Imitative musical inspiration

This is the second of three levels of musical inspiration. At this level the creative artist is inspired by traditional musical forms bequeathed by inspiration of the first level. The artist responds to them with musical forms according to his capacity, listening inwardly to a source of music in his soul as a form of mental improvisation. Creativity at this level may raise traditional forms to a transcendent level.

The listener at this level calls upon higher faculties (corresponding to the higher chakras) than those required for listening of the body-emotion-intellect (visceral-heart-head) variety.

With consciousness deliberately focused in the heart chakra, a higher octave of emotions is felt, namely the feeling qualities that underlie ordinary music of the heart. These are cosmic feeling-qualities beyond joy and sorrow. They are experienced as an ever-changing dilation and contraction, tension and release, to which none of the five external senses offer any parallel. These may be carried either by the harmony (Western music) or by a tonal centre of gravity (Oriental music).

With consciousness deliberately focused in the throat chakra, the larynx may actually respond as though singing the melody which tends to be exteriorized in an imaginary space of notes. This experience readily deteriorates into the normal experience of head music. If the observer avoids such observation of the melody and instead becomes identified with it, it becomes a vehicle for a journey through time. The listener is thus brought close to the creative source of the original melodic inspiration on which the composer drew. This is an experience of the nature of time.

With consciousness deliberately focused through the mid-eye chakra, provides a vision of music akin to insight. It is concentrated attention without selectivity, from which the listener may emerge to become identified with the music itself. Ego-bound consciousness is then supplanted by the state of the music itself. This total self-absorption in sound brings to being in the individual the primordial condition of the universe as a musical and temporal whole. The individual feels himself to be indistinguishable from the object of perception.