Vision.
Or, if you're up on your Sanskrit,
darshan.
Physicists have known for a long time that our perceptions literally create the sensible world out of a phantom storm of quantum possibilities--that everything we see, touch and hear, from a point of view only slightly different from our own, does not exist at all.
"...Is that oak tree simply there, a given object in the landscape? Not at all. To a neutrino, which can pass through the entire earth in a few millionths of a second, solid objects are as vaporous as fog... Everything about that tree is malleable. To a proton, which takes billions of years to be born and then decay, the life an old oak is less than a split second. To a mayfly, with its lifespan of one day, the oak tree is literally eternal. To a Druid priest, the tree would be sacred, the home of forest deities, and therefore a tremendous source of power. To a logger it is just a days work."
--Chopra
Take any quality a tree might have, and it not only
changes according to the perceiver, the perceiver
is the creative force. To perceive the world, our brains transmute
virtual photons into sensory information.
At a very young age, I realized that this process occurs in two different ways. One, it creates the phenomenal world of oak trees, land, sea and skyscapes, and our experience of other beings. Two, it creates an
interior landscape of equal reality, equal beauty. In this interior world however, we are more free; we can dream, take flight, change shapes, see events unfold in more than three or four dimensions, travel infinite distances in the blink of a (third) eye.
It may be that this interior world is an
echo of the neural process with which we assemble our vision of the exterior world, or that this interior world is preexisting, a model upon which we
build our perceptions of the external, concrete world. In the end it doesn't matter, both worlds certainly inform each other with a strange and inescapable symmetry.
When I close my eyes and listen to music, I am travelling in this interior world. Brass sections become forests, guitars become rippling streams, voices become stones, pianos become mountains, a gong becomes a sunrise, and changes in tempo become the speed at which I am flying, swimming or otherwise
moving, surveying it all.
Of course, listening to music is not always an intense trip into this interior world; sometimes we are only listening, thinking about the meanings of words, tapping our feet. But this is only a question of
where we are placing our attention. In fact, when music is only 'background noise,' some part of us is still moving through that interior 'imaginary' landscape and sending messages back to our busy conscious selves, engaged as we are in whatever tasks and distractions, and saying
this is a cavern full of shimmering jewels or
this is a hot wind sparkling in a vast desert or
this is a deep sea dive among colored corals and strange fantastic creatures.
Darshan means basically, "to be in the sight of" - to
behold and be beheld, and this is what music means to me.
...And that human beings can create messages this complex, profound and beautiful for each other, is also what
life means to me.