1. Initiation: Is it the key to spiritual awakening?
2. “Our Spiritual Experience: Separating Truth from Self-Delusion”
3. “Is there a Spiritual Significance to the Hale-Bopp Comet?”
4. “Would you speak about the power of prayers and blessings?”
5. “What is the actual value and benefit of meditation? There must be millions of people in the world who do not meditate and who live perfectly good lives.  If a person does not meditate, does God or their soul really care?”
6. "What is it about music that makes it a universal means of communication? Is it the sound vibrations, the rhythms, the style? How is it that music touches us so deeply?"

For the next set of  Questions and Answers (#7-#15)........Visit Page 2

QUESTION: A number of spiritual disciplines, particularly those with a master or guru, use initiation as a ladder to spiritual growth or enlightenment. What is initiation? If we don't have a human initiator, does spiritual initiation take place?

ANSWER: In earlier periods of human life, the reality that you are pointing to with the word "initiation" was quite different from the conception currently held by most human beings. For example, in a certain period of ancient Greece, an individual would be taken forth as a child and placed into a group of children who were initiated into an understanding of the "gods", the spiritual realities as perceived by the priests at that time. In that period, "initiation" was a lifelong training of a human personality in the attainment of extremely dramatic experiences of realities that are not physical.
     In a time of ancient Egypt, initiation involved the creation of a death-like state of the physical body. Throughout human history, there have been many different processes of initiation. For your purposes at the present time, it is wise to consider initiation to be: A process of introducing your human personality into a clearer, stronger, conscious experience of spiritual realities.
     Currently, there are individuals who have a body of spiritual knowledge and experience that they believe is valuable. They have become teachers in order to share that knowledge with others. In so doing, they may create a process of initiation. They usually do that by: (1) referring to earlier writings, teachings, or traditions; or (2) by inventing the initiation process from their own experience and understanding of spiritual realities.
     There are many ways in which an initiation can come about. What is important for you to know is: Initiation is human, not divine. Your soul does not say, "You must be initiated to know God". Initiation is created by human ideas, human thoughts, and human processes.
     If you say, "I do not feel that I need initiation", then, you can assume that you do not need it. You, as a sensitive, intelligent human being, who is growing to the best of your ability, can make the decision: "I do not need this human-created process to find my way to truth, and to God. I have my own individual process of spiritual awakening". You might call that individual process your own personal initiation.
     If you see evidence that a certain teacher has brought deep spiritual experiences to other people by putting them through a process of initiation, and you desire to experience that initiation, then you are free to go forth and achieve it. That is an area of human choice, desire, and interest.
     There is a certain "natural" initiation that occurs for human beings. You could also call it growth. It can be focused upon mental and emotional blossoming. You could call that personal growth. It can also be focused upon knowing God, and your soul, and the spiritual realities. You could call that spiritual growth. Such growth is a personal process. It is a personal quest that all individuals can choose to make an important part of their life.
     In your quest for spiritual growth, if you have a certain sequence of steps that you believe can bring about the growth, and you call those steps "initiation", then rejoice. You have a clear map to guide your quest. If you are more spontaneous and less organized, and you simply take a period of silence in each day to attune to the spiritual realms, and you do not call it initiation, you are still moving toward a greater conscious awareness of truth. What is involved in any spiritual practice, whether you call it initiation or spiritual growth, is simply a change of your human conscious awareness. You are becoming more consciously aware of the spiritual realities that always exist beneath your awareness.
     If you desire to embark on a structured spiritual path of personal initiation, there are some important things that you can do in your daily life to become more consciously aware of the forces of God, of your soul, and of all spiritual realities. These are steps that you can take along your spiritual pathway.
     The first step of your personal initiation process can be: Addressing your challenging thoughts and feelings. You might believe that initiation should begin with something ideal, like loving more fully. But, it is very difficult to love, or to have a spiritual experience, when you are frightened, troubled, confused, sad, or in pain. Therefore, the first step of initiation is the willingness to work creatively with your negative thoughts and feelings that have become steady patterns. You do not need to give a great deal of attention to fleeting negative thoughts and feelings, but, you do need to work honestly with the steady mental and emotional patterns that trouble you. You need to understand them, live through them, communicate them to other people, and eventually learn to release them. (Editor's Note: Guidance for doing such work is given in Dr. Scolastico's books, Healing the Heart, Healing the Body, and, Doorway to the Soul.)
     The second step of your personal initiation can be: The patient willingness to care more, which eventually becomes a willingness to love more. Loving begins with caring. Care more about yourself and your human pathway through life. Care more about other people. Stir compassion, generosity, and kindness in yourself to the best of your ability. That will lead to the creation of strong feelings of love, which will stimulate powerful intuitive capacities within yourself. The opening of those intuitive capacities will eventually lead you to deep spiritual experiences.
     The third step of your personal initiation can be: Creating a holy "temple" to which you assign yourself and dedicate yourself. You can imagine that you are a priest or priestess in search of holy orders in a temple of your own creation. Your holy temple is created by taking time each day to step back from the human world and dedicate yourself to bringing your full consciousness to bear upon your soul, upon the forces of God, upon the eternal realities. This holy temple can become a wonderful retreat from your daily life, a place where you consistently go to attune to the spiritual forces. You can transform any physical place into your temple by your creativity and imagination. You can use various objects, such as a candle, incense, or a special photograph, to signal to your consciousness mind that a spiritual opening is about to take place.
     The fourth step of your personal initiation can be: A commitment to meaningful and beneficial activities in the physical world. Here, you can say to yourself, "It is not enough to simply feel the majesty of God inside myself. I need to do something in the physical world with other people after I have a spiritual experience". Some people, as part of their personal initiation process, might say, "I dedicate myself to being a teacher of kindness in the daily world". Others might say, "I will become a healer. I will help others heal their pain and suffering". You will decide what activities to take in the physical world that will be meaningful to you, and beneficial to others.
     This is a general way to carry out the steps of a path of personal initiation. You can create ways to extend any of these steps, to refine them, and adjust them to your own life. No matter what steps you take, the more understanding and loving you are in carrying out your personal initiation process, the more you will be able to bring your experience of the magnificence of the spiritual realms into harmonious alignment with a meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling life in the physical world.    (back to top)

