Why do all the Active Meditations have music accompanying all of the active steps and some of the inactive steps?

     In the Pythagorean mystery school, music was one of the greatest things – and that's my effort here too. We have to create great music so that great meditative states become possible. Music is outer meditation: meditation is inner music.      They go together, hand in hand, embracing each other.
     It is one of the greatest experiences of life when music is there surrounding you, overwhelming you, flooding you, and meditation starts growing in you – when meditation and music meet, the world and the divine meet, matter and consciousness meet. That is unio mystica – the mystic union.
     In the East we have called it yoga. Yoga simply means union. The best definition of yoga, and the shortest, is by the great seer Vyasa. He says yoga is samadhi, yoga is enstasis. Ordinarily samadhi is translated as ecstasy: that is not right, because ecstasy literally means to stand out. Samadhi is to stand in! It should be translated as enstasis, not as ecstasis. Yoga is enstasis – standing in, doing nothing, just being. That state is meditation.
     And anything that can help from the outside will have some music in it; only then can it help.
     The sound of running water in the hills can help, because it has its own music. The roaring waves of the ocean can help, because they have their own music. The singing of the birds in the morning can help, or the sound of insects in the silent night, or the rain falling on the rooftop – anything that creates music can also create meditation.
     The Pythagorean school was a school of music, of song and dance...of great celebration.

     People have forgotten that music can take you downwards, and can also take you upwards. The modern music takes you downwards; it is concerned with the lowest center of your being, with the sex center. It gives you sexuality; it is pornographic. It has lost all heights. It is ugly. It is really noise and nothing else, noise that drowns you –jazz or other pop music. It is simply a kind of intoxicant. It is so deafening that you feel lost, and you think something is happening. All that is happening is that you are pulled more and more towards the earth, more and more towards the animal in you.
     The ancient music, the classical music, has a totally different effect: it pulls you upwards, it takes you beyond gravitation. It is part of levitation; you start floating upwards and upwards. lt has a more meditative quality in it. It reaches to your higher centers.
     The real music worth calling music will have something to do with sahasrar – your seventh center, but very rarely does a genius reach there to create such music. But if even your heart center is moved, it is more than enough.
     If your heart center starts dancing and revolving, you are very close to meditation.

Osho: Philosophia Perennis

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