Spiritual/Religious Experience in Progressive Rock

dr wu23 wrote: ^Are you sure that wasn't due to the black Lebanese hash...?

Straight to a drug reference. How perfectly predictable.

That's one of the best posts I've read in a long time Greg, thanks for that. I have nothing to add really - you took the words right out of my mouth and (obviously) made them make sense

Btw I recently watched World War Z again and thought about how much of my life has been spent as the 10th man - ie destined to flirt with the unlikely.

Logan wrote: I love this passage from Alice in Wonderland: "Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.""

I also took the survey, so I hope it helps you somehow. Good luck to you.

I'm with you all the way. It's just that I've always had an overriding urge to put everything on its head. Even when I was a little kid I had long mind breaks thinking about how weird it would be if 'life' wasn't what we understood it to be and that mountains all of this time had been talking behind our backs? I once thought long and hard about the sea perhaps inhabited the wisest of creatures and that we just hadn't figured out the lingo yet. Maybe aliens had been to earth and they'd just had a chat with some spermwhales.
Growing older and oddly enough much more enamoured with logic, science and Occam's razor...I still purposely fling out wild "theories" about life, the universe and everything like bon bons
I entirely blame Monty Python and Douglas Adams.

^^Hi Greg, nice talking to you again.
You mention a lot of the same music that I want to mention in particular A Meditation Mass which encapsulates a special reverence to these ears...then again I get the same kind of transcendental feel (great word btw and transcendental also better connects with me) from Bobby Beausoleil's Lucifer Rising.
This all actually concerns the absolute core of my love for music. David Gilmour was the first person ever to introduce me to this earthshattering experience...and he didn't even know hah! Nah but Comfortably Numb was still the first piece of music that catapulted me into that special place where time seizes to exist and you're one with everything...or something to that effect.
I remember one time I saw an interview with Carlos Santana talking about the power of music and those special times where he'd hit the right notes, at the right time, with sheer brute emotional force, and to some it was like touching god or maybe making love to the most beautiful woman in the world. I am paraphrasing here but I remember the gist of it perfectly and I happen to agree with him.
We are most likely experiencing a lot of the same things here, but I think culture and upbringing has a lot to do with how we process these things afterwards. Personally I'd like to keep as agnostic a view as my logic allows me to have.

On a little sidenote: as a man who has lived his whole life with a mild form of synestesia, it is remarkable how much music can transform in front of (or in my case behind) my eyes. Depending on the day, year, what I was going through etc etc the same music would change forms and colours, though still keeping its...erm natural presence. It is hard to describe but imagine a criss cross between sun dots and twirling cigarette smoke 'miming' the music and you're halfway there. The other more interesting thing about this little "wiring gone crazy" of mine is that it can heighten my awareness and effectively make me feel like I hear EVERYTHING and it almost gets to be too much - in fact it always reminds me of the same dream I always have when I have a fever: like being engulfed in a black hole. Sorta like this freakish implosion of the mind. Then again go back far enough and that's how we all started. We're made of the same star stuff. Who knows what strange proporties our minds have? That's also the beauty of it. We know next to nothing about how our own brains work. We have ideas sure, but generally speaking we're still at the very early stages of understanding the billions of connections that constitute our mental highway. That is also why the whole robot/AI scare is such bs. We haven't even figured out how and where emotions form - we even have trouble saying what they are from a scientic point of view, so how on earth are we going to 'learn' the robots?

On the other hand, and back to patterned sound again, who knows, maybe when we get these 'soul orgasms' in music we inadvertantly turn on a special feature in our brains that allow us to make long distance cosmic telephone calls. Dial up Orion's Belt on a tuesday for starters!

Hah! I rambled. Sorry if the sense is missing. It rang true in my head.

Oh and I wish you the best of luck on your thesis Kimberley. It sounds like a very interesting read.

Edited by Guldbamsen - July 05 2018 at 15:24

Guldbamsen wrote: I'll be sure to pop by your survey even if I don't consider myself either religious or spiritual. Music though has a way of hitting you hard whenever one is up for it. I've always thought the experience had more to do with the listener being open at the time rather than having to do with a specific style of music. I get goosebumps and inner voyages to rock, pop, jazz, electronic, prog, blues, funk and classical. It's all about the time and place - plus all kinds of music can be progressive.

That's much the same that I feel.

----------------------------------------------------

In the kinds of music we have in ProgArchives, I am more likely to experience something that can feel transcendental when listening to Progressive Electronic, Krautrock and Indo-Prog Raga Rock (plus some Zeuhl) than in most other categories (it's those "inner voyages").

I used to think of myself as spiritual while having a form of negative, or soft, atheism (or agnostic depending upon one's parameters). I do consider myself to be a cultural Christian (or cultural Anglican), and am attracted to various aspects of Buddhism.

The most transcendent music for me has not been Prog, but classical/ art music.   Tallis moves me much more than anything Neal Morse, and, say, Torman Maxt could not hold a candle to Bach or Beethoven when it comes to deep, sublime, and meaningful to me music. Yes can have a New-Agey feel, but it tends to strike me as rather shallow, but that doesn't mean that people don't experience the music in deeply personal and "mystical" ways. Profundity is so personal.

Magma has been mentioned, and for me that band can reach quite sublime heights. Popol Vuh and Yatha Sidhra are two that really speak to me. Different music speaks to different people, and different music speaks to me depending on my mood and current interests.

Perhaps one day you'll edit and add to your thesis and publish it so that we can all read it. Best of luck.

Great idea,Kimberly! I have an M.A. in Religious Studies, so this is right up my alley. Super busy at the moment though: I will take the survey when I get a chance. Good luck, and I hope you get lots of responses.