Through Oliver Sacks’ July 23, 2007 article on the “mysteries of musicophilia,” some of the major questions raised overall are that of this controversial division between Mind/Body and Soul—one which we have been grappling with for centuries—and how it is that music can simply pass through all of this. Why must it even exist at all? Music as sound “appears” differently to every listener. It is experienced through a realm which lends itself to other artistic medium—painting, photography and film, architecture and sculpture, dance (though these things in turn “converted” to music creates quite interesting complications)—but yet remains really free through Sound from the fixed physical appearances or states of the mind and body. Music in time instantly raises relationships between the senses which cannot really be seen, but simply lived, as an overall state of expanded awareness. Throughout the history of this world, this need for expanded spiritual living using music has evolved to distinguish the striking differences between cultures, functioning along a plane of purpose in relationship to the growing bodies, languages and lands. Musical notation, composition, and the evolution of music in general has brought it right alongside the personal perceptions of distinguished exterior objective and even non-artistic experiences, yet still, for every listener the results will be different. No one can really tell you overall what you are hearing completely, just as no one can tell you what your soul is fully. People try to, hence we have disproportionate amounts of attention given to specific individuals, in turn forming groups, clubs, cults, religions, in turn creating disagreements as expansive as war itself. But each and every one of us who has ever lived, is living, and will live will each have their own soul. In fact, it can sadden us because as hard as we try, what can really preserve the soul beyond memory and the deepest interior feelings? Our conceptions of preservation enter homes, technological recordings, galleries, city streets and the environments around us as the mind clasps to the past and hopes for the futures, as the body pulses across the surfaces of terrain presented to it. Within that body is woven what feels to be something truly separate from all of that—an emotional core which seeks to release itself through expression, or for some, what they deem to be eventual enlightenment, perhaps. Question: is enlightenment the ability to maintain control of the soul within the body but yet free from the affixing conditioning restraints of the mind and physique? A nowness which remains forever unclaimed, just as it is music and the field in which it sounds touches on this stream of immediacy and spiritual potential. For every sound, every hearing individual can have a completely different myriad of associations and indeterminate goals within their individual living system. Tony Cicoria’s electrical jolt—a power from the earth practically all of us will never live to experience—shocked the body to such a degree that it stretched his associative tissues through what for him could only then be equaled musically. It was so strong that turning back to his earlier physical self becomes impossible. It is then that the body must to attempt to catch up passionately to the now-necessary technical means towards self-conveyance. In the end, to fully explain the birth of our deepest soulful emotions and experiences eludes us just as much as it will to explain our death. If it takes lightening, epilepsy or any other “abnormalities” about the body, or not, to allow us such profound and unique realizations, so be it. So long as we live out our lives to come to understand our "fulling" individual, spiritual-expressive potential, after which follows giving to/helping others when we so must, and the world at large. July 23, 2007