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Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? The is the quintensensial guide to Sufism. A monument to The Religion , extremely well-written and informative,it is hard to put down. Really spiritually awakening book a must read for those trying to understand steps to enlightenment. One person found this helpful.
Music of the Soul by Erik Schubach
This book helps me move forward in my life. I love tnis book and the music that speaks to me. If there is one book that goes to the heart of the Sufi tradition in modern times, this is the one. Reading it is a transformative experience on its own as it touches the deepest places in our heart and soul. I write this in Sidi's honor after learning that he passed into majestic horizons on November 11, Most importantly he lived by every word of his teachings in full surrender to the Divine. I did not really understand unconditional love and surrender until my personal encounter with him in He was truly an inspirational and transformational guide for the ages.
Music of the Soul Series
This book unveils the deep inner secrets of the Sufi path, a straight and powerful way to reach Divine Unity. Indeed, should you choose to follow the path impeccably described therein, Sidi has laid out a detailed roadmap listing all the states and stations and challenges you will likely encounter along the way, and most importantly, the spiritual medicine to help you get through them.
This is an invaluable book for any seeker. See all 6 reviews. What other items do customers buy after viewing this item? Pages with related products. People often sing as a result of oppression. Perhaps even the oppression itself was a catalyst, a springboard, for that music. That was never the case. Perhaps one of the reasons for that is that our generation so craves for spirit, for soul, and music is a way to speak to G-d. Whether we call it as such is not the issue. His name is Peter Himmelman. We have him here live over the phone as a guest from California. To introduce him, Peter Himmelman is a well-acclaimed musician.
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He performs all over the country, including here in New York. He has a very interesting following because of his wit and his improvisational skills, besides from his musical abilities. So how did we get to know each other? First of all, let me welcome him here. That was a really good talk about music from a Rabbi. Well, where I grew up in Minneapolis, the best thing about my Rabbi was that, first of all, my Rabbi had a nice goatee.
I knew there must be more to a Rabbi than goatees and chocolate chip cookies. I mean I could grow my own goatee at fifteen and make my own cookies shortly thereafter, so…. I just really thought that was great.
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There was something about it. I heard all their music, along with Mitch Miller and Burl Ives. They was pretty good but the Beatles were something special. In other words, they really did have something that was attractive, even to an unbiased five-year-old. And there were other songs. It fascinates me now looking back that even at a very young age, I had strong likes and dislikes, the same way that I do now. We had just met, and I was giving a class to people from the arts, entertainment, music industry, and Peter walked in, this tall lanky guy from drawling Minnesota.
Your father thought that I might have been mentally ill in some way or just mentally slow because the way I speak is so much slower than you New Yorkers. So it was a very interesting interface when we hit it off, using my introduction before about music and soul and spirit, I found it fascinating that I, coming from a traditional background where spirituality is very much a part of the system, but it is a traditional background, and Peter coming from a place that had been turned off from Judaism, with goatees or chocolate chip cookies, or whatever, the bureaucracy of it, and we were really able to communicate.
So I want to ask you this. When you started playing music in a more serious way, how would you describe the soul connection? Are there words for it or is it just that music has its own language? Is there a way to bridge the two worlds? Can you describe the spiritual journey you went through, or you still go through, when you play or listen?
How do you see music in the context of a spiritual thing, in other words, do you identify with that parable that I mentioned before about music being like the wings and a way for a soul to move from one place to the next? Well, there are a number of great parables. Somebody told me this once. Painting is a light refracting material which depicts things in a physical world.
And then you have music which has no physical substance at all. For me, growing up not using the term soul or spirit, and for that matter people have all sorts of stereotypes that they can come and apply to those terms, so what I found moving when I hear a live band, for example, a rock band which is somehow the music that I most readily respond to is this irrepressible laughter that I would sometimes get that would fill up my body and I guess you could say my soul to such an extent that it was actually such a surprise. I never had such a powerful experience. I could not repress my laughter for the way that all the instruments played together with each other, the way they were connected.
But think for a moment from a secular point of view, taking G-d out of the picture for a moment, how do you think human beings would have innovated a language like that? Where did it come from? Did you ever think about who was the first person who sang a song and under what circumstances? You know, somebody would hear birds and people learn by imitation, so it would be natural to hear a bird, for example, or a howling wolf or something and try to imitate that.
Certainly the sound of rain and rhythms could be imitated. Beating out rhythms on logs and taking a piece of stretched out skin and turning it into a string and hearing it drone, sounding something like the wind.
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I would imagine the first thing was trying to imitate sounds in nature. To have them at their disposal. Call 1- or write to us at wisdomreb meaningfullife. My question to you is this. Rosh Hashanah is coming up.
And on Rosh Hashanah they blow the shofar in the synagogues. I guess its role is to pierce through and make you come back to your senses, remember things and priorities and get everything straight. But I think it really works well.
In other words, is one or another more powerful when it comes to song and music? You sound a little solemn now, you know. In Chassidic thought it talks about the difference between music of the East and music of the West, that Arabic music is very melancholy and haunting because Ishmael, the son of Abraham, comes from chessed the attribute of kindness , and therefore, their pleasure, their delight, and entertainment, comes from the opposite.
So their songs are very gevurahdik , from the gevurah the attribute of strictness side of things. And Western music comes from Eisav, the son of Isaac. Western music is much more upbeat because they come from gevurah , so their entertainment and their pleasure comes from the opposite extreme which is chessed. I have to tell you that when I was in Israel a couple of week ago I was really in love with that Arabic music on the radio station.
I was tuned in all the time. Peter, the first time you came to see me, if I remember, the next day you called me and said that you had composed a song. Do you remember the name of the song? I always find that pretty cool. Well, the whole story works out well. I have four children and sometimes I say that the kids were born as a result of this blues singer who I think died of alcohol poisoning in Minneapolis.