Music: listening

Do not always listen to music you know already. Try music you're unfamiliar with. This can be hard. While listening some music you naturally desire to have a good time. To be positively touched by the music. Music is about emotions and the trick is not only to strengthen existing emotions by listening often to the music you like, but also discover some radically new ones. Emotions you have not yet experienced before. These kind of emotions are not going to be strong the first time they come up. This is easy to understand, because they're totally not 'trained'. It's even a hard job to get them to the surface of consciousness. Being able to enjoy them will take some time. Then again, while listening to unknown music, the moment will come when you are pleasantly suprised in some strange way. There's just one rule. It will never happen with familiar music.

There are roughly two ways to make such discoveries a bit easier. The first one is based on the assumption that we need to set free the unconscious mind. Let the music toy with your mind. To do this, you just put on a cd. Don't skip tracks. And don't actively listen, but put it loud, if possible. Now and then you'll notice the music automatically. Go do something else entirely. For example, reading something which is not too difficult. While the music plays your mind will be triggered at times. The interesting thing is, this will happen at the genuinely sweet and amazing moments. At a certain point I got myself wondering: “What the f*ck!! This is totally gorgious, who wrote this?”.

The other way around is the hyper-alert way. Listen to the music without doing anything else. Let yourself be totally absorbed. If your mind can shift into a 'silent' mode of full attention, you'll notice you can spot you're own emotional peaks; The points at which you'll be enjoying the music. This won't happen while being in your ordinary mental state. It's best to do this kind of thing while you feel rested and also happen to have a whole day off. The trick is to totally disregard your emotional peaks. Do not fear, you won't lose them. By doing this you make some room for emotions you don't know yet. After a while this way of listening will leave you in a very freaky mental state: not knowing how to response to what. At that point, you'll likely encounter something new and utterly mysterious.