On music as a living force, the philosophers and shamans who sensed it long before us, and the lifelong homework of answering a call you didn't ask for.

How a Woman With an Accordion Changed My Life

It was a night that changed everything.

A few years ago I attended a multi-day psychedelic retreat. The space was safe, well-held, run by people who understood what they were doing. There was a team whose care for every detail was palpable from the moment I arrived. I felt held. I felt looked after. Whatever was going to happen, I trusted the container.

For the first hours, after ingesting the psychedelic substance, not much happened for me. The room was filled with carefully chosen music from speakers — songs selected by the facilitator specifically to support the depth of the experience. The music was beautiful. Intentional. But I remained somehow on the surface of myself, watching the experience and what was happening for other participants from a slight remove, unable to fully let go.

Then the live musician entered.

A woman. Her voice. An accordion.

She sang in a language I didn't recognize — Portuguese, I would later learn, the language of Brazilian ceremonial music. And something in me that had been braced against the experience simply... released. Not because I understood the words. Not because I knew the tradition. But because something in the frequency of her voice, in the bellows of that accordion, in the specific quality of that live, breathing, human sound in the room — reached past every defense I had.

Music was my entry point. It was music that made me trust the process enough to step aside. It was music that dissolved the last of my resistance and let the experience begin.

And in the depth of that experience, one of the first clear thoughts that arrived was this:

“I want to learn how to open doors for people with music.”

Painting of nebula, in black, dark blue, dusty pink and purple

I didn't trust that thought at first. It felt too good to be true. Too large. Too perfectly shaped to the contours of everything I'd ever longed for. I filed it away as something the experience had generated — vivid, meaningful in the moment, probably not real.

I didn't play any instrument at the time. The idea of becoming a musician felt like a fantasy someone else might have.

It took two more years. Many more ceremonies. A slow, incremental process of receiving the same message in different forms, from different directions, with increasing insistence.

Gradually, I stopped being able to dismiss it.

And something else shifted too: I stopped experiencing the desire as something coming from inside me — some personal wish or ambition — and began to experience it as something coming from outside. Or more precisely: from something larger than the boundary between inside and outside.

Clear crystal balls in front of a colorful background — I imagined music arriving like prophecy — a mysterious figure holding a crystal ball that revealed my future.

I had always imagined that a calling would arrive dramatically. An external force. A vision. Some unmistakable sign from beyond.

In my romantic fantasy, music would have appeared as a kind of Roman empress with a scripture that was holding my musical prophecy. Or as a pulsing talking golden light speaking to me from the heavens announcing I was meant to be a musician in this life time. Or some kind of creature of the forest approaching me with a crystal ball that would show me my future.

Well, that's not how it happened. The calling came in stages, quietly, through a medium I'd loved my whole life without fully understanding why.

Music had been calling me from the beginning. From that first moment I witnessed the woman with the accordion. But at that time I just didn't have the ears to hear it yet.

Mushrooms and flowers on a powder pink background — It was music that made me trust the process enough to step aside. Music was the door — and it was also the key.

Music as the Force Behind Everything

I want to say something here that I'm aware might sound strange — and that I'm going to say anyway, because it's the most honest thing I can offer at this stage where I stand now.

Music has become, for me, a primary pathway to spirituality. For a long time in my life I had lost my connection to any sense of something higher — to anything I could call God, or the sacred, or the transcendent. That connection felt closed off. Inaccessible. Like a door I no longer had a key for.

Music reopened it.

Not music as entertainment. Not music as background. Music as a moving force behind all things — as the mechanics behind the visible world, as the pattern underlying creation. When I encounter music in its deepest form, I sometimes feel I am touching something that constructed the universe. That the vibration of strings or voice is not representing something sacred. It is something sacred.

I am almost prepared to say: I believe music is God. Or at least — I believe music is one of the clearest faces of whatever that word is pointing toward.

This felt, for a long time, like a private and possibly eccentric belief. So I got curious. Is this a personal experience — the specific story of one person, opened by specific circumstances (including mind-altering substances)? Or is this something larger? Something that other musicians, other thinkers, other traditions have also encountered?

I started looking. And what I found was that this experience — of music as a living force, as something that precedes and exceeds human intention — is not only not eccentric. It is one of the oldest and most persistent recognitions in human history.

Is Music the moving force behind all things? the invisible machinery of the visible world?

An artful light installation representing the cosmos and nebula with two people standing inside of it

The Oldest Idea in the Room: What Philosophers Said About Music's Nature

Long before neuroscience, long before recorded music, long before the modern idea of music as entertainment or industry — philosophers were grappling with the same question I found myself asking: what actually is music? Where does it come from? Why does it do what it does to us?

Their answers, across centuries and cultures, converge on something remarkable.