QUESTION: In our quest for spiritual understanding, how can we separate truth from self-delusion?

ANSWER: If you begin with a kind of reference point, then you can gauge how far you move from that point. For most of you, the reference point that is most beneficial is, a feeling of perfect love. If you have not felt this at all in this lifetime, then you need to strive to feel it. If you have felt it once, then it becomes your reference point. You would say:

"This feeling of perfect love is ground zero. Whenever I have a feeling like this, I will be relatively certain that I am standing, subjectively speaking, in the middle of truth. As strongly as I can possibly feel truth in this lifetime, I am feeling it when I feel this great depth of love."

Let us say that you are feeling half that love. You will say, "I am halfway out from ground zero." Let us say that you are feeling hatred. You would say then, "I am all the way out from ground zero."
 This is a beginning point. It is not to suggest that positive feelings are perceptions of God, and negative feelings are a perception of the opposite. It is to say that the forces of God that flow into you, if unobstructed, would cause you to feel a constant ecstasy and unbounded love. When the forces of God are obstructed, the intensity of such feelings decreases. If the forces of God are fully obstructed in you, then you will have no positive feelings, and there will be a coldness, and emptiness in you. Then, the presence of fear will cause overt negative sensations or feelings.
 There is a way to be neutral in your feelings. In such a moment, you are not creating negativity, but, you are not so close to truth. You are not feeling truth, in terms of perceiving truth as an experience of love.
 To understand truth and feeling, imagine that you are with many brothers walking down a narrow road. Let us say that the road becomes so narrow that it is only one brother wide. On each side of the road there are sharp briar bushes. Now, let us say that you are aligned with truth. In other words, you understand that these ones are your beloved brothers. They are part of your being. You care for them so deeply that you would not hesitate to invite them to go forward in front of you to pass through the narrow opening. Each one does this in love, and there is a very gentle arrangement, and you all walk in single file, and you all rejoice in the passage. You might say that this is human kindness, or human consideration, but it is also truth. The feelings, and the energies of truth, have come together in a single moment, and the result is an harmonious human choosing that brings harmonious physical results into the physical world.
 Now, let us say then that you are far from truth, and let us say that you mistakenly believe that your brothers are attempting to beat you to a large feast in a nearby village. In truth, none of them wish to do that, but all of them have your same fear. So, all together, you rush toward the narrow opening and you become caught, and you all smash painfully against the briars. In this, you would say that you are far from truth, and the inner feelings have led to human willing and choosing that have brought negativity and pain into the physical world. As a general guideline, you can say: “If my inner experiences lead to choices that are bringing pain, most likely I am far from truth.”
 This gives you a feeling for how to be flexible in aligning feelings and truth. You could say to yourself then, day after day:

