Communications II

In the spiritualistic context, communications are understood as messages between two agents, one embodied and one a spirit—with the medium acting as an enabler or intervenor. Here the activity is equivalent to “conversation” or to “exchange.” But what is it that is being exchanged? Meanings capable of being rendered into concepts.

In ordinary experience, however, we also encounter all kinds of other forms of communication that don’t display real-time “give-and-take” characteristics. Examples are signs and broadcasts. These are messages put out by an agency on purpose; the message has a meaning; but when it is issued, no one in particular is being addressed; the target is everyone in general. These broadcasts are in the “Hear ye, hear ye!” category. They also convey concepts. The message may be spoken or written or may simply be an image, thus a left-pointing arrow to indicate a sharp curve on a highway.

A particularly interesting form of this “broadcast-style” communication is music. For purposes of discussion, let’s eliminate words set to music as in songs or operas and stick to pure compositions of sound. These musical messages have structure. In that they aren’t random noise, they have meaning. If we stick to clear and obvious forms, we can identify the seeming intention behind the music, or its the content. It may be rousing, martial, passionate, pastoral, sensuous, innocent-childish, tense (used in movies), lulling, exalted, transcending, and so on and so forth. Music therefore has a meaningful content usually labeled as emotional. The feelings aroused are a good match for other experience that produce the same emotions. Yet another way of looking at music is to see it as a structured form of energy. Its conceptual content is diffused; its feeling content is concentrated. Within the boundaries of the emotion, the listener can apply any number of fitting concepts to the sound. To put this more emphatically, the individual who hears the music is free to interpret it conceptually using his or her own ideas as they happen to occur. The ideas are not explicitly present in the music, but the music is compatible with the ideas. An eerie, tense piece of music may be added to a ghost-movie, a spy-thriller, the story of a lovable dog about to encounter a snake, a marital conflict, and on and on. The eerie music, however, is incompatible with love-scenes or birthday parties or the birth of a baby—unless the newborn just happens to be Damian.

I’ve gone in this direction—broadcasting, music—by way of introducing a speculation. It is that meaningful flows of energy, thus structured forms of energy, may be reaching us in this dimension from the order of the soul. I don’t conceive of these as coming from active agencies, thus angels or demons; others use yet other words for immaterial agents. I think of these flows as part of the normal environment of the soul-order, flows that have a dynamic behavior. The individual’s inner state can draw such energies towards itself; if the inner state is high, it will draw high energies; if the state is low, it will draw negative forms of the same energy appropriately structured.

Now here I’m really reaching, thus I’m engaging in pure speculation, but I think that experience provides a foundation of evidence for it. To give that experience a recognizable name, let me call it inspiration. Everyone experiences inspiration, but it is particularly obvious to those engaged in the arts. You have a general idea, a feeling and a fuzzy concept of what it is you’re trying to express. And suddenly the inspiration is right there. The hands start moving, images begin to flash, the words begin to flow. This last process, a reaction to the inspiration, is the action of the person, I believe. But the inspiration that triggers it is energy attracted by the inward groping of the agent’s will. Inspiration will flow—if the individual is at all in a listening state. But the result is due to the individual. A confused, unskilled, careless person will produce a chaotic sort of work, no matter how strong the inspiration is. The highly skilled, intelligent, and disciplined person will produce a fine piece of work even from a faintly-perceived inspiration. Great works of art signal very high gifts, very deep listening, and very strong flows from the beyond.

With this I have at least outlined how communication from the beyond, from another order, reaches ordinary people on more or less a daily basis. This is a hypothesis, of course. The reason why I find it plausible is because I’m certain that our consciousness, mind, soul—you name it—originates elsewhere and, in its normal operation, it uses energies from its native order even on the material plane. What we call inspiration is the noticeable manifestation of this linkage. It may very well be present in many other ways of which we remain unaware. One of the reasons why we notice it is because it surprises us. We get the most wondrous ideas when we are “in the zone,” as the phrase has it. We know full well what kinds of results we usually get. Great art, even a fortunate poem, is inexplicable in the ordinary way.

Some individuals are quite dense and “hear” very little of this heavenly music; at the other extreme are very gifted people who literally swim in the current. Being closed or open to the flow does not automatically translate into tangible achievements. Two factors are involved. To be effective in translating the inspiration, the individual must be competent in the tooling of this world as well. It did not in the least surprise me, therefore, that in Sufi teachings—one of the most mystical approaches to reality—the minimum qualification of the initiate is that he or she should be a “householder,” meaning somebody who’s already proved his or her competence in getting things done in the real world.