PYTHAGORAS (c. 570–495 BCE)

"There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres." [1]

Pythagoras believed in musica universalis — the music of the spheres — a harmonic order built into the mathematical structure of the cosmos itself. Music, in his view, didn't originate with humans. It was a property of the universe that humans learned to imitate. We didn't invent it. We tuned in to something already present.

PLATO (c. 428–348 BCE)

"Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul." — The Republic, Book III [2]

For Plato, music was not decoration — it was a direct formative force on the soul. In The Republic, he argues that musical modes shape character more deeply than any rational argument can, because they bypass the intellect entirely and act on something more fundamental. In Timaeus, he goes further: harmony is described as a gift given by the gods to help human beings bring the disordered movements of the soul back into alignment with the rational order of the cosmos. Music, for Plato, was quite literally medicine — a technology for restoring inner harmony by resonating with the harmony underlying all of existence. [3]

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788–1860)

"Music is the melody whose text is the world." [4]

Schopenhauer made the most radical claim of all: music is the only art form that does not represent the world — it is the world's will expressing itself directly. While painting depicts appearances and poetry describes experience, music bypasses all representation. It doesn't describe joy or suffering. It is joy. It is suffering. It speaks a language that existed before language.

What moves me about these three thinkers — separated by centuries, writing in completely different contexts — is the same underlying conviction running through all of them: music has an existence that precedes and exceeds human intention. It is discovered, not invented. Received, not made.

When I found these texts, I wasn't looking for validation. I was looking for company. And I found that the experience I'd had — of music as something that constructs rather than decorates reality — was apparently old enough, and widespread enough, to have generated some of the most serious philosophical thinking in Western history.

An abstract photography with a bust at its center in purple and pink colors — Music is not something humans created. It is something humans learned to hear.

The Shamanic View: Music as Transmission, Not Performance

In many indigenous and shamanic traditions, the philosophical question — is music a human creation or a cosmic force? — was never really a question at all. The answer was simply assumed: music belongs to the invisible world. Humans are its instruments, not its authors.

The most thoroughly documented example comes from Amazonian healing traditions. In the vegetalismo practices of the Peruvian Upper Amazon, the ceremonial healing songs known as icaros are not composed by the healer — they are received. Anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, whose 1986 study remains the foundational academic work on this tradition, describes how icaros are transmitted directly by plant spirits to healers during periods of ritual fasting and ceremony: the songs already exist in the spirit world, and the healer's task is to become a clear enough channel to receive them. [5] More recent ethnomusicological research confirms this understanding is still central to how practitioners in these traditions describe their own practice. [6]

I found this not in a book first, but in a room — on a vinyl floor, looking up at a woman and her accordion, singing in a language I didn't recognize. What she was doing didn't feel like performance. It felt like transmission. Like she was a conduit for something that had its own direction and intention, and she had learned, over years, to get out of its way.

A similar understanding of music as ancestral carrier — rather than personal expression — runs through the West African griot tradition, in which hereditary musician-historians understand themselves as custodians and transmitters of ancestral force through song. The griot does not create the power in the music; the music carries power that precedes them, and their role is to serve as its living vessel. [7]

These are not isolated beliefs. Across Hindu cosmology (Nada Brahma — the universe as sound), Norse creation myth (the primordial vibration of Ginnungagap), and ancient Egyptian theology (creation through the spoken and sung word of Ptah), sound appears as the generative force through which reality itself was brought into existence. Music is not art in these traditions. It is ontology. [8]

A figure at the center of the cosmos expanding — The question isn't whether you're talented enough for music. It's whether you're quiet enough to receive it.

What Musicians Have Always Felt But Rarely Said Plainly

What surprised me, as I looked further, is how consistently significant musicians across genres, eras, and cultures have described the same experience — without any shared philosophical framework, without knowing each other's language, arriving independently at almost identical conclusions.

A note of honesty first: the claim that Mozart described music arriving "fully formed" is, strictly speaking, a myth. Modern scholarship has shown that Mozart worked through extensive sketches and revisions like any composer, and the famous letter describing effortless composition is now considered a 19th-century forgery. [9] What the real evidence shows is actually more interesting: a composer who described music as something he thought about obsessively, constantly, as a presence that occupied him whether he was working or not. The romantic myth may be false, but the underlying experience — of music as something that possesses rather than serves the musician — appears throughout his verified letters.

Beethoven's sketchbooks tell a similar story. Hundreds of surviving notebooks document a composer in constant, sometimes agonized dialogue with musical material that felt as though it had its own demands, its own direction, its own insistence on being resolved a certain way. Lewis Lockwood, in his authoritative study of Beethoven's compositional methods, describes a creative process that "suggests not so much the imposition of will onto material as a continuous negotiation with it." [10]

John Coltrane left the clearest and most direct statement. In the liner notes to A Love Supreme (1964), he wrote: "During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music." [11] The album was not a performance. It was an offering — music understood explicitly as something received from a source beyond the self, and returned to that source through the act of playing.

