When words are put in music, and sang, the meaning of words has extra meanings. Hearing a song, listeners are getting two cues. One is music, which is more symbolic than words in terms of articulating the message to the receiver.

Everett (1999) says that harmonic progressions gives different affect to the listeners. The progression 1-2-4-5-1 has more colors than 1-4-5-1. Music also has structures: we hear introduction and climax. In addition, musical dynamics are stronger than speech.

The other is language, which is generally used to communicating with others in our daily life. Thinking about the mechanism that how our emotion is evoked differently by music and language, often times our emotion is moved before we process music. For example, my sadness is evoked before I use my brain to analyze what code progression makes me sad. On the other hand, I feel sad when people tell me a bad news. First, I understand their message, then feel cry. Possessing these features, songs stimulate listeners’ both instinct and logical thinking part.

I remember when I want to improvise a song. It was a soggy morning after three rainy days in a law. I was sitting at a dining table alone and looking outside. Gradually blue sky was appearing among gray clouds and I sang “here is blue sky. That’s what I ‘ve been waiting.” My emotion was flowing: I was filled up with joy. For me, it seems awkward to say my feeling when I’m alone.

While I was repeating that simple song several times, I was in a relationship with my song: I was not sitting alone. My emotion was stimulated and my brain was creating a visual image, a clear blue sky while my ear listening my song. At the same time, “self-abandon …[might be] intended…where the self goes beyond itself, where subject and object come together” (Zuckerkandl. 1973. p.25). I unite myself with the moment, a beautiful morning.

I watched a video, which is a kids group session at Nordoff-Robbins center. Two kids were both physically and mentally retarded, but their intelligence were close to an average kids for their age. They needed to be held because they could not sit by themselves. Their music was fully interactive: spontaneous musicing and joyful musical experience. A co-therapist David started singing something like “X (kid’s name) played music: you worked hard: you did a great job”.

The song not only gave kids therapists’ messages, but also obligated the group music. The speaking did not work at the situation since kids and therapists were in music. In addition, music was also a tool to communicate and express for the kids who did not have speech. So, David used kids’ language to tell his message. Moreover, singing to kids and the whole group enrich the group music rather than disturb their musical flow.

Song also can be a symbol or representative of groups. Every country has national anthem: specific types of song represent certain period in our history. I saw a process in a session in Nordff- Robbins center that a song naturally created a session goes on and it became his theme song. Even though he could not sing it, he internalized the song and identified himself in the song. I cannot think that “a speaking phrase” can be alternative. Then, what is the difference between a song and a speaking phrase? I assume music has more power to capture our emotion immediately.

We are now in the middle of the third decade of what has variously been called the “New Age”, the “Aquarian Age”, and the “Psychedelic Revolution”. The revolution occurs internally: the changes in human consciousness. The human potential movement had been born and was waiting to be discovered by those who wanted to know.

What opened the movement out was not academic instruction in these people’s thought, because for the most part they were anathema to materialistic “positivism” which at that time was enjoying its heyday in academia. No, it was “pop culture” which helped rouse widespread interest in the newly emerging “transpersonal psychologies”.

This found expression through music that, in symbolic terms, represented a mystical metaphysic being about deeper aspects of the psyche; in particular, about God. Jung in particular – symbols used in the music and lyrics could be understood as symbols of the psyche; its healing – integration – the process of individuation or self-actualisation.

Lyrics, which to some people would be meaningless, but may in fact be deeply spiritual. These, and the evocative music which usually goes with them are what I call “transcendental music”. It rouses within one higher emotions and sentiments which are not normally experienced in ordinary states of consciousness.

The Beatles are a renowned example, though by no means the most exemplary. The song Tomorrow Never Knows: “Turn off your mind; relax and float down-stream: it is not dying. Lay down all thought: surrender to the voice: it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within: it is being.”

Apart from during their brief flirtation with India, the Beatles like most rock groups were not noted for the spirituality of their lifestyles. But perhaps this is beside the point. Perhaps the artist is but a medium of a message, and should not necessarily be looked in as its embodiment also. Many artists whose work has been of spiritual relevance deny that it is so. Paul McCartney of the Beatles, for instance, had pointed out that people read things into their music which were not there, but that afterwards you cannot deny that they arc there.

One versed in the transpersonal psychologies would, of course, understand it very well. A symbol, be it a dream, a parable, a fairy tale or imagery in a lyric, can take on a thousand relevant interpretations depending on the condition of the individual psyche resonating with it. The meanings of symbols can vary for each individual. That is part of their magic.

