First Encounters with Ragas
As a teenager, I listened to ragas for hours. I knew nothing about them. I looked up a little: microtonality, meditation, sequence of tones. I understood no more than that. But they were the deepest musical experiences — a meditation to music. To this day, ragas lead me inward or into deep states of insight that are not rational. Rather, they are a way of being in the world.
Music as Shared Space and Pure Energy
Listening to music draws us all into the realms of emotional landscapes, daydreaming, aesthetic experience. It is emotional, abstract, temporal; it allows the other senses to be brought in or faded out, memories to be called up or something to be forgotten. We can dream a future, long for something, or express emotions — let them out.
When we make music together, practice, dance, listen together, or even simply recommend music, we enter a shared space. This space is another dimension. It has no material reference in the way the other senses do, for example in the performing arts or in cooking. Music corresponds to the ether, to space itself. Vibration requires a physical carrier, but in itself it is pure energy.
Music, Consciousness, and the Fourth Reality
When my senses mingle — smell, touch, sound, taste, and sight — the chemical messengers of my nervous system unite somewhere within me, perhaps in my head or my heart, and there form a ground for consciousness. This ocean of consciousness, fed by the senses, can access a reality through them: this we call the waking state.
In the dream state, we access another reality, a reality made of memories, feelings, fantasies. Or we enter deep sleep, where the senses do not reach consciousness. Yet since I continue to exist, as I experience every morning, my Self was apparently somewhere else entirely. It was probably where the material world, as we understand it, no longer matters. We were in the dark ocean of pure existence.
In the Māṇḍūkya-Upanishad, however, there is also a fourth state — that state which may perhaps be called “enlightened.” In this state we are awake, but not bound to our senses. We do not perceive, but neither do we dream; we do not sleep, and yet we grasp a higher reality. We know the world in a deeper sense. I see my inner being and the world as such; I understand that my everyday consciousness is functional but limited. I become conscious of my ignorance. I know that I know nothing. I am one with the world, although I seem to be outside it. One could speculate here about the ideas of the transcendental, of Advaita, or of immanence. But I would rather leave that aside, since it gets lost in intellectual games.
Music, and for me personally ragas, have something of this fourth reality. I explicitly do not want to say that listening to music resembles an enlightened state, and yet I am suggesting this parallel. I do not sleep and I do not perceive; I do not dream and yet I am wide awake. I feel myself in a world that is often more intense than reality. Sometimes I take refuge in it. But when I listen with great concentration, when I become one with the music, something lights up in me — with a purity and clarity that I otherwise know only from meditation.
In music, we identify with something. Music is a carrier of something I can become. In meditation, too, I can become something; if it goes well, I become one.