Nick Cave has written about this with characteristic directness. In Issue #108 of The Red Hand Files, responding to a question about writer's block, he described songs not as things he creates but as things that travel toward him: "The lyrics are always coming. They are always pending. They are always on their way toward us. But often they must journey a great distance and over vast stretches of time to get there." And in a later entry: "Whatever force leaves these occasional gifts at my doorstep knows I won't abandon the idea... Perhaps that's why, after all these years, the ideas continue to come." [12] Cave understands himself not as a generator of music but as its destination — a portal through which something already in motion finally arrives.

I no longer read these accounts as charming exaggeration. I think they are the clearest descriptions these musicians could find for an experience that doesn't fit neatly inside ordinary language. And I recognize in them — with something that feels like relief — the shape of my own.

What Neuroscience Adds — And Doesn't Explain Away

Modern neuroscience has not debunked the mystical experience of music. In some ways, it has made it stranger.

Music activates more regions of the brain simultaneously than almost any other human activity — movement, emotion, memory, language, and visual processing, all at once. When we improvise freely, the prefrontal cortex — the seat of self-monitoring, judgment, and what neuroscientists call the narrative self — goes quiet. The part of the brain responsible for "I" steps aside.

In a landmark 2008 study, neuroscientists Charles Limb and Allen Braun scanned the brains of jazz musicians during improvisation and found exactly this: deactivation of the self-monitoring prefrontal cortex, and simultaneous activation of the brain regions associated with self-expression — but without the inhibitory layer of judgment that normally accompanies conscious thought. [13] The brain enters a state that resembles dreaming, or deep meditation.

The performer steps aside. Something else moves.

I find this neither surprising nor reductive. What the neuroscience describes — a state in which the ordinary self-monitoring mind quiets and something less guarded comes through — is exactly what the shamans were pointing at when they talked about becoming a channel. It's what the philosophers were describing when they wrote about music expressing the world's will directly. It's what I experienced in that very first encounter with psychedelics, listening to a woman and her accordion, when my resistance finally dissolved.

The mystical and the neurological are not in competition here. They are describing the same territory from different directions.

Portrait of a blurred woman in blue, on a pink, orange and yellow background — When music flows most freely through us, the part of the brain responsible for 'I' goes quiet.

The Calling Is Not the Destination — It's the Beginning of Work

Here is what I didn't understand when music arrived as a calling: the arrival is not the destination. It is the beginning of the hardest part.

The philosophers can tell you music is a cosmic force. The shamans can tell you it has its own intelligence. The neuroscientists can show you where in the brain it lives. The musicians can tell you what it feels like when it moves through you.

None of them can do the daily practice for you.

None of them can sit down at the instrument on the days when the connection isn't there. None of them can bridge — and it is a significant, humbling, sometimes discouraging gap — the distance between the vastness of what you felt called toward and the specific, limited reality of your current skill level. None of them can hold the tension of knowing what music is, at its deepest, while still being a beginner.

This is what I think about every day. How do I bring this into my life? How do I honor something this large with the ordinary hours of an ordinary day? How do I keep showing up for a calling that sometimes feels too immense to hold?

The hardest moments are not the ones when I doubt my talent. They are the ones when life pulls me away — when work and obligations fill the day — and the music feels distant. Not gone. Just far. Like a signal still transmitting, but I've moved out of range.

What I'm learning — slowly, imperfectly — is that integration is not a single act. It is a daily practice of returning. The calling doesn't require you to be perfect or ready or even inspired. It requires you to come back.

A calling is like receiving a phone call that changes your life. For a moment, everything feels illuminated. But afterward, the real relationship begins. You have to keep picking up the phone. Keep dialing back. Keep answering, even on the days when the line is full of static.

A hand holding a phone while the other hand is dialing a number on a pink old school telephone — A calling persists regardless of whether you follow it — something that keeps asking for you even when you've turned away.

I spent a long time believing music was for other people — people who had been given proper access in childhood, who had grown up with permission I wasn't given. Part of what I'm doing now, in practicing every day, in building this musical life piece by piece, is giving that permission retroactively. Telling the version of myself who watched music from the outside: you were always welcome here. You just didn't know it yet.

The force is real. It opened a door I didn't know existed. But walking through it — every day, in the practice room, with the ordinary difficulty of ordinary learning — that part is mine to do.

Frequently Asked Questions About Music and Spirituality

Is music considered a spiritual force in philosophy?

Yes — across multiple traditions. Pythagoras believed in a cosmic musical order built into the mathematical structure of the universe itself. Plato argued that music resonated with the foundations of reality and could directly alter the soul. Schopenhauer called music the only art form that doesn't represent the world but expresses the world's inner will directly. Across these traditions, music is understood not as human invention but as something discovered — a property of existence itself.

