by Marlyn Bumpus
Given in the Blue Star Memorial Temple
May 18, 2025
Music and spirit. They seem like two completely different things, right? One is sound and the other … belief? And yet they are also incredibly similar things, things that as often as not function hand in hand.
Music and spirit are central to what it means to be human insofar as I can think of no human society, either in the past or present day, that doesn’t have both concepts and practices buried deep within them to one degree or another. Individuals within each society — or even within a subgroup of a single society — may exhibit wildly disparate ideas of which form of music or spirit (spirituality or religion) is acceptable or practiced. But even with the many vastly differing definitions of what IS music or what IS spirit (spirituality or religion), most folks will recognize them as music or spirit when they see or hear them.
That universality of them — the fact that few if any levels or ages of society didn’t have one form or another of both present — is part of what makes both so very powerful as part of the human experience in this day and age. Both have the potential to move mountains, however that “mountain” may be defined at any single moment or in any single situation. Both have equal capabilities to either unite disparate groups of people — similar to the way an orchestra unites many different instruments working together to create an experience impossible to achieve with a single instrument alone — or to alienate these disparate peoples to the point of conflict either verbal or physical. What is pleasing to one group is absolute cacophony to another, what brings calm to the mind of one is nothing but chaotic and jarring to another, what is acceptable to one is absolutely intolerable to another.
Let’s look at music. There are examples of some kind of music everywhere on the face of the globe. Nearly every human being will understand what a lullaby is, for example, regardless of culture or language. After all, motherhood is a pretty universal state of affairs, along with the need to calm a fussy or sleepy baby to sleep relatively quickly. While the precise forms music might otherwise take to actually accomplish this fact may differ broadly — for example differing in which kind of instrument is used, what kind of tonic scale is used, whether quarter tones are considered merely off-pitch or legitimate, etc. — for the most part people will recognize music AS music.
Similarly, there is a universality to the concept of spirit or spirituality/religion to the point that we all recognize it for what it is when we experience it, even secondhand, even if we don’t necessarily agree with either the practice itself or the beliefs that underlie them. Nearly every human being will understand the kinds of questions that spirit/spirituality/religion attempts to answer, no matter how differently those questions are phrased and/or what kinds of answers are elicited. What’s more, Rites of Passage — important and universal events in human life such as childbirth, maturity, forming family bonds, death and mourning — all find expression in and celebration through religion or spirituality.
AND music.
Music generally is a pretty important part of nearly every form of spirit/spirituality/religion. It can be fairly primitive, as in drumming and chanting, or as complex as a Bach cantata or a Mozart Mass. And that music, to believers, can be incredibly moving — driving the emotions that power the spiritual/religious experience to heights (or depths) that mere spoken words cannot.
Aside from the universality of both, one of the clearest ways in which music and spirit are fundamentally similar is contained in a very important concept that both share: harmony. Musically, this generally means that the sounds we listen to are pleasing to the ear in a way that makes us relax and open ourselves to that wordless communication that is music. Harmony when it comes to spirit concerns those actions that bring humans together as a cooperative whole, working together to make life good — or better — for all concerned. Disharmony or dissonance, of course, describes the direct opposite, both in music and spirit. Disharmony is hard on the ears, causes tension and dissatisfaction; disharmony in spirit can break the cooperative down to the point that conflict — actual physical violence — can arise.
Another way in which music and spirit are similar is that both require and make use of silence. Western music has any number of little squiggles and curly-cues that indicate a pause in written form. In learning taiko — those big, Japanese drums — one learns to chant the “song” because there IS no written form to it. There is one syllable for a direct hit DON, one for a “rim shot” TSUKU, one for striking the wood of the rim directly KA, and one for silence HSU. So a line from a taiko piece would be chanted DON HSU DON DON KARA DON. I’m certain many of you are familiar with the Zen koan of “what is the sound of one hand clapping.” Simon and Garfunkel wrote a very famous and thought-provoking song that explored silence as well. Eventually, as I learned and then played taiko for years, I became very familiar with the “Sound of Silence”. And yes, silence does have a sound. We just need to practice silence to hear it. To learn to really listen.
To me, music and spirit never seemed so close as when I considered the practice of hearing silence. It was quite eye-opening.
As I have been pondering comparing and contrasting music and spirit in trying to formulate this talk, one thing has become very clear to me: what they share — indeed, the way in which they are either virtually identical or at least mirror images of the other — is that boiled down to their very basics, both are practices. They are actions, as opposed to something static, concrete, immovable or merely descriptive; they are verbs and not merely nouns or adjectives. What’s more, they both flex and change according to the skill and personality and intention of their practitioners. There is no fixed point at which one can state “This is the best it can be” — there always seems to be a horizon out there to be reached for, practiced for, aspired to, a new form to be tested out, a new song to be written, an inspiring idea to strike us.