If you wish to sit in a moment of meditation and draw a great truth into your mind, but you notice that most of the time you are creating turmoil inside yourself and outside of yourself, you would not expect to succeed at drawing a truth into your mind. You are simply not matched with the energies of truth. Your personality is distorted. You need to make some healing.
If you feel predominantly, most of the time, "I am creating harmony, balance, and a sense of goodness," and you decide to make an attunement to truth, you would say: "I am encouraged. I can expect to succeed in feeling the truth, in knowing the truth, for I am bringing a personality prepared by its inner adjustments, its inner work." This does not mean that you feel that your life is perfect, or without challenge. It simply means that most of the time you are passing through the narrow road without sticking yourself in the briars.
Your ability to consciously align with truth depends upon your motives, your function in life, your relationships, your achievements, your attitudes, your entire personality life. Your personality needs to be prepared. It is as though your taste buds have been numbed, and you wish to know whether you are eating mashed potatoes or the mashed squash. You would find it quite difficult.
When your taste buds are alive and active, then, you need to use them to taste. In other words, if you would have many foods before you, and you cannot see them, and you wish to know the difference between them, and you stand at a distance and put out your tongue, you would have great difficulty. You are not using your taste buds. They might be perfect, but you are not using them. So, once you learn these personality assessments and adjustments, and you have a clear sense of yourself and your various patterns, and you are working with them, then, you need to taste life, and engage life with those patterns.
Let us say that you sit at home and practice perfect love, but you never go forth to love anyone. You are in perfect condition for that perfect love, but you do not act. You do not make it tangible in the physical world. Your inner life, in order to be tested, in terms of whether you are moving toward truth or not, needs to be acted upon in the outer world, or you will not have enough movement to tell which direction you are going. If you sit and stimulate your taste buds by your thinking, but you never eat any food, there will be no fulfillment.
In a way, you are attempting to assess life with an inner capacity that at times does need to be disengaged from the outer world in order to be primed and stimulated, discovered, opened, and learned about. But then, if you simply sit in silence and do not re-engage your life, it will be difficult to know truth from distortion. All of the various aspects of your life weave together as a great symphony. If you would say, "I am listening to this symphony, how do I know if the beginning is better or worse than the end?" you can make no assessment if you do not hear the whole symphony. If you hear it all, then you can engage it fully and you can respond to it, and you can decide what pleases you. You are more able to know what is truth when you are willing to engage all of life.
Now, if you would say, "But what is the ultimate truth?" you would simply confuse yourself. In other words, you would need to know that truth, in human form, is a choice, not a reality. It is a subjective response to all of the complexities of life, organized in your thinking and feeling, and then decided upon. If you would say, "The truth is that all human beings are animals, they are cruel, they are terrible," that is a creation of you. If you would say, "The truth is that all human beings are wonderful, they are joined in love," that is also a creation of you, but, in time, you can verify that it is also a reality of life. However, if you do not create it first, you can never verify it.
So, from your point of view, and for human purposes, you would say: "Truth is not discovered. It is created by me, and it is tested by me, moment to moment, day after day, throughout this lifetime."    (back to top)

QUESTION: The Hale-Bopp comet makes a beautiful and unusual spectacle in the night sky. Is there a spiritual significance to this comet?

