Spiritual/Religious Experience in Progressive Rock

Sorry that you feel this way. In the end, it is the same body, mind and soul/spirit experiencing these things and it does not matter what it is that carries you there, provided that you have the ability to learn from it.

As I like to say, it does not matter how "knowledge" of any kind gets to you, religious or otherwise ... it can come with a slap to the face, or a kick in the butt, or getting hit by a Mack truck, or even by sitting and lucidly getting hit by a piece of music, or walking into the Sistine chapel and immediately having an inner trip!

LIFE IS ... and separating it from the body of ours is what the religious history is all about, to make sure that we can not do what the "saints" and the "gods" did, and have done that is written about. Surely you must be aware of that idea. it has been a problem with the mind of humans for millennia, by ensuring that a ruling order is more important to our feudal systems of existence. It has NOTHING to do with religion at that point, and in fact it is more about de-sensitizing the human experience to ensure they can not enjoy or appreciate that inner relationship with the "father" (as our most well known friend would say!).

None of this is about "ideas" or "concepts". This is all about one's own connection to their inner self and their ability to resolve it ... and everything else around it, is just manipulation of the human spirit for social purposes and to ensure that you have a wife, 2.1 kids and a car and house and are in debt for 30 years so the "lords" can benefit from your slavery!

Be it drugs, sex, or anything else, it is all within the "human experience" within the body and as such, you have no criteria whatsoever, to define and state that one is valid and the other is not. The body/mind/soul/spirit of that person felt it and lived through it ... and that is as valid an experience as any other, and to think that it has to have the cherubs, the naked maidens and this and that, and not the distorted energy fields of color and vision, is the same thing as stating that you are simply not interested in the human experience as a whole holistic experience.

I haven't done drugs for 35 years, but through meditation, dreaming and music, I have developed a lot of the inner studies that allow me to write this ... it is not some flight of fancy, and I DENY that even a couple of LSD trips were not valid in my experience ... there is NOTHING in your life's story that is not valid to your experience, except what you refuse to accept and understand, and that is a mental process, that, btw, prevents a lot of "religious" and other "inner" experiences from taking place for you! 

This is NOT, a New Age type of thing whatsoever ... this is a serious study of the inner self, and its attention span .. something that has been in the mind/soul/spirit of many mystics for thousands of years, and their words and experience is not less because you and I choose this or that and defy/deny this or that. We're all different and take to our experiences very differently. I did not take drugs because I was escaping from dad and mom, or to run away from home, or to have the hour or two with my girlfriend. I took them to explore and listen to music and paint, and write ... and to specially experience something myself that one of my favorite writer put together ... THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION ... an experience that helped me find and understand that there was a lot more inside than I could ever conceive, or know about!

The rest is up to you ... not me to comment or decide!

Or to a concert ... it really amounts to nearly the same thing, with one exception. Within a concert, like a church, there is a physical connection that can help the event take place, although the influences within that connection are more likely to confuse you, than they are to help you ... in the end, a spiritual path, or even a religious experience, is an individual matter, and what makes it "religious" is your ability to understand it and put it to work.

In other words, let's say you get stoned for the concert, or take a hit of a psychedelic, and you might have an exaltation that approximates the "religious experience", however, that happening, again, is distorted by conditions that are not conducive to you remembering it properly and correctly to be able to put the contents in order ... and this was what a lot of the Beatles stuff in their later years were saying as well, and the reason why they were with this and that person in India to learn more about its depth.

Sadly, very little of it lived past the breakup of their band! but that would be expected considering how difficult it is to group up the individual experiences, when in the end, they are all such an internally devised exploration.

As a further, stranger example, the BARDO, has a series of "doors" with "dragons" in it, and these are not real doors or dragons ... they are the images that we concoct when we do not recognize and understand something in the inner side of things in these experiences. And these kinds of things, are the ones that tend to hurt the person learn its inner messages and details that allow you to experience these things further and further into the ends of your soul/spirit confines.

I do not doubt, EVER, that there is spiritual context within everything ... what I doubt, is that too many of these rock music pieces, are about the wording and lyrics, and not necessarily what the music is about, which when separated from the lyrics might not quite be as good or as much. And this is the hard part ... how do you know, instinctively, that something is true or not ... how do you spell out your own experience, and in this sense, things like "Stairway to Heaven" are a gross misstep towards what the song really wants to convey and I would even imply that musically it does so, although I seriously doubt that as many people would speak about it as passionately as I do ... and I happen to love Led Zeppelin, and was very sad when Bonzo died, because I felt inside that what made the group work was the combination of the 4, and it was vastly clear in all bootlegs!

Cord Change wrote: ...Apart from subject matter in a song I’m not sure how you could have a religious experience while doing anything that is not directly related to a religion...

If we take the word out of the equation, anything can be a "religious experience", including sex. The problem, and what I specified earlier, is that the context that we are looking at is so highly directed to an area, where it is possible that a lot of the work mentioned is not as serious as the context of a "religious experience", and this will only confuse many of us and its definitions, and in the end, create a serious problem with the direction of the work at hand.

Further example: If you listen to Rachel flowers do a whole bunch of ELP on the piano, you recognize really quickly how great of a composition it is for many pieces. This, could be considered a "religious experience" for both Keith and Rachel, because they are playing it and feeling it (specially Rachel being blind!) to a level that we can not exactly conceive, or understand ... which is close to what a "religious experience" would normally be.

Gurdjieff, for example, does not like to mention these things as a religious experience, but an internal personal experience, that can be shared. Hopefully I am not misunderstanding what he says, but you can see how this could be really valuable and important for an artistic group of musicians, rather than create a pre-defined pop song, which would take most of the "religious experience" out of it, for ME. AND, this is the reason, why I do not like to hear, or see, people say ... "rock'n'roll", or "progressive this or that", because you are locking up the whole thing into an idea ... rather than a reality ... and that is NOT the way to learn anything from anything ... that's probably elementary Lobsang Rampa, btw.

One great read, would be Carlos Castaneda, but some folks do not seem to want to find out what all of it is about ... the last couple of books, for example, are about visions, and the last one dreams. The "ART OF DREAMING" is exactly that, though it takes a sort of step like to details that are somewhat similar to the BARDO for me, but they are better suited for anyone of us to work with than the BARDO, for example. 

And these are very difficult to read and learn, because of the nature of the internal work that you have to dedicate to, that most of us do not have the time, or the place to try it with. 

It almost feels like the way the world is going, killing any "religious experience" is what all of this is about, since it is so difficult to pick up the points within it, and how they work, and then, harder yet to know/figureout the next step ... and as a psychic friend of mine used to say ... we go from this box to that box and then another box (always a different box of course), and one day we get to the point where we have to get rid of the box that creates all the boxes, and ... we stop and die ... because a "no-box" was not a part of the curriculum ... in other words, it was not the correct path or way of the inner side of ourselves.

Sorry that some of this seems so scattered and may not be properly worded. It's the best I can spell what I have been through, and what music does for me ... music, for me, IS my "religious experience" and it doesn't matter if it is Albinoni's Adagio in G, or Terje Rypdal's Mirage or Adagietto from EOS, or Djam Karet's The Trip. I'm just not sure that many folks can understand how such different music's can be so valuable to an inner self, but it is to me.

BTW, was able to finish the survey.

Thx