As they are both practices, it’s logical that both music and spirit or spirituality have remarkably similar stages of development and potential obstacles to learning as an aspiring practitioner moves from being an utter neophyte to an accomplished master. These stages and obstacles might look quite different on the surface; but when boiled down to their basic, really are virtually identical.
Again, let’s start by considering music as a practice in the more classical sense. This is how it works, and this should be somewhat a familiar experience especially if one has undertaken to learn a musical instrument at any point in one’s life. We start out knowing nothing at all except a general idea of what music is and what we, as potential musicians, want it to sound like. The first realization along that path is that the language and vocabulary of music is, with little exception, completely unfamiliar to anything we know from daily life — at least it is for everybody here in the Western world and increasingly in the Far East for whom Italian is not a mother tongue. There is an entire system of writing to learn. The instrument we wish to master, no matter which one or even if it is the human voice itself, is an unfamiliar thing, sometimes downright uncomfortable to hold or try to use for too long. Fingers and lungs and arms and muscles of all kinds get pretty darned tired while making movements that are unfamiliar and/or used in a new and different way. The position of the body while playing may take a while to get used to.
And the sounds a beginning student makes very often in no way whatsoever resemble the kind of music we want to ultimately produce. After all, we live in the age of recorded music, where we’ve endlessly heard those who’ve put in the years and years of effort to learn how to play WELL — and we seem to forget that we too would have to go through the same amount of effort to reap the same rewards. There ARE no shortcuts.
I remember learning the violin — and then teaching beginning students later on. Yes, it was music they and I were creating as we began our study — but only barely. I’m sure you understand what I mean — the comedy of a beginning violinist are myriad throughout audio-visual media. The bow screeches across the strings, often hitting more than one string at a time at the worst possible moment. Finger pressure makes the notes themselves sound downright wimpy if they’re even in tune — which they, often as not, definitely are not. There often was no sense of rhythm at all, or the rhythm was jerky: one, two, three…………four, one, two…….three, four……one, two, three, four, one….. Like I say: it was music, yes, but just barely.
When one undertakes a spiritual path, one ends up in a very similar situation. The language and vocabulary are often unfamiliar — to the point of using languages such as Latin or Greek or Sanskrit or Pali or Native American or Hebrew or Arabic or Chinese or Tibetan, depending on the path one chooses to study, in much the same way that music uses Italian. It takes time to learn and truly understand not only the meanings but also the nuances buried within that new vocabulary. The instrument of spirit is ourselves, our minds, our deepest thoughts and emotions, the very foundations of who we are as human beings. We have vague ideas, based on our exposure to some enlightened master or talented speaker of who or what we want to become. What’s more, the close examination of and/or effort to change or address those things about ourselves that we uncover and decide are really things NOT to be proud of or downright ashamed to even admit to ourselves in the first place is anything but simple or easy. In fact, it can be downright uncomfortable and unpleasant at times, to the point of being at least temporarily dis-empowering.
Then there’s the physicality of spiritual practice. Sitting quietly in meditation or listening to a complex sermon simply isn’t easy for beginners. We itch, we twitch, we look around just a bit to see what the rest of the folks around us are doing, we’re distracted when or if anybody sneezes or coughs. Heaven help us if a cell phone goes off in the middle of a meditation finally going right — the entire ambiance is broken!! Time crawls, and minutes seem like hours. If we are trying to count our breaths, we lose track about the third time we’ve counted through to ten; and suddenly we’re daydreaming, or remembering things we need to do when we are done sitting, or just plain falling asleep from boredom. Or, if we’re lucky, we catch ourselves daydreaming or remembering or starting to doze off and then struggle to either get back to the meditation itself or catch up to what the speaker is talking about.
And yet, it is in the reality of actually doing the practice that the similarity between music and spirit becomes most profound. Neither music nor spirit/spirituality can be mastered in just a few sessions; both require hours and days and weeks and months and years of seemingly endless repetition before things begin to start to make sense and the evidence of skill acquired begin to appear; and that lengthy time requirement can be very off-putting, to the point that many simply give up before really attaining much. Our world holds so many attractions — always has done — that giving up is a very easy decision to make. So that’s why both music and spirit are not only considered practices, but they are disciplines. Stick-to-it-iveness is an absolutely essential part of both practices. It also leads to the formation of two distinct groups of people: those who put in the time and master their practice, and those who either can’t or won’t but appreciate and enjoy the products of those who did. Both music and spirit benefit from an audience.
But, if one knows where to look, progress can be found far earlier along the paths than one might think, in very distinct and discernible stages. If the time is taken to point that progress out to the student or neophyte who might be struggling and/or floundering in frustration, it can be very helpful and encouraging.
