Listening to Music

Listening to music and playing music can produce immensely positive effects - inspiration, bliss and peace, healing, and wisdom. Another name for this is "music immersion", because you become so emotionally involved in the music you are hearing, that you feel as if you are swimming in sound. The principal mechanism by which music works is via very high emotion. Music of the right sort can generate memories, images and feelings which can overwhelm. But it has to be the right music – that composed when the composer himself or herself was in a state of spiritual openness.

Hazrat Inayat Khan said that "Composition is an art rather than a mechanical arrangement of notes. A composer of music performs his small part in the scheme of nature as a creator. Music being the most exalted of arts, the work of the composer of music is no less than the work of the saint. It is not only the knowledge of technicality, of harmony, of theory, that is sufficient, the composer needs tenderness of heart, open eyes to all beauty, the conception of what is beautiful, and the true perception of sound and rhythm and its expression in human nature."