What is the shamanic understanding of music?

In many shamanic and indigenous traditions, music is understood as a living intelligence rather than a human creation. In Amazonian healing traditions, ceremonial songs are received from non-human sources rather than composed — the musician functions as a channel, not an author. Similar cosmologies appear across West African, Norse, Hindu, and Egyptian traditions, where sound is understood as the generative force through which reality itself was brought into existence.

Why do musicians describe feeling chosen by music?

This experience is consistent across musicians of vastly different eras and genres. Neurologically, it relates to the deactivation of the self-monitoring prefrontal cortex during deep musical states — when the 'I' steps aside, what remains can feel like something other than personal will. Philosophically, it aligns with traditions that understand music as having its own intelligence and direction. The phenomenology is real: many musicians genuinely experience music as arriving from elsewhere, rather than originating within them.

What does it mean for music to be a calling?

A calling, in the deepest sense, is a direction that persists regardless of whether you follow it — something that keeps asking for you even when you've turned away. In the context of music, it tends to be characterized by a felt sense of rightness that goes beyond preference: a recognition rather than a decision. The challenge of a calling is not the initial recognition — it is the daily, ordinary work of integration: honoring something vast with the specific, limited hours of a real life.

Can music be a pathway to spirituality?

For many people, yes — including those who have lost or never found a connection to spirituality through more conventional paths. Music activates regions of the brain associated with awe, transcendence, and self-dissolution. It reliably produces states that feel larger than the personal. Across cultures and throughout history, music has been the primary vehicle through which humans access the sacred — in ceremony, in worship, in the solitary experience of a piece of music that opens something that words cannot reach.

A long corridor with infinite archways opening into the next — The calling doesn't ask you to be ready. It asks you to return — to the instrument, to the practice, to the thing that keeps asking for you even when you've been away.

What I'm Still Learning

I don't have this fully figured out.

I have the experience — vivid, real, life-directing. I have the philosophers who mapped its contours centuries before I was born. I have the shamans who built entire traditions around it. I have the neuroscientists who showed me where in the brain it lives. I have the musicians who described it in interviews and liner notes across a century of recorded music.

And I have a woman with an accordion in a ceremony room, singing in Portuguese, who dissolved my last resistance.

What I'm still learning is how to live inside it. How to let a force that feels cosmic scale down into a Tuesday morning with thirty minutes before work, cold fingers, and an accordion slightly out of tune.

That's the real practice. Not the moments of awe — those come on their own, and they are gifts. The practice is everything in between. Showing up for the calling on the ordinary days. Trusting that the connection is still there even when I can't feel it. Coming back, again and again, to the thing that keeps asking for me.

I believe music is its own kind of entity. I believe it was going to find me one way or another. And I believe that what it asks of anyone who hears it this way — is not greatness. Not readiness. Not the resolution of all doubt.

Just this: keep coming back.

a colorful galaxy with stars, purple nebula — In a cosmos of infinite possibility, music chose me. And I choose music — not once, but every single day.

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References

[1] Iamblichus. (c. 300 CE). The life of Pythagoras (T. Taylor, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63300

[2] Plato. (360 BCE). The republic (B. Jowett, Trans.). The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.4.iii.html

[3] Plato. (360 BCE). Timaeus (B. Jowett, Trans.). The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html

[4] Schopenhauer, A. (1818). The world as will and representation (Vol. 1, §52). Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/worldaswillrepre01scho

[5] Luna, L. E. (1986). Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the mestizo population of the Peruvian Amazon (Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 27). Almqvist & Wiksell International.

[6] Graham, O., & Loizaga-Velder, A. (2023). Experiences of listening to icaros during ayahuasca ceremonies at Centro Takiwasi: An interpretive phenomenological analysis. Anthropology of Consciousness, 34(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12170

[7] Charry, E. (2000). Mande music: Traditional and modern music of the Maninka and Mandinka of western Africa. University of Chicago Press.

[8] Berendt, J. E. (1983). Nada Brahma: The world is sound — music and the landscape of consciousness (H. Bredigkeit, Trans.). Destiny Books.

[9] Stafford, W. (1991). The Mozart myths: A critical reassessment. Stanford University Press. (The standard scholarly work debunking the apocryphal "fully formed" letter, attributed to a 19th-century forger.)

[10] Lockwood, L. (2003). Beethoven: The music and the life. W. W. Norton & Company. (p. 6)

[11] Coltrane, J. (1965). A Love Supreme [Album liner notes]. Impulse! Records.

[12] Cave, N. (2020, August). What do you do when the lyrics just aren't coming? The Red Hand Files, Issue #108. https://www.theredhandfiles.com/the-lyrics-just-arent-coming/

[13] Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLOS ONE, 3(2), e1679. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001679