I was listening to an NPR reporter interview a preeminent
Bach scholar who said that the great performers of Bach’s music -- atheists and
materialists alike -- all felt as if they were communing with God when they played
Bach. Hearing about what the music of Bach does to master musicians, I thought
of something that Laura Dale, former editor of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, once told
me. The man she loved in her youth
was a musician who died before they married. It was clear that her hope of
rejoining him after death was behind her passion for survival research.
There is one thing I clearly recall her saying. What most deeply convinced her of life
after death was no inference or pattern of evidence but listening to
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. The music convinced her in a way that
went completely beyond linear reason. It spoke directly to her soul of the reality of
transcendence. Apart from the experience,
needless to say, strict rationalists are apt to see this as just an emotive
outcry, a comforting illusion.
Still, I’m sympathetic to Laura Dale’s offering a musical
experience as the basis of her belief in the reality of a mind-mediated Otherworld. I recall two similar experiences, which
did something to me. A teenager, I
was listening to WQXR, which was the radio station for classical music in New
York City. The piece I heard was
by the medieval composer, Johannes Ockeghem, and it had a memorable title, Credo Sine Nomine, “Belief Without a Name”. I was so taken by this music – taken
out of my normal sense of self – that I dashed off a letter to the radio
station, describing (somewhat breathlessly) how the music affected me. A few days later I turned on WQXR and,
coincidentally, the classical “DJ” was reading my letter on air!
My second experience of transcendent music occurred years
later when I was a student at City University of New York. This time the composer was Claude
Debussy. I don’t remember which
composition it was, but I do remember the absolutely distinct sensations and
thought processes it it stirred up in me.
It put me into a singular state: I felt complete freedom from the fear
of death, accompanied by the happy idea, “I can die now.” The “proof” of immortality was the
indescribable lightness of being I felt in response to certain passages of
Debussy’s music.
All sorts of experiences may produce the conviction
of having tasted immortality. They’re
complementary to the linear arguments from particular case histories that
psychical researchers focus on. In
my view, research on life after death should include the whole range of experiences
that carry the immediate, compelling sense of immortality. Music, I’m sure, is not the only example.
After all, what presumably does survive is us, the inner mental core of our being. There might be interesting ways we can
tease out that sense, that intrinsic quality of our immortal self-awareness.