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email: Kurt
Leland
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BOOKS
In Music and the Soul: A Listener’s Guide to Achieving Transcendent Musical Experiences, I introduce the idea of transcendent musical experiences (TMEs), a term I’ve invented to describe the extraordinary emotional, spiritual, or mystical reactions we can sometimes have when composing, performing, or listening to music.
TMEs run the gamut from chills along the spine to apparent physical paralysis. They often result in tears and feelings of being deeply moved. They can include sudden realizations about how the music is constructed or what the composer was thinking or experiencing at the time it was written. They can also produce spontaneous and ecstatic insights into life, the universe, or God. Some TMEs induce inner visions of odd colors and geometric forms impossible to duplicate in physical reality or scenes with the hyper-reality of lucid dreams.
TMEs appear to be messages from our souls that guide us toward developing a greater awareness of our potentials as human beings in the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual realms. Some TMEs have the power to transform or change the direction of our lives.
What brings about TMEs? Are there particular composers, genres, pieces of music, or recordings that are more likely to produce them? What can listeners, composers, and performers do to increase the likelihood of generating TMEs in themselves or an audience?
Music and the Soul attempts to answer these questions. Not only is it a listener’s guide to achieving transcendent musical experiences, but also a handbook on how the soul guides us, through music, to increase our satisfaction and happiness in life, and become more deeply and truly ourselves. My goal has been to develop a vocabulary for discussing music in terms that anyone can understand, based on intuitions that we all have about the music that moves us, but perhaps have never had the words for--until now.
My focus is on classical music, because that’s what I know best. But interviews with friends whose TMEs have been induced by listening to jazz and rock, from Brubeck to Led Zeppelin, demonstrate that the phenomenon is not limited to classical music. The techniques and principles for achieving TMEs that I reveal here will work just as well in other genres of music. TMEs seem to be more common than other types of mystical experiences, such as out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences. Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to has had at least one TME.
As I describe my TMEs and those of others, providing hints about how listeners, performers, and composers may be able to replicate such experiences themselves, I hope you’ll be reminded of your own TMEs. The internal and external conditions that induced them can be important clues about how to achieve future TMEs.
I wrote Otherwhere: A Field Guide to Nonphysical Reality for the Out-of-Body Traveler back in 1992. It took me nearly a decade to find a publisher for the book. While the market for books about astral projection seems to be saturated with information about how to get out of body, there seems to be little material available on what to do after having become proficient in doing so. I wanted to give prospective out-of-body travelers some idea of the “scenes, dwellers, and phenomena” they might encounter while out of body, especially if they were to come across the nonphysical reality that I call Otherwhere.
Because Otherwhere exists outside of space and time as we understand them, the rules that govern its inner workings and appearance are rather different from those that prevail in the physical reality with which we’re familiar. In a word, they’re quite “other.” For example, in Otherwhere, thoughts or feelings may create our experience more or less instantly. Furthermore, when one encounters a being of light, that being may appear like an alien or an angel--but its true reality is determined by its function.
I’ve tried to come up with a neutral vocabulary to describe these beings and their functions. For example, a being whose function is to guide the out-of-body traveler is a Guide, one that enables some process of learning or growth that we might be watching or participating in is a Facilitator. The purpose of this neutral vocabulary is to help prospective astral travelers understand experiences in Otherwhere that may seem to have religious or science-fiction-like overtones without becoming afraid of them or confused over what they might mean about oneself or the universe.
Some of my out-of-body journeys have taken me into areas of Otherwhere associated with the Afterlife. Several chapters of the book describe what I learned during a Grand Tour of this portion of nonphysical reality.
The Guides, Facilitators, and other beings that I come across during my adventures in Otherwhere often explain characteristics of this nonphysical reality that a prospective traveler might find perplexing. They also provide some techniques that my readers might use--such as launching themselves into Otherwhere from a lucid dream--to initiate their own explorations of this fascinating realm.
The Unanswered Question: Death, Near-Death, and the Afterlife takes as its premise that the information about the Afterlife brought back by near-death experiencers may not provide an accurate picture of what we should expect after making our own transition to the other side.
Using accounts from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gnostic, Christian and other ancient wisdom traditions--as well as the writings of the seventeenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, contemporary near-death experiences, and my own out-of-body experiences--I attempt to outline what we might expect to encounter during our passage from the physical reality in which our lives unfold to the nonphysical reality of the Afterlife.
Because everything we’ll experience in nonphysical reality exists outside of space and time as we understand them, the Afterlife is organized in ways that our usual waking consciousness or rational minds may find difficult to understand. Near-death and out-of-body experiencers have to represent this reality to themselves in quasi-physical terms in order to make sense of it. The translation of nonphysical reality into physical images necessarily--and often unconsciously--distorts the information such individuals bring back with them about the Afterlife. Yet behind these images lies a consistency of function that provides a better means of understanding them than how they appear. In investigating the accounts of the Afterlife in the various sources outlined above, I try to expose such underlying similarities of function.
My belief is that, by means of a process of triangulating between images of the Afterlife gleaned from near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and the ancient wisdom traditions, it should be possible to prepare ourselves for what we’ll encounter after death--when we’ll have a chance to answer that great Unanswered Question for ourselves.
I published Menus for Impulsive Living: A Revolutionary Approach to Organizing and Energizing Your Life back in 1989. The book was channeled by my guide Charles.
The purpose of Menus was to help people pay attention to their impulses, which Charles calls messages from the soul about what we need to be doing next. According to Charles, enlightenment is nothing more than knowing what to do next under any given set of circumstances. Thus, the book is an approach to achieving enlightenment, though couched in very practical terms.
The word menus in the title refers to computer menus. Charles classifies impulses into seven basic types, which he calls Menus A through G. The contents of some of these menus are predetermined by the soul. Others are left entirely up to us. The menus include what Charles calls the natural schedule (Menu A), which consists of physical impulses such as those to sleep, wake up, and eat, as well as lists of self-chosen activities in the following areas: physical exercise (Menu B), self-awareness (Menu C), work (Menu D), play, (Menu E), and frequently repeated household or personal care-oriented tasks, such as washing the dishes or taking a shower (Menu F). Finally, there’s a menu for impulses that take one by surprise (Menu G), such as a coincidence or synchronicity that seems to upset one’s plans, but which is really the result of the soul’s direct intervention in our lives. Such direct interventions can often have miraculous consequences, if we’re willing to follow them.
Social and family pressures have often been responsible for repressing the impulses from the soul that are intended to help us discover and fulfill our life purposes. The menus system delivered by Charles is an attempt to help us rediscover our impulses and give ourselves permission to follow them wherever they might lead.
Unfortunately, Menus for Impulsive Living has been out of print for more than ten years. Copies can sometimes be found for sale on the Internet, for example on the Advanced Book Exchange (www.abebooks.com). I’ve created a revised and more user-friendly version of the book, which I hope to publish in a year or two.
--Kurt Leland
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