The Music of the Organs

Messiaen’s music as well as Deleuze’s thinking, among others, penetrates indeed into the real etheric world, as you so finely describe in your recent essays and book. This is the reason why I endeavored to show, in my book, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, to what extent some scientists, thinkers and artists of our time can be useful as training tools for spiritual science, because you learn infinitely much from them about the etherization of consciousness, thinking, art, and life. Now, what they arrive at as the culmination of their "Dazzlement"- naturally, each thinker and artist experience and express this event in different ways- what is common to them all can be named (if you recall what I say about it in my Colmar Lecture), “Franciscan ecstasy”. However, this ecstatic moment which also forms their final limit, is where the real work of spiritual science begins.

I experience them not unlike a baby that after being born in the physical world, can breathe the air and move around, has also perhaps some vague and dark tactile and proprioceptive experiences, but has no eyes and ears to see and hear the new external world in which he lives. When I experience the etheric world through the soul of these thinkers and artists, I experience it as dumb and dark world, because they cannot really perceive the new world into which they entered. This is where true anthroposophy becomes a creative partner that leads what comes up from the advancing edge of the spirit of the time, which without it would remain blind and deaf, to begin with to a clear etheric cognitive in the etheric. The meditative exercises that Rudolf Steiner gives allow us to develop those organs of perception and conception for the etheric world (and the higher worlds as well), that perceive and articulate real etheric content and substance and create out of them true Imaginations, that can portray the real concrete beings and events in the etheric world, which remain formless and nameless in modern thinking and art.

 Now I want to add the following in regard to our research of the spiritual significance of post-structural thinking and music. In my book Cognitive Yoga, I describe in detail the etherization process of only two senses, sight and smell, but I emphasize that the forces which I use in my research as a whole result from the etherization of all the 12 senses. In a note related to the problem of the blockage and inhibition of the etheric streams colours and light, I make a short remark about the etherization and spiritualization of the sense of hearing. I want to insert it here, so you can work with it further, if you think it is relevant to your research perhaps to some of its more advanced aspects.

From Cognitive Yoga: Making Yourself a New Etheric and Individuality

Chapter 4: Etherization of Sight p. 79

“When we try to stream with or inhale the etherized world forces of light and colours, sounds and warmth, from the head into the rest of the body we are slowed down and eventually blocked the deeper we descend into the body. From the point of view of the etherized cognition of sight, it can be said that in a more subtle way this already begins below the eyebrow and becomes increasingly stronger and noticeable from the mouth region and below the larynx. And most of its intensity is filtered out when we reach the lung and heart region. We discover that the body taken as a whole becomes nontransparent and then even `hostile' to our etherized cognition and the colour and light forces that stream from the etheric world into the head. As a matter of fact, the body begins to reject and repel it back. We can also experience how each colour is rejected and repelled by different organs. For example, our etheric consciousness that streams into the body with the etheric world forces of etherized green is finally blocked in the vicinity of the lungs. While the world forces of red, though they penetrate a little deeper, are then nevertheless repelled in the stomach region. Here we confront a limit and a border, a real threshold, which repeatedly repels our efforts to inhale the sense stream deeper into the body”.

Here I inserted the following note concerning the sense of hearing:

 “This process of rejection takes place for each sensory-etheric extract in specific and localizable bodily organs. For example, muscles and limb bones repel certain sounds and harmonies. We discover an interesting polarity between sounds and colours. Sounds become audible in ordinary hearing because the speech, jaw muscles and bones reject them. When sounds are etherized and inhaled into the body, these muscles and bones become empty spaces like the nerves in the brain become for the light. When this rejection is overcome, and we become one with the sound, its melody, harmony, rhythm and beat disappear as well, because they exist only through the resistance of the muscles and skeleton, and we enter into the experience of soundless music, which flows deeper into the body than the etheric forces of light and colour. In the more advanced stages, after overcoming further bodily-soul and inner organ inhibitions, we learn how it flows out again through the body, reversed, through hands and feet, and connects us with the `music of the spheres' via the resonance created by the body of the earth and its cosmic movements around its axis; the sensitive, fluctuating, moon's waves and cycles, and the planets' complex dances with the sun in outward cosmic space”.

This is indeed a new and vast filed of future spiritual scientific research, that flows into CY in general, but is not described in the book in particular. If I would have expanded on this, I would have, for example, describe in some detail the contribution of the inner organs to the perception of etherized sound. I would have made a pause in the middle of this sentence where I mention the organs only as an hindrance that must be overcome: “In the more advanced stages, after overcoming further bodily-soul and inner organ inhibitions, we learn how it flows out again through the body...”. Here one could add a more detailed description of the inner sound morphology and topology, because the organs, after we overcome their physical resistance, become through their etheric bodies, individual, differentiated, sounding boards for the music-less sound and soundless music, before it continuous, “reversed, through hands and feet, and connects us with the `music of the spheres' via the resonance created by the body of the earth and its cosmic movements...”. As a matter of fact, what makes it possible to experience this music through the body, through the hands and feet, outside of the body, and connect it with the body of the earth, is made possible because we find out that each organ donates a specific etheric force for this hearing of this ‘music of the spheres' ; or, differently expressed, what allows us to experience the earth as a sounding board for the cosmos, becomes possible because first of all the body, thanks to each individual inner organ, becomes a sounding board for the earth, in such a way that we can say that what the moon, sun and planets are for the earth, the organs are for the body as a whole... I believe this is a fascinating, exciting, potential field of future research!