ANSWER: Let us say that you have painted a very large picture, a canvas, that is an extraordinary masterpiece. In one corner of the painting, you see a very small but pretty brush stroke. You spend your whole life looking at that small brush stroke. No matter how wonderful that one stroke is, if you become preoccupied with it, you will miss the magnificence of the whole creation, the larger masterpiece.
If you say, "How dramatic, there is a small speck of light in the sky that is a small floating object," and you overlook the extraordinary miraculous nature of your own sun, and very important factors having to do with your physical moon, and the untold numbers of stars, then you are missing the magnificence of the larger masterpiece.
The fascination with this comet is primarily with its newness and uniqueness. It gives you something new to be interested in and to be excited about. This feeds your craving for more and more complexity.
If you wish to say, "This small object that we have named, this comet, has extremely importance significance for the human race," then let that belief stir in you a great feeling of mystery and awe. That would be an appropriate response to the entire universe displayed about you. If you wish to use this small object as a trigger for that larger response, it can serve you well. However, you could do the same thing simply by contemplating the extraordinarily miraculous nature of your sun, which makes possible life in this physical body. You could bring this sense of newness, majesty, and awe to any of the physical objects in the universe.
Now, in the broadest sense, all of the objects in the universe are expressions of the eternal souls wielding the forces that you would call the forces of God. These physical expressions of divine, non-physical forces are set to be reminders to your conscious awareness that you are being appreciated and loved by eternal souls. The eternal souls are always looking upon you. They are always guiding you and uplifting you. If this comet, or the sun, or the moon, or a star, or galaxy, helps you feel that you are being loved, that you are being guided, then rejoice. However, the presence of this small object, the comet, in itself has no particular significance beyond being a way to stimulate human interest and curiosity, and perhaps stimulate your longing to know more about the larger realities of life.
You can attribute any significance to this comet that you desire. However, you might wish to be clear that you are the one attributing that meaning.    (back to top)

QUESTION: Would you speak about the power of prayers and blessings?

ANSWER: Let us suggest that there is a great benefit in learning to bless other human beings in a deeper way. First, you bless them by your kind thoughts and wishes of goodness for them, which you can do from a distance. For example, if you see on the television a reporting of a one who has suffered great loss, and you begin to feel frightened by it, or helpless, have those feelings first, accept them, and share them. Then, say to yourself:

“I am not helpless. I can bless this one from a distance. For I have the power of God in my own hands. I exercise that power by thinking about this one in deep, loving ways, by sending forth my sympathy and my understanding, and, most of all, by sending forth my belief that this one is a child of God in human form, and this one has the courage, strength, stamina, and determination to heal the pain, to transform it.”

When you do this, you become a kind of blessing, in terms of the energies that you send forth. You might say that in the power of this is the power of your prayers, your well wishes, your conscious and willful determination to send forth the particular forces of God that flow into you individually, and to share them with another human being.

In many ways, more directly, you bless others by your presence in their lives. So, each day, it behooves you to assess the kind of blessings that you are giving. Let us say that you come forth each day to be foul and abusive toward others. You are blessing them with your anger and your resentment. You are visiting them with pain and suffering. So, the part that you play in their life is the part of the tormentor.

If you come forth each day, to the best of your ability, striving to understand others, to be kind to them, to be gentle and loving, you are blessing them with the beauty of God quite directly. For you can understand the forces of God as forces of kindness, gentleness, love, and creativity. The power of God derives from this base of love and understanding. In other words, the creative forces of life that hold physical matter in place, that have created physical matter in the beginning of time and space, these forces, for lack of better human words, can be called forces of creative love, creative goodness, creative purity, wholeness, and oneness. These kinds of thoughts and feelings approximate the eternal forces and energies.

When you create personal divisiveness, bitterness, hatred, and resentment, that is the human will creating, you might say, “counter” to divine will. But, since human will has been given the freedom to shape the physical world, to a certain extent, there comes then the freedom to go counter to the creative forces of life itself. When you do that day by day, you are blessing others with chaos, pain, and suffering.

