This Night Has Opened My Eyes

One of the most intense spiritual experiences I’ve ever had was at a loud rock concert in the middle of an amusement park. In 1986, at age eighteen, I went with my sister to see The Smiths one drizzly evening at Canada’s Wonderland, outside of Toronto.

Our family had moved the previous summer. I was attending a high school where I knew no one, and music had become a valued companion. Many hours were spent alone in my bedroom with The Smiths, vibrating in sympathy with singer Morrissey’s longing and alienation, and imitating his strangled, mournful expression. Sitting now on the outdoor venue’s wet lawn, waiting for the show to start, I felt the thrilling anticipation of seeing him in person.

To pass the time and distract us from the dampness, I confided in my sister about other new things I’d been doing in my teenage bedroom—reading about Zen and trying out meditation. These experiments were raising important questions for me. Is reality as it appears to us, or do we see only a tiny glimpse of it and form all sorts of spurious conclusions from limited evidence? Are people forever doomed to live in private mental worlds of their own making, or are we in fact each just a momentary fraction of a larger consciousness that connects us all? And, in the words of Morrissey, “Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?”

I didn’t know, and neither did she. But while meditation hadn’t so far answered those questions, it did seem to have a way of bringing them into sharper relief, as well as raising others that I struggled to put into words.

So, when the band finally took the stage, the air was already full of profundity. As the heavy tremolo of Johnny Marr’s guitar announced “How Soon Is Now?,” a pulsing sonic wave enveloped the entire audience, connecting us all with the great mysteries and each other. Time became at once expansive and nonexistent. Everything other than the experience of that moment suddenly seemed beside the point.

Music and meditation may very well be natural companions. DJ Steve Aoki certainly makes that case in this issue’s cover story: “The deeper these emotional moments are,” he says, “the more present you are, the more connected you are. And that’s why music is such a strange thing. It’s so powerful.”

In the years since that concert, I have developed a daily meditation practice and become a musician myself. I’ve attended and played hundreds of shows, mostly far more pedestrian, and Morrissey has turned out to be a less than admirable figure. But that night made me forever aware of the deep connections between mindfulness and music.

As “The Queen Is Dead” played, the entire front row somehow found themselves spontaneously jumping onto the stage, filling it completely for no other reason than to sway together in time with the band. I swayed with them on the lawn, heart full to bursting with love. I saw my sister and all the other fans swaying too and understood that they were me and I was them, all temporarily relieved of the self-doubts and loneliness we’d all been feeling in our respective bedrooms. “Has the world changed, or have I changed?” we sang as one.