The Healing Power of Musical Energy

A lecture on Science of Rhythm by William Gilchrist, a former Rock Star from Seattle, WA,  who transformed into spiritual musician during a program Summit University, MT USA

I thought of sharing this teachings on the science of rhythm and musical energy, there are perversions of music everywhere and this is quite alarming, these excerpt will give a bird’s eye view of how music affect our lives. Our mental, physical, intellectual, spiritual, emotional aspects also our spiritual centers (Chakras).

Did you know? Musical instruments like Piano and harp stimulates the charkas to spin into right directions, most classical music are music of the spheres, composers like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and other great musician are inspired by the masters to bring this music to our consciousness to help accelerate our consciousness and purify our charkas. 

Music can also be karmic (creates burden) and transmuting (consuming, balancing karma). I also noted that pinoy opm or pop music have negative subliminal suggestions and downward spirals. Excerpt from concerned Filipinos for healthy nation, read on…

THE SECRET POWER OF MUSIC

The Transformation of Self and Society through Musical Energy by David Tame 

(an excerpt)

Our subject is not music as abstract art, but music as force which affects all who hear it. Music – not as entertainment only, but as literal power . Whenever we are within audible range of music , its influence is playing upon us constantly- spreading or slowing , regularizing our heartbeat; relaxing or jarring the nerves; affecting the blood pressure, the digestion and the rate of respiration.

There is scarcely a single function of the body which cannot be affected by musical tones .The roots of the auditory nerves are more widely distributed and posses more extensive connections than those of any other nerves in the body ( a fact which may be of deep significance).Investigation shown that music affects internal secretions, circulation and nutrition.

On the subject of modern popular music , with its great emphasis on fast, loud and syncopated rhythm, it is worth remembering that rhythm in music exerts a very strong influence over the heartbeat, tending to bring it to somewhat conformity with the rhythm of the music itself. Since many people listen to hours of rock music per week, one shudders to imagine what effect this must have upon their health and lifespan; there is no doubt that while the music is being listened to, the hearts also beats unnaturally fast and strongly. Musical syncopations are also reflected on syncopations, or unnatural emphasis, of the heartbeats. Jagged jazz and rock rhythms have been experimentally demonstrated to cause the beating of the heart to lose its perfect rhythm . Research has discovered that rock music is bad for digestion, and is dangerous while one is driving. Further, since rock raises the blood pressure, it is bad for cases of pre-existing hypertension. And since the heartbeat in turns affects one’s mood and emotions, these too become subject to the influence of rock rhythms when they are heard-tension and inharmony of the mind being increased. Indeed, rhythm affects not only our bodies, minds and emotions, but even our subconscious.

Whether rhythm stirs up or soothes us down seems to depend primarily upon how its frequency of beats relates to the normal heartbeat of 65-80 beats per minutes. A tempo at about the same pace as the normal heartbeat soothes us. In fact, if you put your hand over your heart while listening to such music, you will find that the heart tends quickly to correct any discrepancy in its tempo, and comes into perfect rhythm with the music. Fast rhythm raise the heartbeat rate, and therefore emotional excitement rises too.

Since fast rhythms releases into the bloodstream chemicals which excite the organism, such music can literally be said to give a “kick”.

When young person is used to listening to fast rock music for a number of hours per day, such “kicks” literally become a form of addiction, and a sense of emptiness is experienced if for some reason the music cannot be listened to for a prolonged period of time.

JAZZ

The popularity of jazz, which was born and bred in the Deep South, swept throughout the United States in the 1920’s, today, in the Philippines as on other countries, the popularity of jazz is rising.

In contrast to the apathetic attitude usually displayed toward the dissonant music of our own day, the people of the 1920s tended to be very aware of the threat which jazz posed to society. As the music spread among the minority of the lower strata of society, opposing reactions were strong at first. Middle-class moralizers castigated it as the work of the devil. In his JAZZ, A HISTORY, even pro-jazz writer Frank Tirro admits:

“Jazz become the symbol of crime, feeble-mindedness, insanity and sex, and was under constant attack from the press from the early 1920s on…it is ironic that we preserve, study and enjoy a music today that was felt to be insidious and lascivious only yesterday.”

It might be ask: why were reactions so strong against a music which, at the time, was played only by small minority, whereas in our own day a greater proliferation of a music in similar vein goes virtually unchallenged? The answer can only be that during the 1920s the new, syncopated music come into a world which had hitherto never heard such sounds, and the music was therefore clearly recognized for what it was. Today, on the other hand our senses have become dulled and our awareness inoculated against such music through sheer familiarity. We therefore do not naturally react to it as would the pristine consciousness.

Writing a few years later, the composer4, poet, esotericist, Cyril Scott , had this to say:

“After the dissemination of Jazz, which was definitely’ put through’ by the dark forces, a very marked decline in sexual morals became noticeable. Whereas at one time women were content with decorous flirtations, a vast number of them are now constantly preoccupied with the search of erotic adventures, and have thus turned sexual passion into a species of hobby. Now, it is just this over-emphasis of the sex-nature, this wrong attitude towards it, for which jazz-music has been responsible. The orgiastic element of this syncopated rhythm, entirely divorced from any more exalted musical content, produced a hyper-excitement of the nerves and loosened the powers of self-control. It gave rise to a false exhiliration, a fictitious endurance, an insatiability resulting in a deleterious moral and physical reaction.

