Music and spirituality in the 21st century

Image by Fey Ilyas via FlickrYou don't need to be an  ethno-musicologist, an evolutionary anthropologist or musician to appreciate the deep link between music and spirituality. In Christianity one might speak of finding the Spirit through sound, while in Buddhism sound is one of the gates of perception which can lead us to a direct awareness of our deepest mind.

If we get too mechanistic about it (these sounds trigger these clusters of neurons) without looking at the holistic, in this case humanistic, perspective, we run the risk of failing to appreciate anything more subtle the relationship between mood, awareness and music has to tell us. Any sensory data is translated and transduced to mental phenomena in the brain, taking on a new quality. This can include sounds, sights, tastes/smells, and touch.  In turn these can affect, via the connections in the thalamus, a variety of brain-influenced or directed systems in the body, even the immune system.

In other words, psychosomatic is no longer the "dirty word" once used so derisively to explain away the experiences people claimed to have in their bodies because of what was happening in their brains. The mind-body connection that was once scoffed at a "New Age woo woo nonsense" in many parts of academia is increasingly the subject of intense formal study.

And while that is all well and good, what do centuries or millenia of practical experimentation by various sacred traditions have to tell us about the music-mind connection? What about our own personal connections? 

Standing for and standing with -- solidarity with those on the margins

What is the best way to help those who are on the margins -- in terms of social or economic status, power, or in some other fashion?  How you do envision a solution, partial or whole, to the neglect or abuse of those who fall into such a category?

This is a perennial question for those working to improve living conditions for those on the outside -- those excluded based on some quality deemed inferior, insufficient, impure, inconvenient or otherwise undesirable.  A major model employed with particular vigor in the US has been the human/civil model, which has its critics such as Andrew Sullivan (writing below about discrimination involving homosexuals):

Liberalism properly restricts itself to law - not culture - in addressing social problems; and by describing all homosexuals as a monolithic minority, it is able to avoid the complexities of the gay world as a whole, just as blanket civil rights legislation draws a veil over the varieties of black America by casting the question entirely in terms of non-black attitudes.