Light and Love
Several years ago Swami notes on His discourse:
"Sound is the attribute of ether. This sound is the
primordial 'Aum', constituted by the three syllables
A-U-M. You should listen carefully to this primordial
sound Aum. Man is also the embodiment of this sound."
(Excerpts from the Divine Discourse of Sathya Sai Baba,
"Divine Origin of Five Elements." 15 May 2000 PM,
Brindavan).
Swami's Teaching is the ingenious
generalization of human knowledge, experience, and
wisdom from ancient times until today. His words,
examples, deeds, darshans carry the Divine energy for
the benefit of his readers, devotees, students, etc. The
Divine energy spread without any language and academic
rules of presentations.
When one can develop the skill to sit in silence and
listen to the vibrations of silence, it is possible to
access the subtle layers of information what lead
towards harmony between the mind, intellect and the
body. The last is not merely host to the mind and
intellect, but home for Atman.
By Swami and
Vedic saints bhajans singing, Vedic hymns chanting
have nearly the same powerful spiritual meaning to the
person personally and to the outer space with all
objects in it.
The ancient Masters have
coordinated the acoustic tones and holy words in such
balance of different vibrations what bring the singer
nearer to the Self. Spiritual influence of sacred sound
Vedas (sound of chanting only, the issue of Vedas wisdom
is another topic of contemplation); bhajans on the body
level take place as factor, organizer towards the
harmony between Body - Mind -Self.
"To
elevate the bhajans to a spiritual level what are
required are true feeling and ecstasy of devotion. The
songs should flow nor from the lips but from the
heart...
Conduct your bhajans with a pure unsullied heart, you
will experience the Divine. ...You should sing
whole-heartedly with the desire to please God.... Merge
your soul in the bhajans you sing. Spiritualise your
bhajan-singing. Then you will experience real bliss."
(Bhagawan Sathya Sai Baba. SSS. Vol.30, Chapter 7).
Bhajans singing and Vedic hymns chanting carry to
the air not only the vibrations of Divine songs but also
the vibrations caused by surrender of singers. In result
the stage of harmony and cleanliness of singers inner
space and outer space around singers increases.
"The devotional singing one can get merged in the
Divine. That is the reason why the Lord is described
as Gaanalola or Gaanapriya (Lover of song or one who
is charmed by music). It will be befitting if a
devotee combines the reciting of the Lord's name
with singing and praying for merger with the
Divine." (Sathya Sai Baba. SSS. Vol. 27, Chapter
29).
It is the purpose why Swami pays much attention
to Vedic hymns chanting at Parsanthi Nilayan before
darshans every day. Darshans as consist in two parts.
The first is Swami's image what is not separated from
His Omnipresent Form, Atmic energy that powerfully
spread over the planet especially during darshans. Every
human being can take part in His Cosmic Omnipresent
darshans (as expression of Cosmic Consciousness) at any
corner of the Earth (when he/she has only a deep faith).
The second part is Vedic hymns chanting and bhajans
singing what pictorially adds to darshans beauty and
harmony of sound based on ancient special selection of
acoustic vibrations. Swami's darshans and devotional
festivals are bound by musical representations and
chanting of Vedic hymns, mantras, devotional songs.
Swami as a rule
finishes His Discourses with bhajans singing . He
explains:
"Singing
this intense yearning for God and enjoying the
experience of adoring Him, helps to purify the
atmosphere. No man can escape the influence of the
pollution of the air he breathes. The sounds that we
produce, with good intent or bad, spread throughout the
air around us. The pollution in the atmosphere is
imbibed by the plants, the plants supply the grain, the
grain is the basis of the meal. When the environment is
clean and free from evil vibrations, the food too is
pure.... It is to ensure such an atmosphere that this
saadhana (spiritual effort) initiated the world over."
(Excerpts from: Sathya Sai Baba. SSS. Vol. 13, Chapter
37).
"Bhajan is one of the
processes by which you can train the mind to expand into
eternal values.Teach the mind to revel in the glory and
majesty of God; wean it away from petty horizons of
pleasure. That is all that bhajan or puuja or vratha
can do. Bhajan induces in you a desire for experiencing
the truth, to glimpse the beauty that is God, to tast
the bliss that is the Self. It encourages man to dive
into himself and be genuinely for his real Self."
(Bhagawan Sathya Sai Baba. SSS. Vol.9, Chapter 14).
Why music has an ability to cause emotions -
so pervasive and important to us?
Music is remarkable in
its power over all humankind. Humanity has been making
music since the dawn of culture. More than 30,000 years
ago, early humans were already playing bone flutes,
percussive instruments and jaw harps. No human culture
on the Earth has ever lived without music: people making
music predates agriculture and perhaps even language.
Despite the ancient and primal nature of music,
though, scientists have struggled with some very
fundamental questions about its origins and purpose.
Recent scientific works discovered that music
strikes - an ancient part of our brain,
evolutionarily speaking, and one that we share with
much of the animal kingdom. In recent paper Patricia
Gray, head of the Biomusic program at the National
Academy of the Sciences, and several colleagues from
around the country propose that music came into this
world long before the human race ever did. "The fact
that whale and human music have so much in common
even though our evolutionary paths have not
intersected for 60 million years," they write (2).
Birds, animals, whales too make kinds of sound what
is possible to select as music. "When birds compose
songs they often use the same rhythmic variations,
pitch relationships, permutations and combinations
of notes as human composers," Gray and her
colleagues write.
Why would
such different creatures - with such different
physical means for making sound - all adopt such
astonishingly uniform patterns for their
melodies? Gray and her colleagues conclude that
the similarities "tempt one to speculate that
the platonic alternative may exist - that there
is a universal music awaiting discovery."
