In my new book, Divine Attunement: Music as a Path to Wisdom, I use music as a metaphor to inspires people of all pursuits and walks of life to hear an inner voice and have it guide their work. This work could be teaching, gardening, cooking, horseback riding, running corporations, conducting business, or practicing law, all with greater attunement to their inner voice.
Musicians who play devotional, sacred, or any type of expressive soulful music practice this technique. In order to reach deeper levels of expression, musicians tune into their inner voice and allow it to guide their work.
It is important to recognize this technique is not just for musicians or artists – it is for everyone. We should all work with a sense of purpose and tuning to a higher calling and inner voice. If you do this life becomes art and art becomes life. The world would be an incredible place if everyone lived their lives as artists and attuned to their inner voices.
I examine mystical teachings from Hebrew, Hindu, and Sufi traditions that explain what goes on when one makes music and improvises a performance like in jazz.
I then look at the latest neuroscience studies that focus on what goes on in the brain when someone performs these actions. I take all this information and make some conclusions in my book about the process of receiving inspiration and doing something inspired by an inner voice.
I explore many different findings in the book from mysticism and neuroscience but these are intellectual ideas. While you can understand an idea intellectually, there is a difference between someone who understands an idea and someone who lives it and feels it in their gut.
In the case of music, it is not enough to understand music theory; you must sit and play with an instrument and practice to experience artistic expression. Because of this, I felt inclined to include exercises that teach people how to attune to their inner voice.
The inner voice starts as a silence. Nowadays our short attention spans are bombarded with pieces of information and our brains keep analyzing it. We are constantly processing information from distracting sources like Twitter, Vine, and other social media.
The meditation and sound exercises provided in the book give people a chance to practice and implement techniques that allow them to better attune with themselves.
One of the things I mention in the book is a fascinating process where Western Culture lost a great deal of self-expression in music and language. For instance, while we started with numerous musical modes (organized sets of musical pitches), we ended up with only two. We have similarly lost many of the sounds that used to be a part of our language as well.
I believe losing the full spectrum of human expression through the loss of musical modes and language has limited our emotional and expressive range. I feel our lives will be richer if we restore the full spectrum of sonic expression.
We have lost the knowledge of how to craft works expressively in favor of modern efficiency. If you look at cars from the 1930s, the craftsmanship was far more intimate and artistic compared to today’s designs. Similarly, music used to be experienced through analog recordings that were richer in frequencies and sound. Now we use digital recordings and we have lost much of this richness in favor of modern efficiency. MP3 recordings are even less rich than digital recordings. Consider how much depth our favorite recordings have lost as a result of this current technology. The younger generations have only ever listened to compressed audio on small ear buds – a comparatively poor listening experience. Older generations have experienced a richer quality of musical recordings that many people today don’t even know is possible. We are losing vibrations, artistic experiences, and ways of communicating. This is in turn creating a colder, more impersonal, individualistic world due to the lack of rich and nuanced communication.
It is important to restore the wide range of musical expression we possessed in previous times. I believe this restoration is important for maintaining human depth and for dealing with challenges ahead.
If we can recover our lost spectrum of expression, I think we will have the tools to finally achieve a relative world peace. It will not be a perfect peace because there is never going to be perfect peace. There will never be just light or just day and we know from mystical teachings the shadow and the energy of destruction is part of the balance of nature. But we can hope for more moments of balance and kindness than of destruction in this world.
The interesting thing about this book is that it is an interfaith book. It includes stories from ancient Judaism, Sufism, Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It encompasses more than one path and more than one culture.
Readers who have reviewed the book indicated the book led them to better understand traditions and beliefs other than their own. Everyone who opens the book will find a story that resonates with his or her own beliefs, but will also learn about different traditions as well. This will hopefully lead to more informed discussions and better understanding of our beliefs.
The sense of difference amongst people, that we are different and from different tribes, is quite strong and we have to restore the belief that we all came from one language and we are all branches from one ancient trunk.
My work is about strengthening that awareness and consciousness. It is harder to hurt another person if you and that person share more in common. This is the point I am expressing through folk tales, allegorical tales, and personal tales. These are the stories I tell in my concerts and at top universities across the country.
I believe the adversities we face in the world, whether it is the conflicts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa; or natural crises such as climate change, the depletion of our natural resources, and pollution, stem from the fact that people have lost the sense that they are all from one tribe. I feel that people who lack emotional expression, communication skills, and cannot see past their own values will not solve these issues. These challenges will only be solved by humans who posses a full spectrum of expression and emotional connectivity. This book strengthens the sense of oneness that underlines all living things on this earth.
A world inspired by the principles I discuss will be able to reach this place of relative peace and take on the challenges of depleting resources, global conflicts, and destruction of the ecosystem. We need the unity of the greatest minds on this earth to deal successfully with these problems. I believe this book provides hope and joins the contributions of others to guide us along a brighter path.
For more information about the book: www.TheOracleInstitute.org/DivineAttunement
For more information about Mr. Ron’s music: www.YuvalRonMusic.com
Edited by Wes Hughes
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