Feelings of Music

Ohh. So we can still connect emotionally without having experienced the interconnectivity of us and the universal being, but the connections will be stronger if we tap into our essence to connect with the song/songwriter's essence? Is that what you mean?

Yeah , connecting with essence is definetly stronger than just connecting to a part of the song with the ego-mind or on a strictly emotional level. This is so because essence is the whole picture of the song, and possibily when one connects with essence, one will be able to connect with the Universal Essence, which definetly does make the connection stronger and supply it with more creative potential. Whereas if one simply connects to part of the song that appeals to him/her (the part that one feels as though he/she can relate to), then one will still be limiting the interconnectivity of things to only 'how I am related to the song here' (still separating individuals instead of acknowledging interconnectivity) instead of realizing how we essentially are all related to the WHOLE song.

Yeah Smile, connecting with essence is definetly stronger than just connecting to a part of the song with the ego-mind or on a strictly emotional level. This is so because essence is the whole picture of the song, and possibily when one connects with essence, one will be able to connect with the Universal Essence, which definetly does make the connection stronger and supply it with more creative potential. Whereas if one simply connects to part of the song that appeals to him/her (the part that one feels as though he/she can relate to), then one will still be limiting the interconnectivity of things to only 'how I am related to the song here' (still separating individuals instead of acknowledging interconnectivity) instead of realizing how we essentially are all related to the WHOLE song. Very Happy

Mm. Makes sense to me now xD. Therefore the individual connections < the universal one, from what's been said. Hmm. So the emotions actually arise from both parts, it's just a matter of how prominent they are; for an individual, it creates only emotions that the individual can relate personally to, while if we tap into the universal essence and connect with the song through that, we can feel emotions that normally we wouldn't have felt/things we have not experienced before. And so the music also comes from this; that personal events that have occurred to an individual can create music that elicits emotions the writer has felt, but also in the case of Emily Dickinson, her writing's powerful emotions arise from her interconnecting with the universal essence. :O

Mm. Makes sense to me now xD. Therefore the individual connections < the universal one, from what's been said. Hmm. So the emotions actually arise from both parts, it's just a matter of how prominent they are; for an individual, it creates only emotions that the individual can relate personally to, while if we tap into the universal essence and connect with the song through that, we can feel emotions that normally we wouldn't have felt/things we have not experienced before. And so the music also comes from this; that personal events that have occurred to an individual can create music that elicits emotions the writer has felt, but also in the case of Emily Dickinson, her writing's powerful emotions arise from her interconnecting with the universal essence. :O

Voila! I think with all the posts and replies, we have finally figured out the answer and essence to Phil's topic. Yeh! Thus, really, emotions come from both the individual's ego-mind and the inner being. The variant is the wide range of emotions that we only feel by connecting with essence and the potential of interconnectivity that only comes with acknowledging and feeling the WHOLE ESSENCE.

Voila! cheers I think with all the posts and replies, we have finally figured out the answer and essence to Phil's topic. Yeh! Thus, really, emotions come from both the individual's ego-mind and the inner being. The variant is the wide range of emotions that we only feel by connecting with essence and the potential of interconnectivity that only comes with acknowledging and feeling the WHOLE ESSENCE. Very Happy

Yay~now that calls for a celebration [if there are no more questions/additional comments from people, but there probably will be 'cause nobody else has been on here yet o.o].

Where's Phil? XD

Oh dear.

I haven’t been catching up continuously with Phillip’s forum discussion, nor have I been updating myself frequently with all the forum followers’, I’m sure, ingenious and invaluable responses and comments – and I do so sincerely apologize for that (and I also do realize that “Because I was studying for AP Econ” won’t ever measure up to be an excuse for my unexplained absence).