When you strive, to the best of your ability, to align with the forces of sensitivity, kindness, gentleness, goodness, and love, you are visiting others with powerful, potent forces that reflect the very creation of life itself, which of course, affects the creation of the cells of their body, moment by moment, day by day. Those forces influence the creation of the human mind and human emotions. They instigate a kind of warming of the heart of another, so that if there is enough of that, eventually, they can pour back into the pool of human experience, their individual choice of loving, and bringing kindness and goodness.

You can see quite clearly, if all human beings choose to pour into the pool of human experience, goodness, kindness, love, moment by moment, day by day, then the human control over the physical world will be exercised in a way that gradually causes the blossoming of the forces of God in their true form, in their perfect, loving form.

So, in the coming period, if you think through these areas, and if it pleases you to dedicate your vision to this magnificence, and, if it pleases you to work each day to try to bless others with that kind of influence, then, not only can that bring you a great joy, but you can feel that you are a larger expression of the creative forces of life itself in the unfoldment of life on the physical earth. You are becoming one with the forces of God in powerful ways that serve you and all those about you.

For this moment, imagine that you wish to feel what we have described. And, as we would pour forth our love to encourage you and inspire you, help yourself feel that it is in your choosing that you have the power to align with this vision of goodness. If you choose it moment by moment, day by day, you will create it moment by moment, day by day.      (back to top)

QUESTION: What is the actual value and benefit of meditation? There must be millions of people in the world who do not meditate and who live perfectly good lives. If a person does not meditate, does God or their soul really care?

ANSWER: You do not come into earth to meditate. You come into earth to think, feel, act, and do.

Your soul and the forces of God have placed certain impulses into you that you could call intentions. They are intended to guide you in certain directions, and to influence you to make certain choices that will move you toward what you would call "goodness." Your soul would never try to influence you to have hatred in your heart, or to strike out at another human being. Thus, you could say that your soul desires you not to meditate, but to feel love and companionship with others, and to follow impulses of kindness, compassion, generosity, and love.

There are many ways for human beings to act on such impulses toward goodness. Those ways are unlimited. The souls will not limit your free will. They will not force you toward goodness and eternal harmony.

Now, in addition to the impulses toward harmony and goodness, the souls will place into human beings smaller impulses toward fear and negativity. Those are impulses that you ones as human beings have created before this lifetime and were not able to heal while in human form. Such negative patterns must be healed by human beings. Therefore, they must exist in some human beings in order to be experienced, lived through, and healed. Thus, the primary impulse from your soul is not to meditate, but to love, to create harmony and goodness, and to heal.

When you are in human form and some of your fear impulses arise, you are intended to experience those impulses, moderate them, control them, understand them, and heal them. You are not intended to act upon them and cause pain and suffering to yourself and other human beings. The desire to act upon negative impulses is human. It is rooted in selfishness, and in fear of pain and suffering.

Imagine that you are living a daily life in which, let us say, you become overly focused upon yourself. All that you care about is earning money for yourself. You are not interested in generosity or kindness to others. You wish to protect yourself from others so that they do not cause you pain, or steal your money. You become quite frantic in the pursuit of wealth. As such a person, if you take a period of silence each day, whether you call it meditation, contemplation, attunement, introspection, retreat from the physical world, whatever you call it, there would be a likelihood that, inside your private human experiences, the very strong impulses from your soul that are prodding you toward kindness and compassion would reach your feelings and your thoughts. Thus, the very strong human impulses that you have chosen of selfishness and greed would be temporarily mingled with the soul impulses of kindness, goodness, and love. You would be more likely to awaken from your self-created “trance,” so to speak, in which you are totally caught up in selfishness. You would be more likely to accomplish the true purposes for which you have come into human form, which are related to kindness, compassion, and love. In that case, you might say that your soul desires you to do meditation. Your soul desires you to take some time away from the overwhelming distractions that you have focused upon through selfishness, greed, and the pursuit of money so that you can awaken to larger purposes of life.