Whereas the old-fashioned melodious dance-music inspired the gentler sentiments, jazz with its array of harsh, ear-splitting percussion-instruments inflamed, intoxicated and brutalized, thus causing a set-back in man’s nature towards the instincts of his racial childhood. For Jazz music at its height very closely resembled the music of primitive savages. A further results of it was to be seen in that love of sensationalism which has so greatly increased. As jazz itself was markedly sensational, the public has increasingly come to demand ‘thrills’ in the form of ‘crook dramas’ and plays, the only dramatic interest of which is connected with crime, mystery and brutality. This also applies to sensational fiction, for the sale of the output this type is prodigous”.

To the sensitized mind the harsh rhythms of jazz were brutalizing to the conciousness. On the physical level the rhythm of jazz, like their parent sounds of Africa, literally forced the listeners to do something rhythmic with their limbs. The faster the tempo, the more the emotional tension created. As for meter, Alice Monsarrat has commented that:

“The normal easy meter…like that of the waltz, is 1-2-3, 1-2-3, or a fox trot 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. But with the advent of the twentieth century, the meters began to gallop brokenly stirrup to stirrup with harmonic dissonance and discord in the melodic line…the meter began to appear something like this: 1& 2 341 & 2 & 3.

A broken meter in the treble, played over an insistently regular beat in the left hand, with gradually increasing rapidity almost to the point of frenzy..is capable of producing the identical disintegrating and almost hysterical effect on the organism.”

The average western man often ‘hears’ (if the word can be used) more music during the watching of TV than he hears performed on its own and for its own sake. We seldom realize just to what extent music has become part of our lives. Surveys have shown that the average American teenager listens to no less than three to four hours of music each day. Most of it is not truly ‘heard’ at all yet even background music to which our consciousness minds are oblivious affects our heart-rate the same.

ROCK MUSIC- A Power for Good – or Evil? ( a reprint by concerned Filipinos for Healthy Nations)

In 1955 a song by Bill Haley and The Comets, “Rock around the Clock,” became a big hit, introducing in the United States, Rock and Roll as a new style of music. A year later Elvis Presley, a crooner, gyrating to the new rock beat attracted millions of fans specially among the teenage generation when he introduced “Hound Dog” and other hits.

Since then rock music has proliferated throughout the world. Because of the far-reaching consequences of music on society and our desire to provide helpful information to the parents and their children, we are sending you this excerpts.

LOUD ROCK DESTROYS NORMAL HEARING

The Environmental Protection Agency in America has discovered that current generations of youth suffer from hearing problems normally associated with fifty- to -sixty year olds. TIME magazine has reported that permanent loss of hearing among rock fans is much more common complaint than is generally realized. (So now it becomes clear why disco has to be played so loud; the higher the volume, the more the hearing degenerates…) . If the ears of a rock fan happen to have so far stood up to the blattering; it is nonetheless certain that his body has been internally affected. To quote from Bob Larson who, having once been a rock musician, is now a campaigner against the music.

“Rock properly understood, is music warfare waged upon an unsuspecting society by guitar gunners who are frequently fully aware of what they are about.”

More than any other form of the misuse of the sound, it is ROCK WITH WHICH WE MUST NOT DEAL TODAY. There is no question that rock is intimately related to the state of consciousness found in vast numbers of young people- young people who are to the “mature” adults of the future. Rock has unquestionably affected the philosophy and lifestyle of millions. It is a global phenomenon; a pounding, pounding destructive beat which is heard from America and Western Europe to Africa and Asia. Its effect upon the soul is to make nigh-impossible the true inner silence and peace necessary for the contemplation of eternal verities. Its “fans” are addicted , though they know it not, to the “feel-good”, egocentricity-enhancing para-hypnotic effects of its insistent beat. 

Rock in all its forms is a critical problem which our civilization must get to grips with some genuinely effective way, and without delay, if it wishes long to survive.

The hormone epinephrine is shot into the blood during stress or anxiety or the simulated experience of submitting oneself to an abnormal volume of music. When this happens, the heart beats rapidly, the blood vessel constrict, the pupil dilate, the skin pales, and often the stomach, intestines and esophagus are seized by spasms. When the volume is prolonged there are heart flutters.

A three year study of university students by investigators at Germany’s Max Plank Institute showed that 70 decibles of noise consistently cause vascular constriction-particularly dangerous if the coronary arteries are narrowed by atheriosclerosis.

And that is “only” 70 decibles! We must remember that the volume at the average dance hall reach much higher!

MUSIC POWER- FOR GOOD OR EVIL?

The power of sound as a force which could be used for good or evil was considered to be unsurpassed. And as a specific and concentrated form of sound production, music was of ultimate importance, deriving its energy from Above for the working of change in the world below.

The role of music and the role of religious intonation and liturgy was to release into earth a form of cosmic energy which could keep civilization in harmony with the heavens. Without such activities, it was thought, all could lose its alignment with the harmony of the universe, with catastrophic consequences. Sacred sound was even thought of preventing natural cataclysms such as earthquakes; while on the other hand, the evil or ignorant use of sound was believed to contribute strongly towards such cataclysms. In its good and beneficial use, however, music was held to posses a mediating role between heaven and earth- being a “communications channel” from man to God, from God to man, and a key for the releasing of the energies of the supreme and to the earthplane. Like human nature itself, music cannot possibly neutral in its spiritual direction, upward or downward. It is actually a part of the essential nature of the majority of styles and movement of music that they either lift people into an awareness of beauty and sublimity, or that they inculcate, subtly or overtly, feelings of discipline and hedonism. To put it plainly, music tends to be of either the darkness or of the light.