When I was learning my instruments, and as I later watched one of my children learn hers, I discovered that at first, one simply goes through the motions, creating muscle memory in making the instrument play the right note at the right time. It sounds mechanical, soulless if you will, when the student is so concerned with each individual note that they fumble and stumble along. Then, once one learns the proper notes on the instrument, improving the quality of the sound becomes important. This is when the muscle memory mastered in that first stage finally kicks in, along with rhythm, to make it sound more or less like what we think it should. Only once the muscle memory has been ground in so well that the playing of the instrument and each note is virtually automatic can the student begin the process of learning how to make the music communicate something that’s beyond the spoken language.
Now, of course, that is a more formal musical education I spoke of earlier, which some folks never bother with or have access to. “Playing by ear” is also music — picking up an instrument and simply experimenting and practicing until the sounds one makes are as close to what one wanted to make in the first place is also a perfectly acceptable way to learn. But even then, it takes time and lots and lots of practice to move from sore muscles and sounding horrid to being able to produce something one considers acceptable. What’s more, one need not spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on an instrument; I had a dear friend who was a past master of the “cigarbox guitar” craft, who could take an empty Spam can, a piece of lathe, some screws to hold them together, a string and a peg and make a one-string instrument very easily. Aboriginal folks in Africa use hollow logs and sticks to create very effective percussion instruments. Music, as I said before, is universal — as is the ability to make it however and whenever one chooses.
I’m sure by now you all can probably see how spirit — the practice of spirit — works in much the same way, with the same stages along the way, and with the end of communicating something, to us or to others, that lies beyond spoken language. The “language” of spirit, if you will, is in the quality of action — when one has practiced enough, what kinds of thoughts, words and actions have become so second nature that they manifest without conscious effort, what kinds of attitudes manifest without fail. Mastery of spirit is demonstrated when one begins to mindfully and intentionally respond to the circumstances of one’s life in the everyday moment, rather than merely to react to them with a thoughtless knee-jerk — and to manifest this progress knowingly in situations other than while sitting meditation or listening to sermons.
So, can one also learn spirit “by ear”, as it were? Of course we can. So much of it arises naturally from within. The wonder of a child contemplating the butterfly that landed on their finger, looking up into the sky and watching the clouds, walking in a quiet forest or along the edge of the beach and experiencing that vastness either experience allows — all of these are spiritual experiences that can be built on without any formal education because of the universality of the spiritual within the heart and mind of humans. Despite what an elitist might say about how one sits, what one meditates on, or the “proper” way to do things, the practice of spirit can happen however and whenever one chooses to do it.
Have you ever considered how driving down Grand Avenue, or any other major thoroughfare through a city rife with stop lights can be a great spiritual practice? What if every light along the way to an important appointment turns red just as you approach? What is your mind’s reaction or response? Are you frustrated, angry, hurried, disgusted then by every other inattentive driver that slows you down even further? Or do you sigh the second or third time you grind to a halt at a red light or another inattentive driver makes a mistake that makes you hit the brake and give grace to Whatever It Is that is forcing you to slow down — for whatever reason that this Whatever has decided that slowing down is necessary — and then simply rolling with it without allowing it to negatively drive your attitude forward?
Or what if traffic is flowing smoothly and you’re hitting mostly green lights and getting to where you wanted to go in a timely fashion. Are you grateful? Do you appreciate all the little things that had to work right all around you for this gift to happen? Can you carry that gratitude forward into the next moment of your life?
Now consider adding music to the situation: what about the kind of music do we listen to as we drive? Are we aware of how music itself can influence the mood and the way we react or respond to the things that lie in our path? Does that music have an almost war-drum beat and/or angry lyrics that move our thoughts and moods into more confrontational and aggressive attitudes, or does it calm us and open us up to being more patient? Harmony — or disharmony?
You see, there are so many ways that music and spirit work together in our lives without our even realizing it. Music surrounds us everywhere — the Hindus believe that the primal sound OM permeates every other sound we experience around us, from the chirping of birds, the sound of a hymn or mantra chant, to the roar of the motorcycle on the nearby street that breaks through a silent meditation. And our experience of that sound — that music with which Nature itself imbues the world — influences our thoughts and words and actions, which ventures into the realm of spirit.
And, I guess, that’s the point of all this long-winded verbiage. To me, music and spirit cannot be separated very far, not even when it seems like neither of them are necessarily all that present in the moment. But when I play — or when I really listen — I am practicing a form of meditation that spirit, too, teaches. I am quieting the mind, focusing it, striving to improve, to reach for that horizon of sound and thought that always lies just beyond my reach. Music is my way to open myself to hearing the soft, internal voice of the Universe itself, so that I might better be of service to humanity and the Universe.
Namasté.
— Marlyn Bumpus