be otherwise without anybody to show them the true way? The path is so multi-faceted and riddled with impurities that it is almost impossible not to be lost without a guide. That is why Virgil guided Dante through hell and Beatrice guided him through Paradise.

The mystics who intimately studied sound and music spoke of three different modes of listening. One may listen with the heart, the throat, or the eye of the heart (“third eye”), corresponding to the modes of duality, unity and total annihilation. Only in the final mode may the essence of music be exhaled. One must inhale all of existence to exhale the one true word.

The ancient Chinese Book of Rites says: ‘When one has mastered music completely, and regulates the heart and mind accordingly, the natural, correct, gentle, and honest heart is easily developed, and with this development of the heart comes joy. This joy goes on to a feeling of repose. This repose is long-continued. Persons in this constant repose become a sort of Heaven. Heaven-like, their action is spirit-like. Heaven-like, they are believed without the use of words. Spirit-like, they are regarded with awe, without any display of rage. So it is, when one by mastering of music regulates the mind and heart.’

One must regulate the mind and heart so as to finally transcend them. One can be silent and sit still only when one has arrow and bow. Only when the arrow strikes at the heart of midnight will the deafening sound be unveiled.

Music is the path to silence.

Edited June 5, 2022 by Oeaohoo

[Oeaohoo]

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Once again the Pre-eternal wills

To come to know in you the joy of creation

Once again the Infinite wills

To recognise itself in the finite.

 

In this uplight, in this explosion

In this lightning rush

In its fiery breath

Is the whole poem of the universe.

 

And a moment of love engenders eternity

And the abyss of space

Eternity breathes worlds

The pealing of bells embraces silence

 

          Something great is being accomplished!

And sweet love

          Is being born anew!

 

Love loving itself as love

          Love re-creating itself

          As Love

 

O life! your divine

Light is blazing up

          The universe is being born

          A joyful answer to it

With this invocation, the Russian composer Scriabin commenced his Preparation for the Final Mystery. This was not to be any ordinary musical performance but a spiritual preparation for the eschaton, the End of the World. It was to combine music, poetry (as above), dance, and even olfactory art and the distinction between performers and audience was to be utterly dissolved in the totalising unity of Art.

Given that we are all still here, it is evident that this annihilation never took place. This would not have mattered to Scriabin because he understood that the real purpose of art is to experience what it means to be a creator, as a final preparation for the realisation that one is and has always been the Creator.

Scriabin is often considered by mediocre minds to have been a heretic if not a lunatic, mostly for having made the following statement:

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I am God!

I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life

I am the boundary, I am the summit

I am God

I am a blossoming, I am bliss

I am a passion burning everything,

devouring everything

I am a fire which has enveloped the universe

and plunged it into the abysses of chaos

(I am repose) I am chaos

I am the blind play of dispersed forces

I am consciousness asleep, Reason extinct

Everything is exterior to me. I am uniform multiplicity. I have lost freedom, lost consciousness and only its aftergleam lives in me as a blind striving

Away from the centre, away from the Sun, away from the Aftergleam of my former Divinity which now oppresses me,

Towards freedom, towards unity, towards consciousness, towards truth, towards God, towards myself, towards life

O life, o creative impulse (volition), all creative striving away from the centre, eternally away from the centre

Towards freedom, towards consciousness

(I have abbreviated this poem towards the end because it would take up too much space).

In his earlier life Scriabin was influenced by the romanticism of the 19th century. Only in later years, under the influence and occasional guidance of the profounder aspects of modern philosophy (the religious idealism of Bishop Berkeley, Schopenhauer's conception of the World as Will and Representation and Nietzsche's anti-dualistic gospel for the future), the Wagnerian desire to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total or ideal work of art which would synthesise all of the arts), the Theosophy of the Russian H.P. Blavatsky and direct study of various ancient texts, in likely combination with his own experiences, did his music start to become a paradigm of spiritual awakening. The shift is very apparent by the time we reach his Fifth Sonata and his third symphony, the Poem of Ecstasy, both of which can easily be found if you wish.

Though Scriabin died before he could ever complete even the Preparation for the Final Mystery, one of his final works - Vers la flamme, or "Towards the flame" - encapsulates the apocalyptic ecstasy which he so desired to express:

By far his most profound work, however, is his final symphony Prometheus: the Poem of Fire. Prometheus was of course the Greek Lucifer, the light-bringer who stole the fire of the gods from the Olympian realm of Being, ruled by Zeus, so that he could distribute it among humanity. The associations with the Renaissance cult of "Humanism" and everything that has followed it (the "enlightenment", democratic empowerment, and so on) are thus obvious. Scriabin, however, plays on the ambiguity that is present in the Greek myth, evoking the eternal tension between the principle of Cosmos and Chaos, Creation and Destruction, the Masculine and the Feminine.

Of course, music of this calibre cannot be understood from a single superficial experience. If you truly wish to understand it, you will have to engage with it repeatedly until your entire body, soul and spirit resonate with it in a unity of blissful dissolution.

Maybe then you will be able to say with the composer himself:

 

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I am the final accomplishment

I am the bliss of dissolution

I am the diamond of all-starriness

I am the silence of all sounds

The white resonance of death

I am freedom, I am ecstasy.