“I think with all the posts and replies, we have finally figured out the answer and essence to Phil’s topic. Yeh! Thus, really, emotions come from both the individual’s ego-mind and the inner being. The variant is the wide range of emotions that we only feel by connecting with essence and the potential of interconnectivity that only comes with acknowledging and feeling the HOLE ESSENCE,” said Fermin. When listening to music, our souls and our essences vibrate according to and along with the range of different sounds and rhythms delivered by the song and the distinctive category of music it belongs to. This process then continues to connect our inner emotions with our ego-minds and, however terrifying and frightening that may seem (we have all been acquainted with the excessive want and ruthless desire to dominate of the ego-mind), when we transmit the “information” to our seemingly power-hungry minds, we do connect with our beings at an intricately higher level. The ego-mind’s ability to classify and to narrow down fields of substance allows us to recognize the feelings that we feel, the emotions that often times abruptly arise out of nowhere, and thus the feelings and emotions associated with listening to music. At this evident level of solid interaction between the feelings retrieved from times of listening to music and the processing of those emotions into the ego-mind (I don’t think we feed them into the ego-mind, since these emotions are strong-willed and powerful in their own identities, and they overcome the forces of merciless attraction with the ego-mind’s wide open trap). We must not (entirely) view the ego-mind as a monster. It aids us in our search for the many feelings we have, including those resulting from the sensations of listening to any genre of music. (But I wouldn’t say that it is graceful, either; it doesn’t exactly float around, does it?)

We are ultimately able to attain the “potential of interconnectivity,” a stage of a more profound and intimate understanding of the cause of our initial emotions. We experience, at last, the answer of why we feel what we feel. Experiencing this is equal to experiencing essence, here the most inner core of our feelings, and the subtly complex beginnings of our feelings and emotions.

Oh my God. It’s “WHOLE.” So sorry.

joannneee wrote:
Beauty IS subjective - it's based on whether or not we feel for something, and emotion is a necessary thing. How we define beauty is based on each of our own opinions. Beautiful can be described as something that strikes you to your core, or just something that's nice and lovely. So there might not be an answer to whether or not music can be "superficially beautiful", would there?

So, Lee, i guess that is where our disagreement should end. Beauty is subjective, so what i may assume as beautiful may be different from your idea.

I actually like this topic, so I'm going to raise another question. How does our essence connect to the music though? Like Fermin said, we may be able to feel it in our essence even though we haven't exactly experienced it. However, what does that mean? Why is it that we are able to feel someone else's pain?

Also, another question that i have is have you ever had the urge to listen to a specific song? It is an urge to just listen to it, even though your scenario is completely different from what the song portrays. Why is it that we have the sudden desire to listen to a particular song?

Maybe this way an experience may be expressed in a way that can be felt by everyone at essence level, but won't it be very vague? Or is the point of being able to connect with such a broad audience to be generic, so one can see a part of oneself in that vagueness? Maybe it has to do with seeing what one wants to or expect to see... maybe the reason why a whole diverse group of people can relate to one song or poem is because even if they might not have had that same exact experience, they can perhaps see similarities in their own life that they can relate to, and they see those similarities because they are prompted to find one...because we're used to categorizing information. But beyond that, because that basic experience is there portrayed in a song or poem, people can relate to it. But then, can't everyone relate everything to oneself??? I'm kind of going in a circle, aren't I?

As for music might be "superficially beautiful", I once heard that people tend to be more attracted to people who have physical resemblence to each other. (emphasis on the tend) ... so maybe we tend to think music that most closely reflect us is more beautiful? (This sounds kind of obvious though...) But then because we of the whole interconnectivity thing, shouldn't all music sound beautiful no matter what our subjective mind tells us??? So there is so such thing as bad music, just a reluctance to accept the...unfamiliarity of the music?

I kind of get what Hannah is saying, actually. The universal self is interconnectivity, but at the same time, if you merely felt the music, there would not be any difference between like and dislike. There would only be "sound", unclassified and whatnot. So I think it's true that music is a combination between the Ego-Mind and the Essence; Essence being the "clay" and the Ego-mind being the "hands". In terms of music, I know I do have specific genres that I dislike/like; preferences are common. But what is judging that? We still don't really know what makes us decide to like/dislike a certain piece - we only know the feeling that comes with feeling the piece, and our minds judge by that.

Fermin Liu wrote:@ Joanne


At first, when I looked and thought about Ivy's question, I came up with a similar reply to yours and posted it above your reply. But then thinking about Emily Dickinson and how she wrote about a wide range of things - some of which she did not experience physically- I think that whether or not one conveys the essence of the message efficiently or not does not really depend on experience. Like you said, beauty IS subjective, but isn't essence more than just beauty? Isn't beauty something perceived by the senses and thus something of the mind? The beauty that is subjective, I think, is the one that some people might agree is beautiful while others think it is completely horrendous. But since essence is the Universal Consciousness - the Supreme Being - isn't the essence that we feel ultimately the same and thus it is not subjective, just that the interpretation and expression of essence may vary from person to person. Dickinson really tapped into this common essence that so many geniuses befoere and after her have used - Einstein, Mozart, etc. - and with her insightful poems about life, individuality, and the interconnectivity of everything (the cycle of life), it really makes us wonder whether physical experience is needed in conveying essence.