Let us say that you are a kind, essentially idealistic and loving human being. You are not perfect. You have your moments of fear, selfishness, doubt, and anger. But, for the most part, you are responding to the true impulses of your soul, and you are living a life of kindness, compassion, sincerity, and honesty. That is your primary expression. And, let us say that you have no interest in the eternal realities of life. You are not curious about the soul and what happens after death. You have no interest in understanding God. You may not even believe in God. In that case, your soul would not try to stir a great impulse to influence you to meditate, for you are following the soul impulses of kindness, compassion, and love. You are living the kind of human expression that your soul desire. Thus, you might say that, from the soul point of view, there is no need for you to meditate. You will fulfill the important purposes intended by your soul without needing to spend time in meditation.

Now, the forces of God will love you no matter what you do, whether you meditate or not, whether you fulfill your purposes or not, whether you are loving or selfish. Your soul will also love you in all of those cases. However, if you became distorted in the negative sense while your soul was loving you, your soul would try to influence you, through inner impulses intended to affect your free will, to choose the true purposes of life - kindness, compassion, and love. This means, then, that if you are living the life intended by your soul, your soul loves you, God loves you, and your soul will not particularly try to influence you to stir up a desire to meditate. If you are living a life of distortion, then, among other influences that your soul will try to stir in you, there might be the influence for you to slow down in your life, to step back from the distractions of the physical world - to make some form of attunement.

In all present human beings, except for some in the more calm societies and the rural areas, but particularly for ones caught up in the complexity of the urban influences, there is a need in your human self for a period of disengagement each day from the complexity of the physical world. This is true even if you are extremely loving and idealistic. If you are loving and idealistic, your soul may not particularly prompt you to meditate, for your soul can see that your purposes are being accomplished. However, in terms of your subjective experience, and your joy as a human being, we strongly recommend a period of meditation, attunement, or silence.

As a general rule, we could say that every single human being who is caught up in the complex modern world has too much stimulation from the physical world. There is too much strong impact from the physical realities, including money, achievement, struggles with the various physical objects, relationships, societies, and the complexities of your media. All of those areas tend to be overbalanced. There is too much of that, in terms of finding the deep joy and fullness that you desire.

If you do not care about deep joy and fullness for yourself, and you are essentially living an honest, sincere, loving life, then you do not need to meditate. You will simply do without that deeper joy and fullness. You will rejoice in your accomplishments, your family, your relationships. That can be a wonderful life. However, if you wish the fullest, most complete joy, and the greatest sense of purpose, meaning, and accomplishment, we strongly suggest that you need at least one or two moments of silence each day to retreat from the distractions of the physical world, and to feel the larger realities of life, no matter how you might conceptualize them.

If you say, “I believe in the beauty of God,” then for those silent moments, worship God. If you say, “I believe in the beauty of humanity, idealism, and love, apart from the daily grappling of the physical world,” then, enter a silence and imagine a pure, pristine human love that is linking you to all ones. Whatever you find to be holy, good, and idealistic beyond the complexity of human affairs, physical objects, and all of the physical world, that can be what you focus upon in your moment of meditation, attunement, or silence. It is an individual pattern. We are simply strongly suggesting the need for the period of retreating from the physical world. You must decide what you will focus upon during that period of retreating. If nothing else, take a few moments each day to take a deep breath, sit calmly, relax, and, as best you can, simply focus upon feelings of joy.    (back to top)

QUESTION: What is it about music that makes it a universal means of communication? Is it the sound vibrations, the rhythms, the style? How is it that music touches us so deeply?

ANSWER: Let us say that, for your purposes in working with your mind, you can consider that the largest indivisible reality is experience. And, you can imagine experiencing the undifferentiated forces of God in a perfect, miraculous realm in which your experience is constant ecstasy. This is one way to imagine the forces of God.

Another way is to imagine souls, emanating from that undifferentiated God force. Those souls have the same experience of eternal magnificence, but they also have the experience of self-awareness – still thinking in terms of experience.

Then, you can imagine souls who have a certain experience that, to use a human word, you could call a "desire" for a reality of their own creation. You can imagine this "desire" experience of the soul as having a certain momentum. That momentum propels that soul experience outside of the all-pervasive eternal experience of the souls rejoicing in the undifferentiated God experience. These experiences of the souls could be called projected desires. They become experiences that are conceived of, but they are not yet fulfilled. Thus, there is now a gap between conceiving and fulfilling. There is a "space" between desire and its fulfillment, where before, there was a unity of desire and fulfillment in the same soul experience, without a "gap."

