SounDs and MUSIC IN THE BODY OF MAN AND BEYOND

By Professor Dr. Tan Man-Ho

(An excerpt from the original work, Real World Views, Book 8,  by Professor  Dr. Tan Man-Ho entitled "To Know, To Understand, To Be; The 'I's and 'It's of Man; Commentaries, Thoughts and Aphorisms on the Social Life of Man", April 1997 - September 1997 Discourses, Chapter 1, Section A: "Sounds and Music in the Body of Man and Beyond" , pp. 8~13)

A.    SOUNDS AND MUSIC IN THE BODY OF MAN AND BEYOND

1   Every kind of human activity is always associated with a definite qualitative form of music and language.  All this is transitory and will change as soon as the posture of human activity changes.

2   Music is to itself a library of the mantra body of man, and nourishes his astral body and language, the library of the symbols and nourishes his divine body.  Higher music and higher language nourish both.

3   The sounds from the human body could turn out to be toxins for the consumers.  So long as we are unable to control our inner forces, toxins could easily gather and emanate outwards.  One becomes psychologically healthy when one consumes medicinal sounds emanated by perfected individuals.

4   Man acquires all kinds of emotional factors by listening to various kinds of music and songs.  The feeding of harmonious sound has become a habitual second nature.

Recently, my great appetite for music becomes unquenchable.  It has become a cause of my dollar drainage.  I call it ‘the-flow-of-dollars-along-the-kingdom-of-world-music’.

5   If you are to attach to music, you must attach to it consciously, and not mechanically. 

Listening to music and songs is no lost provided you also produce them on a higher scale.

Here in our school, music is used to dissolve unwanted emotions and rebuild positive emotions for creating a healthy astral body.

6   Astral music (music for feeling) can be used to remove mechanicalness and formatory pattern of other centers; it can be used to break-up mechanical physical movements and mechanical instinctive-sex processes.

Breathe-in and feel the inner part of the head.  Classical music may be feeling in the head and pop music, feeling without thinking.

7   Music alters the existing pattern of thinking, feeling and the mind of willing listeners.  It could affect the rate filling-in-of-oxygen into the blood due to its possible influence on the rate of breathing.  It is responsible for some strange psyche states occurring in a person.

8   Use music to bring the three centers together.  The question is: What is the music that can centralize your inner forces?  Different people need different types of music to do this.  And the same music might not have the same effect from time to time.

9   Your attitude to classical music should be the same as your attitude to classical books, just as your attitude to popular music is your attitude to popular books.

10   Contemporary popular music and songs can only provide an “artificial” and “mechanical” resting “skin” of the soul.  Life circumstances involve many more things, which demand a display of many intricate emotions.  Whosoever remains in one particular emotion will only find himself swept off by the next emotion-wave.  He is no emotion static man and his attachment to one particular form of emotion is always temporary although the emotion pattern remains the same.  In attachment to a particular form of emotion and to a particular music or song (as its expression), one holds to them and even compels others to follow forth, holding the wheel of emotion backwards.

11   Only he who can produce a flow-of-the-astral-music of a new type has been.  He who imitates has not.  Only he who can produce a flow-of-divine-thought of a new type has been, otherwise, he is not.  He who imitates has not, has to catch-up.

In order to produce and preserve a flow-of-the-astral-music one must be able to record them down in a comprehendible form.  But for music, a direct teaching and production is essential.  That means, unless one is a good musician, one will surely decipher the musical manuscript in his own way and in accordance with his own of astral level.  Just like that of any writing, one can only understand, this divine body in one’s own way and at one’s own level.

12   Take a complete movement of any music and observe how it changes your astral (emotion) states.  Record this changed state and try to observe whether it always evokes such a state in you when you listen to it each time.  Find out how it reacts in the bodies of other man.

13   He who sees perpetual motion of himself will understand the nature of a perpetual music and its arrested forms, ordinary arrested music and mechanical music, and how the later forms (arrested forms) always give way to the former, just like arrested logical thinking always gives way to dialectics and the psychological method.

14   Music associated with socialized romanticism is in antithesis to music associated with individualized romanticism.  So long as economic factors of production have assumed the socialized form, so long will there be social-romanticism.  So long as there is individual, so long there will be individualized romanticism.  That too will not perish but can be modified to “not-to-forget-its-other-socialized-form-of-romanticism”.

This is a problem of romantic arts of the sentimental type (especially of love) and its usefulness when schooled.

15   Without arming our astral body with classical music properly channeled to the school, we will fall prey to sentimental and romantic music that is a danger for behind it there may be a devil called being-mechanical.

16   One must consume a pretty large amount of music before one can see it in its totality.

17   Work music consciously listened is useful for removing certain poisonous and wrongly crystallized emotional hydrogen in the centers.  Wrong music can crystallized these harmful substances as well.  Music must correspond to thought just as emotion must correspond to the thought.  Different musical type is for different forms of thought.  The emotional center and the intellectual center will not function harmoniously if music and thought of contradictory nature are forced together.

18   For a music that intends to express the law of inaudibility, it must contain at least two separate musical octaves, preferably qualitatively different (using different musical instruments).  One must be less audible than the other.  One of the octaves must function as the background whiles the other at the forefront.  It must not be mono-rhythmic.  One rhythm must hide behind the other.  And there should be transformation of the mantra from one musical octave into another from time to time, by bringing the musical octave from the background to the fore (through loudness) and vice-versa to sensitized audibility difference making the intended octave audible (visible) and the unintended one inaudible (invisible) and vice-versa.  The invisible must be ghostly while the visible is the God or vice-versa.  It is also possible to have a triple and quarter movement for demonstrating the law of inaudibility.

If you are to produce a good piece of music with combination of excellent sounds , you must intentionally tune the sound bodies to produce the body of music and to record it into some stable materials such as records, cassette tapes, CDs and manuscripts so that they could benefit the future generation.  These quality music are the objective music and when played is capable of evoking the same emotion in the audience irrespective of the time factor.  For the physical body you must intentionally and consciously produce definite physical postures or movements that can also be photographed and recorded in films, videos, video CD, etc.

The eastern music is as subtle as the western music and is no lower than it.  It is the cultural forms that vary.

19   The sounds and music that is outside is also the sounds and music that is inside.

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