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William House – It may be the greatest secret on the spiritual path. Most of today’s music is a hindrance not a help. This has been written about from ancient Greece and even more so today but has fallen on deaf ears. Why? Because this very same music makes us feel good, relieves our stress and tensions, releases anger and we’re happier listening to it, so it can’t be bad.
Before investigating why feeling good may be bad, lets review the evidence published and otherwise documented.
Dr. John Diamond published a book called BK, Behavioral Kinesiology, later changed to Your Body Doesn’t Lie. He relates the story of feeling terrible one fine day in New York City. Being a health practitioner set him on a path of deduction. He wanted to know what common elements over two days made him feel ill. The only thing he could come up with was a visit to the record store Sam Goodys each day. But why would that effect him that way? The clue came when he realized the same song was played both days in the store. Voila! the common denominator. He just happened to be an expert in kinesiology and so began his odyssey of muscle testing himself and other people listening to various kinds of rock and roll for that is what he heard in Sam Goodys. The results startled him. The harder the ‘rock’ the weaker people became. From that harmless side trip to a record store, began a new career for Dr. Diamond. He has gone on to write several books on the positive side of music, discovering that even the consciousness and abilities of a conductor can effect how much ‘energy’ comes from a performance or recording.
In their 1973 classic, The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird devote a whole chapter on how music affects plants, called ‘The Harmonic Life of Plants.’ Dr. T.C. Singh, head of the Dept. of Botany at Annamalai University discovered that ragas helped plants grow. He observed this down to the microscopic level as well. They go on to describe several other experiments in Canada and the United States in the 50’s and 60’s where plants and crops grew faster and healthier when listening to Bach, Gershwin and certain sound frequencies.
The book continues to relate the story of a former organist and mezzo soprano, Mrs. Retallack, who decided to become a biology student. She remembered one of those experiments using music and set out to do some controlled experiments with her Professor, Francis Broman. Two other students intrigued by Mrs. Retallack’s lead, conducted their own tests and:
“ran an eight-week experiment on summer squashes, broadcasting music from two Denver radio stations into their chambers, one specializing in heavily accented rock, the other in classical music.
The cucurbits were hardly indifferent to the two musical forms: those exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and other eighteenth and nineteenth-century European scores grew toward the transmitter radio, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other squashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb the slippery walls of their cage.
Impressed with her friends’ success, Mrs. Retallack ran a series of similar trials early in 1969 with corn, squash, petunias, zinnias and marigolds; she noticed the same effect. The rock music caused some of the plants first to grow either abnormally tall and put out excessively small leaves, or remain stunted. Within a fortnight all the marigolds had died, but only six feet away identical marigolds, enjoying classical strains, were flowering. More interestingly, Mrs. Retallack found that even during the first week the rock-stimulated plants were using much more water than the classically entertained vegetation, but apparently enjoying it less, since examination of the roots on the eighteenth day revealed that soil growth was sparse in the first group, averaging only about an inch, whereas in the second it was thick, tangled, and about four times as long.” – The Secret Life of Plants, p. 154-155
She went on to address critics by showing that plants indeed did shun rock music. She played rock first on one side of the plants then on the other. Each time the plants turned away, growing in the opposite direction. She went on to test various types of music and percussive sounds with varying results. Her research gained her exposure in newspapers and even on CBS. Some of this notoriety also brought the usual bag of skeptical scientists who immediately dismissed the findings with flippant remarks like, ‘plants have no ears.’
In another study, reported by Insight Magazine, April 4, 1988, physicist Dr. Harvey Bird (Fairleigh Dickinson University) and neurobiologist Dr. Gervasia Schreckenberg (Georgian Court College) wanted to see how music affects animals. They used three groups of mice. One group heard voodoo music, another Strauss Waltzes and the third silence. The music was played at low levels so that loud volume would not be a factor. The mice had to run through a maze to find their food. The mice that listened to the voodoo music had a difficult time finding the food until it got so bad they were hopelessly lost. The other two groups had no problem finding the food. In fact, the mice listening to the Waltz music did slightly better. All groups received a break of silence for three weeks. The voodoo music group still got lost but the others had no problem finding their way back to the food. At the end of the experiments the brains were examined and compared. The rock/voodoo group did not fair well. There was excessive branching of the neuronal dentrites and significant increases in mRNA. Dr. Schreckenberg explains:
“We believe that the mice were trying to compensate for this constant bombardment of disharmonic noise,” says the neurobiologist. “They were struggling against the chaos. If more connections among the neurons had been made, it would have been a good thing. But instead there were no more connections, just wild growth of the neurons. … As a result of the exposure to the disharmonic sounds,” she says, “we believe there was less capacity for memory in the exposed mice.”
A high school student, David Merrell, who had won awards at science fairs conducted a similar type experiment with mice and a maze. The group subjected to the rock music did far worse navigating the course. In David’s words, “I had to cut my project short because all the hard-rock mice killed each other. None of the classical mice did that at all.” (Nexus Magazine 12\97; Washington Times 7\2\97).
If you trace Rock back to it’s roots, Big Band and Jazz, then go back a couple steps further; there you’ll find the Blues and you’ll end up in the Mississippi Delta and Haiti and ultimately back to the voodoo beat, the drum beat of Africa. Why is the beat so debilitating? One can point to syncopation or stress on the off or weak beat. For example, the Waltz has three beats with the natural emphasis on the first: One, two, three; One, two, three. Change that emphasis to the last weak beat and you get: da, da, dumb; da, da, dumb. That’s a syncopated rock beat. That explains the mechanics but not the effect.
It is almost as though the first beat of the waltz is a space or cosmic interval. God sends the energy and then the soul listening, hears and feels the initial wave of life force within the heart. The interchange takes place as the soul pauses to make atunement with the God above, then responds with the second and third beats. A beat with no emphasis on any beat seems mechanized not attuned to the cosmic cadences. The emphasis on the last beat seems to make a statement that the physical plane is most important in this exchange, that the ego supercedes the Divine intent. The final beat says ‘there will be no divine interchange, the energy will stay right here.’
In the beginning, we were spiritual beings, equally created and filled with Light . What we do with that Light is our choice. We have free will. This Light courses through the meridians and chakras as chi, light, fire and energy even filling the spaces in blood molecules. The major energy centers are the chakras as seen below.
The Seven Chakras in Man
© SummitLighthouse
It is these seven energy centers that get affected by the syncopation. They are intended to be spinning at different frequencies and are supposed to look like the pure colors above. Our desires, wrong behavior, thoughts, emotions and outside forces can alter the color and slow down the spinning, even stopping the wheel of the chakras completely. I hope to show that what is actually happening is that the vibration and beat of discordant music sets up a direction and flow of energy that passes through the chakras, creating friction, simulating the spinning of these chakras and therefore, making us feel good. Our chakras are so sullied by the vagaries of modern day life that we crave relief. Rock music brings those chakras back to life but only for a moment. If we had the chakras above, we would instantly recognize the assault upon our Light. Continue reading . . .
SF Source Reverse Spins August 2015
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