I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable – Leonard Bernstein

Music expresses a wide range of emotions, feelings and ideas with varying rhythms, melodies, instruments and vocalizations. Historically, music has highlighted our celebrations with joyful passion; has intimately professed our romantic love in ballads or dejectedly bemoaned its lack; has stalwartly sent troops marching to war and bugled them into battle; music has added pomp to the circumstances requiring such grandeur; and has lamented the loss of loved ones in dirges. Music is capable of conveying deep and complex emotions that are understood and felt by the listeners.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time– George Gershwin

Throughout the ages and across cultures, composers have created music as an expression of inner feelings and ideas. Their compositions necessarily are a reflection of all aspects of their culture, including social and economic frameworks, climate, and availability of technology. Not surprisingly with the widely recognized globalization of the world, which is fraught with financial, economic, social, familial, psychological, and ecological problems, today’s music most often expresses disillusionment, pain, suffering, and desires for what seems missing: love, sex, money …. It isn’t just the lyrics that convey the unhappy and dissatisfied messages, the intense beat and discordant, cacophonous instrumentation share the sentiments. Humans are literally singing and shouting their desire to receive, and to receive more and more and more. It is only natural that music resonates these sincere growing and unfilled needs and desires of humanity.

We have been Focusing Entirely on the Desire to Receive

In fact, it is a law of Nature, a force that acts upon us. The desire to receive is what runs the human world. But this is only half of the equation. The world really runs on two desires: to receive and to give. “They determine not only our behavior, but the whole of reality – everything we think, see, feel, taste, or touch. … We receive our life energy from the desire to give, and we are formed by the desire to receive. However, since we learned that we could change our surroundings to suit our desires, we have been focusing entirely on the desire to receive. We have become ignorant of the fact that we receive energy and life not from the desire to receive, but from the desire to give.” (Bail Yourself Out)

Humanity is discovering that our natural growing desire to receive remains unsatisfied, unfilled, unquenched. We are realizing that our exclusive focus on our ever growing desire to receive material things and fulfillment from others leaves us feeling more starkly vacant and empty. As this song asks, “Will I always feel this way, so empty, so estranged?” (Ray LaMontagne)

The Answer Lies in the Desire to Give

The answer lies in the second part of the equation of these forces of Nature, the desire to give. “The interplay between the two desires eludes us because it is the very basis of our makeup, and therefore resides at a level deeper even than our consciousness. But once we understand how these desires interact with each other to create life, we can put this information into practice and discover how to benefit from doing so.” (Bail Yourself Out)

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life– Ludwig van Beethoven

Music also provides a key to understanding the interaction of these forces of Nature. It can help us see our lack of balance with Nature and a clue as to how to attain the balance. Music’s current almost exclusive expression of wanting to receive helps us see our singular focus on one of the forces and shows us how distant we are from the other force, the desire to give. We are out of balance. We are not in harmony. “Classical music with strong internal harmony helps because it contains harmony born out of unity between opposites. It is precisely when these opposites unite that they create harmony which corrects…” (Laitman.com) Classical music with its intricate, extensive and multi-layered internal harmony exhibits the fitting together and joining of contrasted elements in balance. This musical example of balance and harmony can help us to achieve the same qualities for humankind..

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart– Pablo Casals

Music is a universal language and this far reaching quality makes it well suited to be used as tool to help us emerge from the world crisis resultant from the singular focus on receiving. The desires expressed in lack can be supplanted by music that espouses unity and balance between giving and receiving. Musicians who experience unity and the interaction and connection of these two forces can convey this balance in their compositions both through lyrics and melodies. “Music can help us express a whole new side of reality … the impact of such music on the listener will be unmatched, precisely because it expresses our life force!” (Bail Yourself Out)