I remember that The Moody Blues claimed that far from being about otherwise induced altered states of consciousness, their album To Our Children’s Children’s Children was merely about the wonders of Apollo moonshots. But with lyrics like following, the reader may judge for his or her self whether space walks or mind trips are the subject matter:

Everything’s turning, turning around/ See with your mind, leave your body behind/ Now that we’re out here open your heart/ To the universe, of which we’re a part. /But if you want to play/ Stay right back on Earth/ Waiting for rebirth.

Their normal philosophy is simple as it is timeless. Those who will “give just a little bit more: take a little bit less, from each other this day” will, throughout life “stand on the Threshold of a Dream”. In short, “So love everybody, and make them your friends.”

Pink Floyd’s “weird” music is at times hauntingly beautiful and deeply mystical. Other times it is quite the contrary. Here I shall look at just one peace, a track called Echoes which takes up a full side of their early album, Meddle. 

The music is tremendously evocative in a sense which has been described as having the timeless quality of an Indian raga. In symbolic terms which would have delighted Jung, both the lyrics and the music in Echoes seem to portray the individuation process; comprising a journey into the unconscious, a seeking for the Self during the “dark light of the soul”, and finally, a transpersonal of psychic contents and structure resulting in self-realization.

Echoes commences with regular, hypnotic pipping sound as made by a submarine’s sonar, integrated into the magnificently uplifting and deeply peaceful main theme. An atmosphere of plumbing the ocean’s depths is thus created, and as the music swells in a manner suggestive of inward striving, the vocalist paints the opening scene:

Over head the albatross hangs motionless upon the air/ And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves/ The echo of the distant tide comes willowing across the sand/ And everything is green and submarine

The sea is an ancient symbol of the unconscious. The “echo of the distant tide” is suggestive of its atavistic contents – the fundamental constituents of the psyche; “archetypes” in Jungian terminology. And the albatross may be seen as representing the ego, perched out with the unconscious, yet dependent on it for existence.

The image portrayed by the first verse, then, is one of the composer contemplating the unconscious and what waits to be discovered and integrated within it. The sonar pips and the albatross’ overhead position suggest that he is already embarking upon this journey, which leads us to the second stanza alluding to the goal sought:

And no-one showed us to the light/ And no-one knows the wheres or whys/ But something stares and something trys/ Andstarts to climb towards the light

Light and associated objects such as sun, candle, or fire, are ancient symbols of higher Being, soul, or the “Self” as I shall call it here. The experience of intense light is a common characteristic of mystical experience. The path towards self-discovery is sought by few, and is different for each individual (note Jung’s term, “individuation”). Hence no-one is able to guide the writer or others; only that stirring deep within can advance us on our way.

Strangers passing in the street/ By chance two separate glances meet/ And I am you, and what I see is me./ And do I take you by the hand/ And lead you though the land/ And help me understand the best I can?

Different parts of the psyche are encountered, to be accepted, recognized as part of the whole, and therefore integrated in full realization of the writer’s being. Ultimately, the psyches of other people may be included in this process as consciousness reveals the fundamental unity of all creation.

And no-one calls us to the land/ And no-one crosses there alive/ And no-one speaks and no-one tries/ And no-one flies around the Sun.

Again, notably forces on the journey. But it is a one-way journey. Once embarked upon, there is no going back to the life that was before. You cannot be new wine in an old skin. You cannot cross there with the former self still alive. And you cannot hedge your bets, keeping the destination at a safe orbital distance. God is a question of all or nothing.

At this stage of music, variations on the main theme suggestive of diving to great depth and then climbing to tremendous heights gradually cease. Strange sound effects suggest chaos-the “dark night of the soul”. These merge into the haunting cries of whales in the ocean. The impression created in one of having attained profound depth in the unconscious; of being amongst its very archetypical constituents.

And then, little by little, the whales give way to the sounds of a rookery – new life; rebirth; yet associated with the crow-a symbol of death. For transcended, life and death are one.

Now the sonar bleep returns, but this time one hears not only the transmitted pip, but the reflection echo too. The echo quickens. The goal is close. The music begins a majestic reformation. And then joyfully, triumphantly, the main theme bursts forth again.

And now this is the day you fall/ Upon my waking eyes/ Inviting and inciting me to rise/ And through the window in the wall/ Comes streaming in on sunlight wings/ A million bright ambassadors of morning.

And no-one sings me lullabies/ And no-one makes me close my eyes/ So I throw the windows wide/ Haunting you to cross the skies!

The Self (the “sun”) has been realized. Normal consciousness transcended. The prospects for freedom, for being, are infinite. No more are we trapped in Plato’s cave, lulled asleep to reality. The windows of perception are open. Life is unlimited.

Music is a manifestation of “magic” in the true sense of the word.

Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.