The Power of Music & Dance

This Sunday we will be celebrating the Dances of Universal Peace for the second time this year. The group wanted to find a way to offer a space of sacredness and fellowship to the community. The dances provide an avenue to actively explore the beauty and diversity of various spiritual traditions. They are also provide an inner path to self realization and open the doorways between hearts - thus enabling the participants to discover the divine in one another. Developed by Murshid Samual Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murada Chishti), these dances are inspired by the wisdom and sacred phrases of various spiritual paths, they are essentially a form of celebration and meditation in sound and movement.

In the spirit of the dances I would like to share the following from Hazrat Inayat Khan's writings on music:


Music, besides power, is intoxication. When it intoxicates those who hear, how much more must it intoxicate those who play or sing themselves! And how much more must it intoxicate those who have touched the perfection of music and have meditated upon it for years and years! It gives them an even greater joy and exaltation than a king feels sitting on his throne.

According to the thinkers of the East there are five different intoxication's: the intoxication of beauty, youth and strength; then the intoxication of wealth; the third is of power, command, the power of ruling; and there is the fourth intoxication, which is the intoxication of learning, of knowledge. But all these four intoxication's fade away just like stars before the sun in the presence of the intoxication of music. The reason is that it touches the deepest part of man's being. Music reaches farther than any other impression form the external world can reach. And the beauty of music is that it is both the source of creating and the means of absorbing it. In other words, by music the world was created, and by music it is withdrawn again into the source which has created it.

In this scientific and material world we see a similar example. Before a machine or mechanism will run, it must first make a noise. If first becomes audible and then shows its life. We can see this in a ship, in an airplane, in an automobile. This idea belongs to the mysticism of sound. Before an infant is capable of admiring a color or form, it enjoys sound. If there is any art that can most please the aged it is music. If there is any art that can charge youth with life and enthusiasm, emotion and passion, it is music. If there is any art in which a person can fully express his feeling, his emotion, it is music. At the same time it is something that gives man that force and that power of activity which make the soldiers march with the bet of the drum and the sound of the trumpet. In the traditions of the past it was said that on the Last Day there will be the sound of trumpets before the end of the world comes. This shows that music is connected with the beginning of the creation, with its continuity, and with its end.

The mystics of all ages have loved music most. In almost all the circles of the inner cult, in whatever part of the world, music seems to be the center of the cult or the ceremony. And those who attain to that perfect peace which is called Nirvana, or in the language of the Hindus Samadhi, do this more easily through music. Therefore Sufis, especially those of the Chishtia School of ancient times, have taken music as a source of their meditation; and by meditating thus they derive much more benefit from it than those who meditate without the help of music. The effect that they experience is the unfoldment of the soul, the opening of the intuitive faculties; and their heart, so to speak, opens to all the beauty which is within and without, uplifting them, and at the same time bringing them that perfection for which every soul yearns.