The Power of Music
JJ: Okay the next step up is the world of the intuition and this is as high as we are going to go, there are seven different spheres but getting to the first non-physical or intuitive level is a big accomplishment for any of us so we are not going to go higher than this but this opens the door to what I have taught many times in my writings to what I call the Oneness Principle. The goal that each one of us should have is to be able to hear on the level of the oneness principle where oneness prevails. Now how do we go about achieving this?
Audience: Focus our attention on it.
JJ: Okay, focus your attention on it and put your attention where? This is the difficult task involved in achieving this.
I remember when I first decided that I wanted to write songs and I thought to myself how do you go about writing a melody? Now you can intellectually construct sentences and ideas but how do you write a melody and how would somebody teach such a thing because you kind have to get a melody out of the thin air somewhere. And so I thought about it and I decided that I was going to try and write one so I tried for several months and nothing happened. I thought well, I am going to keep on trying until something happens. So I kept trying and all of a sudden one day a melody came into my mind. I thought, hey that was cool and how does that happen? Maybe I could try and grab another melody and it just didn’t come immediately and it took a couple more months and then another melody came to me and I thought hey it happened a second time! This means that I must be learning so I kept putting my attention on it to the point to where I could bring down a brand new melody of some kind whenever I wanted. I found this very satisfying but the hard part in learning it was, unlike in how to read a book or learn math or a language where there are step by step instructions, to go to the formless worlds and bring down spiritual ideas, concepts, communications and principles that just cannot be taught doing A, B, C. It is a little bit harder but the one A, B, C, of it that eventually leads each one of us to the answer is what?
It is to focus your attention on it and this is what I did when I decided that I wanted to create a melody. I focused my attention on it and in the beginning I really did not know where to focus my attention outside of the fact that I just want to write a melody. The first step is to make the decision and focus your attention in that direction as close as you can perceive that direction to be. Now in the Oneness Principle, oneness is all around us so how do you focus your attention all around you? We like the idea of focusing on this one area, like meditating you want to focus on the one thing, but to go to the formless worlds you do not get there by focusing on a dot, a bulls eye or your stretched out hand. The formless worlds are everywhere and how does one focus everywhere? How do you focus everywhere yet focus in such a way that you can bring something down?
The doorway is the soul and by focusing you open the door and when the door opens we have what DK calls “the raincloud of knowable things.” It is called this because each one of us is only capable of knowing certain things. Our consciousness has not ascended to the fact that we can know all things but when we focus on the higher worlds it is like a raincloud of knowable things. Things that we are capable of knowing that become open to us and those things that are in that raincloud are very abundant and there are more things than we have time to learn. One of the problems with the beginner is he wants to go to the highest thing first and he wants to just leap over all the lower and go right to the higher and learn all there is to know in this one life and be a master at the end and not have to come back. They set their sights too high.
Clint Eastwood had the right idea when he was talking to the bad guy in one of the Dirty Harry movies and he said, “A man’s got to know his limitations” and in my words I would put it like this, “A man must understand his limitations.” You know for understanding his limitations he became pretty unlimited as the Dirty Harry character so he understood his limitations and he was always able to get the best of the bad guys that did not understand their limitations.
So there is a raincloud of knowable things and sure there is a limit to what we can know each step of the way but we are unlimited in what we can know when we take all the steps because there is an unlimited number of steps. On each step there is a certain number of things to know. And as we take each step we must learn that raincloud of knowable things that is on the step that we take.
DK called it a raincloud because a raincloud just appears over us and we do not ask for the rain but it just appears and starts to rain. When we walk out doors into the open we are subject to the rainclouds that are there and this is what we have to do, we have to walk into that spiritual space where the raincloud is so intense that it can rain upon us the knowledge that we seek. When it rains upon us then we must not run back into the house and the security of what we were before but rather we must allow our selves to be rained on with the light of knowledge.
When the spiritual knowledge rains down instead of thinking that this is beyond you and that you are not good enough to receive this or that you are not advanced enough, just stand there and see what happens.
When that first melody came upon me I just stood there and let the spiritual knowledge rain down upon me and absorbed it within me. The reason I am using melodies as an example is that it takes a spiritual principle to receive them. When I received melodies back in the sixties before I had a portable tape recorder, when a melody came I had to keep repeating it in my mind and I often thought that well that is such a crisp clear melody and I could never forget that and a few minutes later it was gone and this is the first lesson that I learned was that when you receive things through higher means they are very slippery and very easy to lose and the same thing with spiritual ideas and spiritual principles, they will come to you and they will seem so clear that you think that boy there is no way that you are going to forget this and then the next day you wake up and cannot remember what you received.