@Fermin

As for this, I would think that experience enhances our ability to communicate - yes, we may all be able to write about something we have never felt, but the people that have felt it could communicate more efficiently.

Thinking about this, it's like saying whether or not you may be able to write about sight if you have never seen before. Will someone be able to imagine what water looks like under the sun if they cannot see? Essence is what makes us up - interconnectivity would come from the fact that we know we are all made up of the same things, and that gives us unlimited potential. An experience would vary from one person to another, but the essence of the experience would not. Can you truly write about death before you have seen it? The people who come back from death, or have a NDE can write about it truthfully because they have seen it - if we used essence, then wouldn't all of us understand what it feels like to be dead? Can we connect with death, in a way?

Emily Dickinson... She's kind of like a baby, in a way... (don't ask me why I thought about it this way ) secluded in her room, she was free from all kinds of distraction, disillusionments of society. She could have a clean sleet, a clean place for her to imagine without being hindered by the values of our surroundings. Imagination could be Essence. Imagination is also the clay that we base everything around us upon. All the things around us were once all imagination, turned to reality: TVs, Computers, iPods. Our imagination makes things real. If we left all things that affected us, we could feel the Essence more thoroughly, without the debri to clog our senses. Perhaps Emily Dickinson wrote what was on her mind - and we, the reader, understood the essence of what she wanted to write. Her poetry may have reflected what she imagined and knew: and we reflected upon her imaginations, because essentially, we would feel what she would feel. It's like drawing a dragon and an angry kitten: they may seem different at first, but what they convey would be the same: anger. So I would say that no, experience may not be needed to show essence, but experience is needed to convey explicitly the form essence takes. I don't really get what I mean, but hopefully you do. xD

@Ivy
I actually think whether or not we understand another person's pain is by understanding merely what pain is. If you burn your hand, or go through heartbreak, the pain in its essence will be the same, only that the form will vary. However, most of the time we are able to feel another's pain is when we have felt the same thing before - a person who has been heartbroken may feel for another who has gone through the same thing. A person who was burned by fire wouldn't truly understand heartbreak if he or she has never experienced it. The tenor of the pain would be difference, but deep down, we all know some kind of pain.

Fermin Liu wrote:Voila! I think with all the posts and replies, we have finally figured out the answer and essence to Phil's topic. Yeh! Thus, really, emotions come from both the individual's ego-mind and the inner being. The variant is the wide range of emotions that we only feel by connecting with essence and the potential of interconnectivity that only comes with acknowledging and feeling the WHOLE ESSENCE.

Nope, I don't think so. Discussions like these aren't meant to produce answers and conclusions as math equations. There's a reason why philosophers have debated these ideas for centuries, and there's a reason why philosophers still exist at all. If all questions were answered so easily (6 pages of discussion is hardly anything really in the bigger picture), philosophers wouldn't be around anymore. The reason they are is because of how abstract and intagible these questions and ideas are and how as we progress as a species and attain more knowledge, even more questions and ideas arise. I think our discussion here is far from being at an end.

ivy wrote:

joannneee wrote:
Beauty IS subjective - it's based on whether or not we feel for something, and emotion is a necessary thing. How we define beauty is based on each of our own opinions. Beautiful can be described as something that strikes you to your core, or just something that's nice and lovely. So there might not be an answer to whether or not music can be "superficially beautiful", would there?

So, Lee, i guess that is where our disagreement should end. Beauty is subjective, so what i may assume as beautiful may be different from your idea.

It wasn't so much a disagreement as much as it was me trying to understand what you were arguing and then questioning it. Anyways, I do agree beauty is a subjective thing, but is it completely subjective? From what I see in Joanne's post, when we perceive something as beautiful it is because it "strikes us to our core", which is, in other words, connects with our essence. How is it then that beauty, something so strongly tied with essence, could be based on our own opinions, products of the egomind? Following that idea that beauty (true beauty, not superficial beauty, which is not beauty at all) is determined on the basis of whether it connects to our essence, should our definition of beauty not be objective instead? Objective in the sense that there is a criteria for beauty that we all hold, despite egomind-created differences but still subjective in the sense of beauty's intangibility and powerful emotional charge?

And for the sake of making this discussion less back-and-forth abstract questioning and more grounded, it would help if people provide some concrete examples.