© 2001 Dominique Ronfet
© 2001 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| The Supreme, God the Sevenfold, Forces, Energies and Universal Control of Power: 100 Questions and Answers (1) | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 19 — Autumn 2001 | Relaxation Corner Poem |
A new section to invite you to share with everyone a piece of music, a book, a painting, etc., in short any “artistic” type experience which will shed light in a non-intellectual way on an aspect of each person’s ideal, a moment in their journey, in their search for God, for themselves.
I am tempted to speak here of a “mental” experience, in the sense of the definition of it in the Introduction:
- Mind. The thinking, perceiving, and feeling mechanism of the human organism. The total conscious and unconscious experience. The intelligence associated with the emotional life reaching upward through worship and wisdom to the spirit level. (UB 0:5.8)
But what does this have to do with the Urantia Papers?
This is precisely the wish I express in proposing this section: that everyone provides a personal, non-stereotyped, and not strictly intellectual response to the questions so often addressed in the Urantia Book but for which there is an answer only within each person: who are we, where are we, where do we think we are going?
So today I will talk to you about music and more specifically about a classical work by Olivier MESSIAEN (1908-1992 French composer and organist: the Turangalila Symphony.
This work of great spirituality, Messiaen was deeply religious, for a very large orchestra is intended to be ‘a song of love, a hymn to joy’.
But a ‘cosmic’ joy.
I quote Messiaen: “Turangalila is a Sanskrit word…Lila means play: but play in the sense of divine action on the cosmos, the play of creation, of destruction…‘Lila’ is also love, ‘Turanga’ is time running, like the sand in the hourglass. ‘Turanga’ is movement and rhythm.”
And this music, which is an extension of the French school of Debussy (‘musical impressionism’) plunges us into colorful impulses (Messiaen testified to the gift he had of seeing colors in chords internally), gigantic waves of energy. No navel-gazing speeches, the artist’s ego does not invade us with his confidences but he invites us to discover new worlds with him.
Messiaen’s taste for Far Eastern rhythms and percussion, as well as his passion for precisely reproduced birdsong (“the messengers of God”), combined with his deeply French culture and religious nature, all give this work fantastic multidimensional, multicultural aspects.
Art here is openness and tolerance, creation of a world, search for harmony between opposites or simply cultures taken as aspects of oneself, which do not know each other.
Isn’t this a lesson we should meditate on?
The titles of certain movements may also make you want to explore this work:
5.Joy of the blood of the stars
6. Garden of Love’s Sleep
8. Development of love
It represents for me a wonderful attempt to reproduce ‘heavenly music’, even if:
The best music of Urantia is just a fleeting echo of the magnificent strains heard by the celestial associates of your musicians, who left but snatches of these harmonies of morontia forces on record as the musical melodies of sound harmonics. Spirit-morontia music not infrequently employs all seven modes of expression and reproduction, so that the human mind is tremendously handicapped in any attempt to reduce these melodies of the higher spheres to mere notes of musical sound. Such an effort would be something like endeavoring to reproduce the strains of a great orchestra by means of a single musical instrument. (UB 44:1.14)
Isn’t this effort of art to express the unspeakable the highest form of expression possible?
While you have assembled some beautiful melodies on Urantia, you have not progressed musically nearly so far as many of your neighboring planets in Satania. If Adam and Eve had only survived, then would you have had music in reality; but the gift of harmony, so large in their natures, has been so diluted by strains of unmusical tendencies that only once in a thousand mortal lives is there any great appreciation of harmonics. But be not discouraged; some day a real musician may appear on Urantia, and whole peoples will be enthralled by the magnificent strains of his melodies. One such human being could forever change the course of a whole nation, even the entire civilized world. It is literally true, “melody has power a whole world to transform.” Forever, music will remain the universal language of men, angels, and spirits. Harmony is the speech of Havona. (UB 44:1.15)
But now it’s your turn.
Dominique Ronfet
| The Supreme, God the Sevenfold, Forces, Energies and Universal Control of Power: 100 Questions and Answers (1) | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 19 — Autumn 2001 | Relaxation Corner Poem |