So one of the things that I did to remedy this was as soon as I got a melody I would be working somewhere and there was no way to write anything down and lunch hour was not for two hours or something like this so I had to say it over and over in my mind and keep doing this all day long and by the end of the day I would usually remember it but if I did not do that then I would lose it every single time. I do not know how many melodies that just came to me that got lost because they just came and then they went. So really good creative artist’s, some of these people do tap into the formless worlds and get their ideas and their inspiration but then understanding spiritual principles is only a step beyond that. Once a person can hear on the spiritual levels then all knowledge becomes accessible to him. This does not include all facts because facts are not necessarily knowledge. For instance if you have a thermometer you can register the temperature a million different places on the planet because you are using the principles involved in measuring temperature that is incorporated in that thermometer and through those principles incorporated in that thermometer you can measure temperature readings throughout the entire planet, is this useful to you?
Jana from the audience: Yes
JJ: Are you interested in knowing the temperature in a million different places on the earth?
Jana: No
JJ: Pretty boring stuff yet it is kind of convenient to have the ability to know the temperature where we want to know it. So this is what happens in the Oneness Principle, you do not get all the facts but you get the principles from which facts are derived. One of the things I have taught that I have taught over and over again is that it takes a thousand facts to understand one true principle but one true principle will reveal thousands of facts. The principle of addition can give you millions of different answers. One principle can produce a thousand facts. One principle of addition, which is a very simple principle, can produce many, many different facts. This is what we get through the Oneness Principle – we get principles. Not just simple principles but all kinds of different principles are available and when we listen on that higher plane – we can hear the principles. They are like higher sounds. Everything in the universe is a sound and even principles are sound but it is like a very complex chord with all kinds of answers in it. We have notes and then we have chords that are formed through a number of different notes and once you know the chord then you can know all the different notes within the chord and once you know the principle then you know all the facts within the principle.
I am going to play you a sound, which provides an answer, and perhaps the most important answer to existence and well-being that is available for mankind. This sound is the answer to the question you have had for many years so listen intently.
The song playing is by Bobby McFerrin and the name of the song is “Don’t worry, be happy”
Lyrics: Here is a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don’t worry be happy
In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy……
Ain’t got no place to lay your head
Somebody came and took your bed
Don’t worry, be happy
The land lord say your rent is late
He may have to litigate
Don’t worry, be happy
Lood at me I am happy
Don’t worry, be happy
Here I give you my phone number
When you worry call me
I make you happy
Don’t worry, be happy
Ain’t got no cash, ain’t got no style
Ain’t got not girl to make you smile
But don’t worry be happy
Cause when you worry
Your face will frown
And that will bring everybody down
So don’t worry, be happy (now)…..
There is this little song I wrote
I hope you learn it note for note
Like good little children
Don’t worry, be happy
Listen to what I say
In your life expect some trouble
But when you worry
You make it double
Don’t worry, be happy……
Don’t worry don’t do it, be happy
Put a smile on your face
Don’t bring everybody down like this
Don’t worry, it will soon past
Whatever it is
Don’t worry, be happy
Laughter erupts throughout the gathering!
This is the answer!
Audience: The guy who wrote and performed that song had no musical accompaniment at all.
JJ: That is interesting, I did not know that.
We are going to start with sound on the physical plane and one of the sounds on the physical plane that affects us more than anything else is music. Now how did you feel by listening to that music, did you feel a little bit happier just listening to that?
Audience: Yes
JJ: The artist (Bobby McFerrin) sounds like the type of guy that nothing would get him down so this makes him the perfect guy to sing this song. He wrote and sung this song and that is very interesting. It is interesting the effect that music has on us, what is music? We have sounds and then we have music, what is the difference between sound and music?
Audience: Music is like harmonic structure and is put together with sound.
JJ: So we think of a sound as just one tone, where as music is a combination of tones but not every combination produces music and what is different about the combination of non-music?
Audience: I would say music is an arrangement of sounds specifically designed to elicit one feeling or another.
JJ: Yes, Bill.
Audience: Music is harmony.
JJ: It is a little bit like snowflakes, when you look at a snowflake through a microscope it is very beautiful but then if the snowflake is kind of crushed it does not look beautiful any more but it is still a combination of forms. So you can have a combination of forms that are not harmonious but they do not sound good. Then when they produce a structure that is harmonious and interesting then we have music. Music is an interesting thing and we have it everywhere.
