Although I can play the flute and bongo drum with pleasure and amateur enthusiasm, I am not a musician. Even so, I’m drawn to what I might call the metaphysics of music. In fact, I have had music-related experiences that spoke to my deepest ideas. I want briefly to describe some examples, and then I want cite a book published in 2026 that is an intriguing exploration of the metaphysics of music.
But first, experiences I’ve had of music that altered my consciousness and my sense of reality. Music can touch the heart and the soul in ways hard to match by other means. Listening to the music of Hildegard of Bingen once and once to the music of Claude Debussy, I slipped into a state of ecstasy, ineffable detachment, my ego dissolved in bliss. The sense of another reality is present but elusively.
A second item of my experience I’d like to mention, featured in Mike Fiorito’s highly original study of the magic and metaphysical meanings of music, which he connects to the highly current issue of the U.S. government finally beginning to reveal the truth about UFOs/UAP. Music and UFOs? It’s a curious pairing. As it turns out, I had such an experience. April 23, 1971, in Greenwich Village, NY, I’m listening, with my girlfriend, Jane, to John Coltrane, a piece called The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I step to the window to look out (we’re on the top floor.) Out of nowhere a cluster of lights appear in the sky and start dancing, clearly echoing the music in its fantastic movements. Also, I see in the sky a man smiling at me and gesturing. Jane comes to the window and sees the dancing lights. (The man I saw vanished.) Later, we learned that a third person, Louie, also into John Coltrane, was on the roof and witnessed the dancing lights. So, we have music (Coltrane) and space visitors grooving with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What’s going on?
Fiorita’s book begins with a discussion of the celestial jazz master, Sun Ra. Sun Ra and his band in the 1960s performed in the basement of an apartment house. Sun Ra, like Coltrane, was very much into music as a spiritual practice, as a way to opening and awakening the deep regions of consciousness. This is very much the pervasive motif of Fiorito’s book. It’s not my purpose to review all the rich material discussed in this book. There is a lot to encompass. Of great value, I would suggest, the book provides a work-out program for the imagination, the key to the magical dimension of what C. G. Jung called “active” imagination.
Fiorito also writes in several places about “deep listening.” The whole planet might become more civilized if we all learned how to listen deeply to each other. Listening to music could be a way of learning how to listen to the more subtle harmonies and discords of the environment. We need to tune into the entire living environment or leave it to the magic of money wizards. We know what that leads to, without fail.
There is a way to connect music to the center of our living being; that is, through the living heart. Rhythm, the soul of music, is essential to the living heart. Our life on earth depends on the music of our beating hearts. And when we sing or even hum, we are literally playing on our life-giving respiration. Fiorito evokes the idea of Oneness, a concept empirically grounded in types of mystical experience. The realization of archetypal oneness would be the kind of evolutionary advance the sane among us would welcome. In the climax, it will music that blows our minds into the ether of the impossible. In the meantime, however, you can do it, make music. And I recommend M. Fiorito’s book, The Inner space of Outer space, guide to the multiverse of creative evolution.
Apprentice House Press, also available from Amazon
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