Music is Good

This being the first day of school, I'd love to leave as soon as possible to make sure everything is in order and I get to my classes on time, so I'd love to blog about something quick (and probably kind of lame), and get going. In light of that, I'm just going to share a quick message that I've probably shared at least a dozen times before.

I like music, especially upbeat and uplifting music, especially hymns. As far as I can remember, I always have. And I think I'm now beginning to learn why. As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, I like happiness. I like feeling happy and I like making other people feel happy. Happiness is good. Music can make people happy, and I think that's because good music attracts the Spirit. Good music brings us closer to God, and being close to God brings us greater happiness. That's because God wants us to be happy, so the closer we draw to Him, the happier we'll be.

President Boyd K. Packer taught that music has a strong influence on our thoughts. Other Prophets have taught that our thoughts influence our actions and our actions ultimately determine our destiny. Good music can help us have good thoughts, perform righteous actions, and secure a desirable destiny for ourselves. And since these are all things that God wants us to do, He blesses us with happiness as we do them.

You know, for a long time, I thought that the love of music was just a psychological thing. Our brain picks up the patterns in the music and because those patterns are pleasing to the brain, it rewards us by producing whatever chemical represents happiness to our brains, so we listen to music just because it feels good. According to that way of thinking, any spiritual benefits to listening to good music are purely coincidental, or perhaps God created our brains to enjoy music because He knew that music would have that beneficial "side-effect." I'm no psychologist, so I can't really say. What I can say is that I no longer think that we like music just because it "sounds nice." It's not just pleasant patterns stimulating desirable chemical reactions somewhere in the backs of our minds. Now I think that if such reactions do occur, God intended that to happen mostly so we'd listen to music more, so we'd gain the spiritual benefits of music, which may be the entire reason we like music in the first place.

Music is good, and it helps us to be good. Maybe that's why I've always liked it.