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. It 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 a genius reaches 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.
Just as music is the meeting of silence and sound, for Pythagoras philosophy is a meeting of religion and science. His concept of philosophy is that of a great synthesis. He is one of the greatest synthesizers ever – he always brings polar opposites together and makes them complementary. He is a great artist in destroying opposition. Wherever he finds opposition he starts searching for something which must be bridging the opposition, and that bridge is important.
Religion and science have been in conflict for centuries because they have not listened to Pythagoras. Otherwise, this division would never have happened. And this division has proved one of the most fatal calamities. Religion and science have been fighting as enemies; for centuries the church did not allow science to develop and grow. People like Galileo and Kepler and others were punished.
Religion was afraid of science. This is stupid, because science can only help religion, science can only prepare the ground for the inner science. The church people and the popes who were against science were simply behaving in a very stupid way – without knowing what they were doing.
Truth cannot be crushed; nobody can crucify truth.
Slowly slowly, science gained ground, became powerful – it was good that it became powerful. But it started behaving in the same stupid way by destroying religion. It became a revenge. For three hundred years, the mainstream of scientific thinkers has been trying to destroy religion as hard as possible. They have declared God is dead. They have declared there is no soul. They have declared there is no afterlife. They have declared there is no inner being in man. They have reduced man to a machine.