I did not bring much with me to India, a backpackful, mostly clothes, books, technology. But I packed a good pair of headphones and have now bought an external hi-fi sound card for my phone’s USB-C output from Tempotec. It was not exactly cheap, but it is excellent. I was delighted when it arrived today, and of course I tried it out immediately. What a divided experience.
The music immediately evoked memories; I reveled in it. I thought of Husserl, who describes so beautifully how consciousness of the Now always consists of memory (retention) and expectation (protention). This makes a great deal of sense for music too: it is important to remember what happened in the last few seconds or minutes, and it is important to anticipate that it will go on, even if perhaps quite differently. Otherwise one simply cannot hear music. But this is apparently the exact opposite of what matters in meditation.
Hearing
For me to shed my little I, I must become aware that the I does not really exist at all, that its senses do not belong to it, that in seeing there is only seeing itself, in hearing only hearing itself. The mind has thoughts, but these themselves are only thoughts. Consciousness of the Now, as Husserl describes it, cannot belong to an I. Who, then, is hearing? The little self that takes itself far too seriously?
Only in surrender within the Self—Brahman—can consciousness be true. In the ancient and modern scriptures this is called Bliss. Listening to music in a state of meditation—what can that be? Recognizing structures, composition, expectations and memories: all these are precisely those elements of consciousness that must be shed. Is listening to music, then, a path that leads away from insight?
Or is there, after all, a higher function in listening to music? Is being immersed in music, the state in which we are entirely music, glide with it through time without thinking, yet are wholly and utterly in music, a state resembling meditation? Is this fulfilled listening to music Bliss? Admittedly, one only rarely succeeds in immersing oneself in music like this. Sometimes it can take on trance-like states, sometimes a highly concentrated consciousness of the interconnectedness of the world. It is created through the interplay of a composer’s composition or a tradition, the performers and the listeners. In a technical recording, the relationship is distorted, but in principle still there. From a semiotic perspective, music is always an abstract relation to the world and at the same time the most direct of all communication—birdsong.
Waves
On another plane, in music we are dealing with sound waves (in visual art, with light waves). We ourselves are probably made of an atomic lattice that consists of 99 percent nothing. There is no I there that perceives something else. There is only the plane of immanence, of pure existence, on which these forces act upon one another. How lovely that the illusion of an I arises in the process. I like that, but it is a fallacy, or at least a shortened view. This I that shines forth in these force fields is an I that transcends immanence; it can establish connections with things far away, across space and time. Perhaps this is what Deleuze calls deterritorialization and the flight of the line. It is within this network, then, that I hear. Perhaps listening to music is becoming conscious of one’s self as selfless.
Atman
But is it possible to reach the plane of Brahman consciousness through music? Is the dance of the gods, are the heavenly sounds, the requiem and oratorio testimony to a divine consciousness? In Christian church music it is probably always only a sound space of the beyond, a space that can be reached only after death and of which music offers a foretaste. That is a little sad. I have this image of angels sitting on clouds, playing harps.
The surrender of Atman in Brahman, the insight that everything is only one, is quite different. India is loud, the fanfares in the temples shrill, the Ragas by contrast contemplative, meditative. I always have the feeling that this is not about an artist, but that something is being manifested here. A little like the OM Choir. It is the reverse direction of action. It is not the human being who creates a Baroque space in which the divine is sung of; rather, divine consciousness descends through the performance. Or, put differently, immanence is flowed through, flows through itself.
P.S.: I am writing this while listening to Schubert’s String Quintet in the recording with the Quartetto di Cremona.
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