Observations placeholder
J F H Von Dalberg goes out of body and hears music
Identifier
005881
Type of Spiritual Experience
Invisible input - bliss and peace
Out of body
Hallucination
Background
Dalberg is the name of an ancient and distinguished German noble family, derived from the hamlet and castle (now in ruins) of Dalberg or Dalburg near Kreuznach in Rhineland-Palatinate. In the 14th century the original house of Dalberg became extinct in the male line, the fiefs passing to Johann Gerhard, chamberlain of the see of Worms, who married the heiress of his cousin, Anton of Dalberg, about 1330. His own family was of great antiquity, his ancestors having been hereditary ministerials of the bishop of Worms since the time of Ekbert the chamberlain, who founded in 1119 the Augustinian monastery of Frankenthal and died in 1132.
Johann Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg (1752–1812) was canon of Trier, Worms and Speyer, and had some vogue as a composer and writer on musical subjects.
A description of the experience
J F H Von Dalberg – Blikke eines Tonkunstlers in die Musik der Geister 1787 [translated by Professor Joscelyn Godwin]
Then the Genius of Harmony hovered around my bed and whispered to me secrets of the higher mysteries of spiritual music…
Never have I felt a more heavenly bliss! He stood there like the glitter when bright silver is melted – and vanished. It was a dream; but the remembrance of it still looms forth as through a mist.
The earthly veil fell from my eyes, I left the earth behind and was suddenly floating in the measureless spaces of the universe. Suns, planets and stars innumerable all around me, in indescribable beauty; and what magic filled my ears!
The spheres turned with the most magnificent song, often suspected by men but too pure for their hearing; the greatest unity in the richest variety, audible only to spiritual ears. True the divine Pythagoras calculated the laws of their numbers and developed earthly from heavenly harmony, but his numbers are only the vestures of the spiritual tones; they give no euphony to the ear, and the spirit in its earthly prison cannot hear them.
But it is not only the material world and that contained in space that moves according to the laws of heavenly harmony – so the Genius said – but the realm of spirits also makes a perfect music whose true tone and unison is God himself. All souls are parts of this eternal symphony; all move according to an appropriate melody prescribed for them; each is a whole, yet each also a part of a greater whole, and all the endless parts make up the great chorus of Creation which worships the Godhead in eternal songs of praise.
Could we but view the realm of spirits with our limited senses we would marvel at how exactly they follow harmonic laws and would see that our earthly music is only an image, a vesture, an emblem of the eternal and spiritual.
In all man’s relationships to the Universe, to God, to society and to himself or to his inner nature, he acts according to the laws of music