by Elidé Beltram Ph. D.
There is definitely an interaction between music and development of consciousness. The Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser defines four modes as magical, mythical, mental and integral. The magical mode is illustrated mainly by rhythmical cult music of the shamans of the former North European and African cultures, the chanting of South American and Mongolian priests, and the gamelan orchestras of Indonesian villages. This form is often enhanced with dance and movement and fulfills an initiatory function. The mythical mode of consciousness is common to Eastern and early Western traditions where speech and music are closely associated, like Gregorian chants, Persian music, the ragas of India, and the Vedic chanting of ancient India. The mental mode came into its own around the fifteenth century with the three-dimensional view of the objective world. Along with the development of perspective in painting came polyphony in music, which necessitated intricate techniques of construction and notation that led to the Western musical tradition: fugue, sonata form, the laws of harmony and modulation, tonality, and tempered intervals.
In Asia, the music of Japan, China, and India continued with its “mythical” way, using sounds that have a wide range of micro-intervals. These sounds are closely spaced pitches sounded simultaneously. One can hear the power of this contrasting timbre in the Tibetan cymbals, which have slightly different pitches, or in Balinese gamelan instruments. The sounds of these untuned instruments, along with African gongs, Native American drums, and Peruvian whistles, can create a resonance with a holistic quality based not on the mathematic tuning but on the quality of the psychic feeling response they are meant to elicit.
P.M. Hamel writes of this acoustical phenomenon of contrasting timbre creating sound bipolarity, which lends itself to the expression of emotional bipolarity often heard during shamanic rituals, such as calm and anger, love/hate, harmony and disharmony. He states that its effect is to create, with particular sound frequency of the drumming, a resonance of sound meant to stimulate particular areas of the brain that rule out distraction. In order to approach the “spirit world,” the shaman calms the left brain to enter the right hemisphere using the channel through the intuitive and receptive world to reach an altered state. According to R. Assagioli, this intuitive and receptive world of the supraconsciousness, or the transpersonal, is the part of the higher unconscious, which is a region of the mind containing material from which we derive creative insight and higher order drives.
The mental consciousness of music is geared to view the objective world. Cognitive reality is overemphasized; the process of perception is reduced, causing loss of feelings. This may interfere with the spontaneity seen in the magical-mythical mode, helpful for the creative acts of the artist and scientist, and also that resulting from sexual bliss. Music, as a function, tends to minimize supression by reducing the active process of cognition, as seen in the shamans’ practices. One may enter a deeper state of passivity where the mind is emptied of personal memories. Music may sometimes quiet the left cognitive side of the brain, and the listeners could experience it from the right, intuitive hemisphere.
According to Assagioli, our human mind involves four levels. The bottom layer of the lower unconscious contains the elementary physiological activities that direct the coordination of bodily functions, the fundamental drives, and the roots of various pathological states such as phobias, obsessions, compulsions, and delusions. This is what Freud calls the id, the area of the psyche that is the seat of the libido, not in contact with the outside world, only with the body. The next level is the unconscious, which holds impulses, habits and conflicts of which we are unaware and which causes problems in ordinary life. It also holds material easily accessible such as motor reflexes and manual movements. The next layer is the ordinary consciousness in which, according to Assagioli, very little of our mental activity belongs to that level. On the top level, the area that is the supraconscious or the transpersonal, in which the mind contains material from which we derive creative insight, and higher order drives. This is where we receive our higher intuitions and inspirations.
H. Bonny’s studies with altered states of consciousness and consonant music verify music’s unique access to the supraconsciousness. Consonant music, mental in nature, can bring personal memories from the unconsciousness through familiar sounds. However, the magical and mythical mode of the dissonance, which uses the unfamiliar sounds, may evoke one’s unfamiliarity by transcending known feelings and memories and excluding personal issues and problems.
Bonny claims that spiritual states induced through music can reach the same pure states of inner awareness reached through psychedlic drugs. Some musical techniques used in the magical-mythical mode of Tibetan music and Indian cosmic singing seem to accentuate certain overtones, which may create musical vibrations that can open inner psychic centers. Through music visualization techniques, my clients have reported connecting with their dark side. Peacefulness, wholeness, and understanding of one’s spiritual life are not reached through intellectual involvement but through total integral listening, the process of “letting go.”
In my mystical walk I connected with the atonal sounds of my “child” times. In my self-absorption with visceral sound, I discovered the primordial musical sounds of the universe, the energy vibrations that first formed things. In this state I felt enlightened, and humbled by the higher power of God in me, the self. My body was opened, sexual energy released. I experienced the vortex of creation, the earth, the energy of life. I became who is in me; I experienced the Imago Dei.
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