Living in the world of Ruach-spirit is how one begins to experience the deeper and the higher world of the Neshama. The way to do so is to train and gain a modicum of control over emotions, not in order to suppress them, but as vehicle to encourage elevated feeling and emotion and slowly banish the unworthy ones. As previously pointed out, just as an average person can get occasional glimpses of Ruach while living on the level of Nefesh, so he who resides on the level of Ruach can begin to grasp the power and siblimity of the level of the Neshama. In this post, our topic is music.
Music resides in the world of Ruach. It is a rare individual who does not instinctively sense the power of music to elevate and inspire. If so, we must explain how music can also arouse the most base feelings, why it seems so inexorably connected to bodily sensations of rhythm, meter and timbre, and why some musicians are less than elevated beings.
Those who understand music are very aware of the fact that on many levels music resembles or invokes bodily sensations. I am not speaking here of heavy rhythms that physically vibrate the body or of lyrics that appeal to the heart or imagination. No, even classical music draws on the familiar sensations of heartbeat or dance for its effects. We now know that music can directly affect the patterns of electrical discharges in the brain, and its wave pattern. Yet, at the same time, best music possesses an ethereal quality with clearly defined spiritual character.
In essence, the mystery of how music can span the distance between the physicality of arrangement, timbre and pattern and elevated spirituality is the same one as the mystery of numbers, on which it is based. Western music is based on scales and distances within the octave, on the principles of tension and resolution, and on repetition and variation. We might say that it spans its floor, which is physical in the extreme and its ceiling, which is spiritual in essence. But, this we had already seen. The level of Ruach spans and mediates between Nefesh and Neshama. So also Music spans and mediates between its physical components and its spiritual overlay.
Musicians live in the world of Spirit. However, one can live at its bottom within its physical floor, rising at times towards its spiritual ceiling to draw insights and then dropping back to dwell at its bottom. In fact, one can be quite satisfied with what is available on the floor of Ruach and not at all desire anything higher. Many musicians feel that they have all the spirituality that they care to have through their musical work; more, that they can immerse themselves in the physical lusts and appetites without losing their spiritual connection of music. This is why some of the greatest musicians were vile people. Without a motivation to ascent above Ruach, there is no need to repair or redeem the level of Nefesh, where body reigns. Those, however, who long to rise above Ruach, quickly find that unredeemed and unrepaired deficiencies of the level of Nefesh, will drag them quickly and mercilessly down, for a person with unrepaired Nefesh can draw upon the level of Ruach but never beyond it.
Comments