The mystics have often talked about music of the spheres. That music is everywhere – the planets circling the sun are producing music in their own ways and if we could hear it we would hear something very beautiful. Each one of us in our life is living out sounds and chords that are part of a symphony that is being played on some cosmic plane if we could only hear it. Each one of our lives is a chord that is part of another symphony that will be completed when we complete our last life and all of our lives together will produce a great melody of some type. So it interesting that music on the physical plane is very stimulating to us and imagine what the music would be like on the higher spheres. We hear the music on this sphere the lowest sphere and we find it very interesting and it catapults our consciousness. After listening to that song we feel like not worrying and just being happy.
Audience: Chuckling!
JJ: Dale Carnegie wrote a book called “Start Worrying and Stop Living” wait a minute, no, the book was “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” if I remember correctly.
Audience: Roaring with laughter!
JJ: Boy that got turned upside down on the astral plane! Laughing!
At the time I thought I did not have a lot to worry about but I had read his first book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and I was so impressed with it that I read this other book just because he wrote it. One of the things he pointed out was that almost all of the things that we worry about do not happen. I think this applied when this song came out.
People were worry about a lot of things like an atomic war with Russia, which did not happen. Then we worried about Russia taking over the world and this did not happen. Then there’s always those worried about the end of the world. But you think back to everything that you have worried about over the past 20 years and ask yourself, did any of it materialize? When you really think about it most of it did not.
There’s always just enough threat to keep the worry going. But most of the stuff we worry about does not even happen and if it does then it is not as bad as what we thought. When it does happen it is not as bad as the worrying that led up to it. Like when people go to the dentist they worry about the drilling and when it is actually happening it is not as bad as the actual worrying about it. Very seldom is what you worried about worse when what you thought it was going be and it is usually something that you can handle. As a matter of fact it says in the Bible that God will not give any temptation greater than you can bear. This is a principle that applies to a lot of different areas of life – God will not give you any pain greater than that which you can bear, so when you look to the future and you worry about stuff, you worry about stuff you can handle and when it comes you will be able to handle it. So why worry about it if you can handle it because when it comes, no matter what it is you will be able to handle it. Lorraine you have had a lot of ups and downs in your life, has there been anything in your life that you have not been able to handle?
Lorraine: No
JJ: Difficult maybe but maybe you handled it.
Lorraine: Right
JJ: Think of it this way, no matter what happens we can handle it. You are invulnerable, you cannot be destroyed, you cannot be created and you cannot be destroyed. And so no matter what happens to you it will not destroy you and what is the old saying, that which does not destroy you only makes you stronger, so eventually what we have to do is face each situation and handle it. One of the ways that can help with this is sound on a number of different levels and this lower physical plane music is very beneficial.
I am going to play you a couple of excerpts from music that has influenced many people over the years. As I told you I had an accident when I was thirteen and I had six operations all together. The accident happened in 1958 and the last operation was in 1961, I was waking up from one of the later operations and I heard this beautiful music and it was so beautiful that I thought I had died and went to heaven and was hearing celestial music! I will play for you the music that I heard. Since that time there have been many interesting songs come out but this to me I thought was the most interesting one to date. It was the first song that used synthetic music Since they used a synthesizer maybe that is why I thought I had died and went to heaven because I had never heard synthetic music before.
I was just waking up from my operation like I said and this actually altered my life because I followed this particular artist throughout his career and he inspired me to begin to write songs and in beginning to write songs it motivated me to lift my consciousness up to the formless worlds.
Audience: And this was 1961?
JJ: Yes, okay I will play this for you now. I was sixteen years old and I woke up from surgery and I did not know if I was alive or dead and I heard this song. I heard this from the beginning and I thought to myself what is that?
The music playing is from Del Shannon and the song is “Runaway” Classic!
Lyrics (Partial):
As I walk along,
I wonder what went wrong,
With our love, a love that was so strong.
And as I still walk on,
I think of the things we’ve done
Together, a-while our hearts were young.
I’m a-walkin’ in the rain,
Tears are fallin’ and I feel the pain,
Wishin’ you were here by me,
To end this misery
And I wonder–
I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder,
Why,
Why, why, why, why, why she ran away,
Yes, and I wonder,
A-where she will stay-ay,
My little runaway,
Run, run, run, run, runaway.
JJ: This has been my favorite song over the years and I also loved his falsetto! When I found out I was still alive because I thought that I might be in heaven listening to this celestial music because I liked it so much!
Larry: This was just before the Beatles.
JJ: Yes and as a matter of fact he introduced the first Beatles song to America called “From Me to You” and he was my favorite artist at the time and I collected everything he wrote. He came out with “From Me to You” first and I did not realize that the Beatles wrote this. Before they became famous a local radio station started to play the Beatles version of that and I thought to myself, who are these Beagles (I thought that was the name I heard) so I called up the station and gave them a piece of my mind and said put Del Shannon back on and do away with those Beagles! But then when the Beatles invaded America I was converted very quickly.