Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Metal/Hardcore Music as a Universal Language, Part 2: the Mosh Pit

Today for my meditation session I listened to a 44 minute bhajan to Lord Ganesha. I feel it's certainly helped me spiritually for this evening, but today I also found something even more interesting concerning my favorite genre of music, heavy metal. As it turns out, heavy metal can help save lives...that might be an exaggeration, but the point is that National Geographic has covered a study that has discovered that a popular form of dancing at heavy metal concerts, known as the mosh pit, mimics the movements of excited particles of gases, much like what is studied in particle physics.

As for how that can save lives, well, the study says that the research could be applied to people reacting under much different circumstances - namely riots, fires, and the like. But I feel this can also save lives in a spiritual sense...not moshing in a mosh pit, exactly, but rather demonstrating the oneness of the universe. Spiritual people, especially in the Hindu faith, have often said that oneness refers to everything in the universe being made of the same thing - divinity. If everything in the universe can be said to be made of the same thing, then divinity is in everything.

This can be seen as further proof of that concept. For just as matter in the universe reacts in a certain way under certain circumstances, so too do people under certain influences. We are indeed already one with this universe...we just have to realize it, and when great music like heavy metal blares through the ether, our oneness is realized.

It doesn't have to just be heavy metal music, of course, but if heavy metal can prove something like this, surely it shows that the path to the divine is manyfold. Just like how the God(s) of Hinduism are many to show that the many can lead to the One. They are not separate from each other, but parts of a whole, and worshipping a part will grant us the whole.

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