Music in the Ritual Space
A participant once shared after the ritual that it was as if we were singing inside of them. Even though they were on the other side of the room, the music felt very intimate, very near, moving them with every change and serenading them with every word. It acted like a type of field where they felt safe to experience a whole range of emotions without fear or constriction.
Who has not been moved by music? It is obvious to some of us why music plays an essential role in spiritual study, precisely because of that: it moves us. Every culture around the world has a type of mysticism or contemplative philosophy related to sound and music. It interweaves with life and flows through every fibre of every being. One could say that music is the very river of life, running through the veins of everything, ever playing on and on into the next song and the next song. When we listen widely, we see it is all one song, one singing, one vibration with many emanations, one beautiful quality of being.
Music is an invisible landscape, a hidden map that brings so much meaning with every little discovery of its body. If you put human beings anywhere, after a little while they will start to make music; melodies will find and flow through them, rhythms will knock on rocks and on their doors. We are like birds who forgot how to fly, for just as the bird has wings and sings, we also have the means to music, as natural as our ability to walk. It's as natural as breathing, as normal as blinking, as regular as our heartbeat.
There is an old Zimbabwean proverb that says, "If you can talk, you can sing; if you can walk, you can dance." I'll add to that and say: if you have a heartbeat, then you can find a drumbeat. And, the trumpet is blowing… Listen. Do you hear it? It blows in all things.
It is important for us to note that we are not pretty musicians who play for ayahuasca rituals; rather, we are explorers who have learned to navigate and listen to music, and have found that it is one of the primary vehicles by which to move in the astral. For many of us, and I can speak for myself, we start our musical pilgrimage here in and from the ritual space.
There is a phenomenon that happens with Forest Path ceremony participants. They arrive feeling like they do not have a musicality, and then depart from our retreats. But months later or a year later they return, instrument in hand, declaring they have taken a leap in their listening, or that something leapt into them and opened a newfound and yet ancient appreciation for what is heard: for music, for poetry, and the invisible places they emerge from.
Music is a doorway, each song holding a different key to enter through that door. Each has its own personality, its own mystery, and when you listen, it guides you through the doorway and into its teaching.
Music is the teacher, Music is the master. In the East, there is the famous aphorism: nada brahma, or simply put: sound is God. Everything you see is vibrating, differing oscillations but one vibration. Isn't that also what we are at one level? That is why deep listening and the contemplation of sound and music are important for us; they lead us back to the original orchestration of which we are all a part.