Specifically: How Music Can Set You Free… (Originally published on July 4th, 2019)

 

If you are like me, feeling the mysterious power of music is one of the best parts of your life. Music can be a way to escape the normal gravity of everyday existence, a way to “dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free”, a way to break the spell of whatever seems to be holding you back.

 

Something about this particular Fourth of July got me to thinking about how music has played out in my life as a path toward freedom. Let’s just say that I trust music more than I trust the U.S. government when it comes to my own personal freedom.

 

Here is the short version of freedom and the human race as far as I can figure it out – Humans showed up on the evolutionary scene as beings who were able to consciously think, “use their heads for something more than a hat rack” as my dad used to say…

 

Thinking liberated us from lower forms of existence and gave us a new level of freedom. The problem is that thinking then became a trap. There are levels above thinking that will set us even more free, but the way we think can cut us off from these higher levels of power.

 

Music can just cut through the red tape and take us to these higher levels. Then we don’t take our thinking so seriously and we can break the spell long enough to begin using thinking as a tool instead of being used by our thinking.

 

Great – but I have music around me all the time, and I am still not a walking light bulb. What gives?

 

Here is a guess – there are two directions you can go to escape the thought spell trap. Up and down.

 

Drink enough alcohol and you drop out of your thought world into lizard brain, and then on down into the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. Don’t get me wrong – I know people who know how to negotiate alcohol and other recreational drugs in a way that works for them. I’m just saying that as thought escape mechanisms drugs and alcohol have mixed results.

 

Entertainment can hypnotize you into allowing the show to replace your thought world with other thought worlds supplied for you by the script writers, visual artists, and musicians. This can be good or bad depending on what ideas you are taking in while under the spell. Music plays a huge part in the way entertainment takes us out of our ordinary thought world.

 

But entertainment is still dropping below the level of thought in the sense that someone else is supplying you with thoughts instead of you taking charge, being a creator.

 

Real freedom doesn’t come in a can. You can’t buy it. You have to grow your own. Think of music as powerful medicine that can create or break spells, and watch how it works in your life.  This can be a sustainable path to ever expanding release from thought loops that make you crazy.

 

One way to do this is to choose to practice or listen to music with your heart and your entire body, not just your brain. What is your gut reaction to the music you hear in commercials? Make it a game to check out how the music is working on you.

 

When you hear music that touches you, can you take the risk of opening your heart completely, even if it makes you cry?

 

When you approach the music in your life with fresh curiosity and an experimental mind-set, you will find ways to break free from the spells that other people are putting on you and also find ways to cook up your own mind altering musical trips.

 

When you pick up your harmonica to practice, think of the repetitions you go through as you build your physical skills as sorcery training. Isn’t it interesting that the word sorcerer – a word synonymous with wizards, alchemists, magicians, comes from the root word “source”?

 

When you practice music, you can use the goal of connecting to your source to guide you. You feel this connection through your body. This will give you an inner goal to balance out the outer goal of learning a particular song or scale or whatever you have as a target.

 

Freedom is a state of being, a feeling you have inside of you. Music is one of the most powerful ways to create this feeling, this state of being. It can help you bust out of whatever mind traps you are in.

 

You can live in your own personal “land of the free and home of the brave” by picking up a harmonica and losing yourself in a song. Just playing a simple melody with everything you have is a creative act.

 

It’s fun to re-discover this over and over again.

 

Harpe Diem!