ABSTRACT
The choice of methods for musical gnosis depends on one's goal. Islam has a strong tradition of musically based gnosis. Music, uniquely among the arts, can serve both the positive approach, which desires realization of higher states of being, knowledge of metaphysical realities, and the cosmological vision. The aural imagination can make music, ranging in intensity from the casual tunes that everyone hears in their head to what Beethoven himself must have experienced, composing the most complex works in a state of total deafness. Critics have sneered at Karlheinz Stockhausen's claim that he was a being from the star system of Sirius who incarnated in order to bring a new music to earthlings. Rudolph Steiner values music as a foretaste of what everyone can expect to experience during the period between incarnations, or exceptionally through perceiving higher worlds while still embodied.