You could call this gap that the souls created by desiring a reality outside of the eternal, the beginning of duration. In other words, if there is a desire that is not yet fulfilled, then there is a period of duration until the fulfillment comes about. You can consider this to be the beginning of time, as created by souls.

This new desire in many souls was a desire for a reality that you would now call the physical universe. The time that you would perceive between the beginning of the physical universe and its ending is the gap created by the eternal souls. It was created for many reasons.

In the experiences of the souls at the beginning of time, the first "gaseous" matter was created by the desires of the soul. The soul experience of, "I desire gaseous matter," and the gap of time until that matter appeared tangibly, so that if you were an observing human you would see gasses floating about in time and space, rides on a kind of soul experience that you as a human would most likely call an energy. However, from the soul point of view, it is an experience. It is the soul experience of, "I desire gases floating about in space, and I create that experience along with many souls, and human beings will later call these gases, energies, and from them there will eventually be particles, and eventually there will be stars and universe." The challenge for you ones is that you have thoughts and words that speak of energies, and those serve you well and they are viable from the physical point of view, but, what you do not realize is that those energies are experiences of souls. They are soul experiences within time, being constantly generated, until the physical period is over. Then, the souls will stop generating those experiences and matter will vanish.

If you wish to understand intellectually, you need words, and the word "energy" is serviceable for certain experiences of the souls that manifest as physical realities. These includes light, invisible rays such x-rays, and many such areas. These soul experiences also include sound.

These "natural" energies, if you will, are impelled experiences of the soul. In other words, the sun shines because the souls experience the sun shining and create the energies for it to exist. The sun will shine no matter what you think, feel, or do with your will as a human being. But, the energies of sound are taken over by human beings when music is created. The experiences of the soul that you could call the energy context within which sound waves can propagate, has been taken over as an experience of a human who, for example, plays a lute. Those sounds of the lute could not come forth without the context that the souls have created for the strings to vibrate and bring the sound waves to your ears, but, those beautiful melodies could not come forth without the human who wrote and played them.

From this, you can begin to sense that in the musical area, you have a mystical union of the human and the divine. You have human beings taking the soul experiences that you would call energies, and the context for sound energies to occur, and those humans are modulating, changing, and bringing infinite variety to that sound structure.

You might say that this is the "bare bones" of music. Then, the music extends into the experience of the human. As you listen to a beautiful pianist playing wonderful music, it is not beneficial to say, "I will calculate the wavelength of each sound, and I will study how the sound enters my eardrum and penetrates to my brain." You could do that, but you might find it more enjoyable to relish the experience of the music.

As human beings create music, in a sense, they are emulating the creative forces of the souls that the souls drew from the undifferentiated God forces. When you create music, you take the energies--the experiences of the souls--and, using human will and creativity, you create anew in a manner that is similar to how the souls created the potential for music. This becomes very potent. In other words, as the creation of music emulates divine forces, it stirs in you something very important.

Most of you will tend to associate music with emotion, rooted in human experience. Thus, if you have had a wonderful love affair and a particular song evokes the feeling of your love and your loved one, that is wonderful, but that is only the beginning of the mystery. There is also stirred within you, as you feel the love of that love affair and that person, a not-conscious sense that you are creating beauty just as God created beauty, just as the souls created beauty. In that moment, you are a co-creator with God.

Be patient with this area. Say to yourself, "I can trivialize music and simply know that it is stimulating, exciting, and interesting." That is one level of benefit. You can rejoice in that level, and, you can also say: "Let me feel more deeply, particularly with music that brings a mood of holiness, or a mood of loving expansion. Let me remind myself that in these human-created sounds of music, there is a reflection of the very same process by which the undifferentiated God forces created the souls, and by which the souls created the physical reality, including myself and my human life."

That can bring such a deep import to your experience. It can open you to a new understanding, new knowledge, and even new music. (back to top)

© 2005 Ron Scolastico, Ph.D.