Everyday I play Bach’s music for my daughter Anaïs and this morning while listening with her, layers of meaning washed over me as I sat in awe, completely absorbed in a feeling of absolute gratitude for music, for life, for giant artists, and their purpose as vicars of God in our lives. JS Bach was such a vicar on earth.
Music, I feel, is meant to shake us up. It churns our emotional body, loosening the fatty misconceptions that have attached themselves to the arteries of our vitality making us overly reactive, lethargic, and untrue. In the presence of music, you have no choice but to surrender and lose all the self-magnification you have indulged in for many years. (What a liberation). All of a sudden there are tears. Layer after layer the ‘you’ that you thought you were starts dissolving without an option of any other choice and the less rigid, open minded, relaxed, loving and cool form of ‘you’ is revealed. You realize it was always there to begin with. It was just long forgotten.
The long forgotten ‘you’ is more closely related to the inner silence than to outer noise. Perhaps that is the reason we make music. We take the noise and shape it into a melody so that we can remember ourselves; so that we can become aware of our innermost silence.
But how does a melody point to silence? It is sound after all which is the opposite of silence. In any given melody, there is silence between notes. Without that silence between two notes how would there be a melody at all? What is it in a melody that effects us do deeply? The underlying silence. Before it makes an appearance, the anticipatory note that comes after the first note points us back to silence. It makes us crave for it, wait for it, long for it. Then next note does the same thing, then the next note and on and on like that. Music never ends and our awareness of ourselves as silence never ends either. It is always there calling us and we are always longing for it! We long for the great Silence, music says. We long for God within.
“Curving back within myself I create again and again.” - The Bhagavad Gita
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