Vedic saints
discovered the universal music tune "OM"
thousands years ago. Entire music is
pictorially as an echo of primary sound
Om, what represents the Supreme Divinity. This
primary sound (as unity) is hidden in boundless
diverse music of echoes in the whole set of
creatures, unanimated objects, materials, in
space and time from black holes in vast galaxies
to living cells, crystals of water and stones,
humans consciousness....
"vi) 4. OM is the bow, the atman is the
arrow;
Brahman, they say, is the target, to be pierced
by concentration; thus one becomes
united with Brahman as an arrow with the target.
(Mund Upanishad II, 2, 3)."
The ancient cultures of different countries
used music for renewal of the divine balance in
human being restore the harmony of the human
psyche in times of disquiet and distress. Music
was used for healing by the ancient Hindus,
Chinese, Persians, Egyptians and Greeks, etc.
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, often
took his mentally disturbed patients to the
Temple of Asclepius, to make them listen to
healing music. To Pythagoras, good music was
consonant with the rhythm of life. Paracelsus
used even the metaphor of ?musical medicine' to
indicate a form of therapeutic music.
Modern science has reached to the standpoint
that musical performance may practice instead of
medicine. Today musical therapy is well known
and even the rationalists? army cannot deny it.
"Bhajan is the process of singing your prayers to God,
praising His Glory and compassion, and pleading that He
may fill you with His Grace. Dr. Hislop has a result of
many years of research, declared that prayer has a
highly curative effect on the body and mind of man."
(Sathya Sai Baba. SSS. Vol. 11, Chapter 37).
Overall, findings to date indicate that music has
a biological basis and that the brain has a functional
organization for music. From it may to do the conclusion
that music play or listening (sound with special
vibrations) has a significant role in the whole
creation...
"The river's voice was
sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness... then the
great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word:
Om - perfection... From that hour Siddhartha ceased to
fight against his destiny." (Hermann Hesse, Siddartha,
1951).
The scientists search the answer how reacts brain to
music? What is the secret of music's strange power? Is
music a tool for someone to have merged in the Divine?
"Life is a song, sing it. That
is what Krishna taught through His life. Arjuna heard
that song on the battlefield, where tensions were at the
highest and when the fate of millions was to be decided
by the sword. Krishna sang the Geetha for Arjuna to
listen. Geetha means 'song,' and He sang because He was
Aanandha (Divine Bliss), wherever He might be - in
Gokulam, on the banks of the Yamuna or at Kurukshethra
between the warring armies.
You too must pass your days in song. Let your whole
life be a bhajan. Let melody and Harmony surge up from
your hearts and let all take delight in the Love that
you express through that song." (Excerpts from: Sathya
Sai Baba. SSS. Vol. 13, Chapter 37).
In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to gain
a firmer understanding of where and how music is
processed in the brain, which should lay a foundation
for answering evolutionary questions. There is no
specialized brain "center" for music uncovered. It is
supposed that music engages many areas distributed
throughout the brain, including those that are normally
involved in other kinds of cognition. The active areas
vary with the person's individual experiences and
musical training.
Before the modern techniques, scientists gleaned
insights about the brain's inner musical workings mainly
by studying patients and famous composers who had
experienced brain deficits as a result of injury. (For
example, in 1933 French composer Maurice Ravel began to
exhibit symptoms caused by a disorder of brain tissue
atrophy. He could still hear and remember his old
compositions and play scales. However, he could not
write music. The experience of another composer
additionally suggested that music and speech were
processed independently. After suffering a stroke in
1953, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, could no
longer talk or understand speech, yet he retained the
ability to write music until his death 10 years later).
Imaging studies have also given a fine-grained
picture of the brain's responses to music. These results
make the most sense when placed in the context of how
the ear conveys sounds in general to the brain. The
processing of sounds, such as musical tones, begins with
the inner ear, which sorts complex sounds produced by,
say, a bhajans, into their constituent elementary
frequencies. Different cells in the auditory system of
the brain respond best to certain frequencies;
neighboring cells have overlapping tuning curves so that
there are no gaps.
Probably it has known, experienced and put into
practice thousands years ago by Vedic saints.
The response to music per se is more complicated.
Music consists of a sequence of tones, and perception of
it depends on grasping the relationships between sounds.
Many areas of the brain are involved in processing the
various components of music. Later the researches
discovered that music perception is not like the simple
relaying of sound in a telephone or stereo system.
Brain responses also depend on the experiences and
training of the listener. Even a little training can
quickly alter the brain's reactions. Researchers found
that learning produces the same type of tuning shifts
seen in animals. The long-term effects of learning by
retuning may help explain why we can quickly recognize a
familiar melody in a noisy room and why people suffering
memory loss can still recall music that they learned in
the past.
When incoming sound is absent, we can "listen" by
recalling a piece of music. Think of any piece you know
and "play" it in your head. Where in the brain is this
music playing?
It was found that brain has ability to revise its
wiring in support of musical activities. Just as some
training increases, the number of cells that respond to
a sound when it becomes important, prolonged learning
produces more marked responses and physical changes in
the brain. Musicians, who usually practice many hours a
day for years, show such effects - their responses to
music differ from those of no musicians; they also
exhibit hyper development of certain areas in their
brains.
In 2004 Antoine
Shahin, Larry E. Roberts and Laurel J. Trainor of
McMaster University in Ontario (1) recorded brain
responses to piano, violin and pure tones in four- and
five-year-old children. Youngsters who had received
greater exposure to music in their homes showed enhanced
brain auditory activity, comparable to that of unexposed
kids about three years older.
Musicians may display greater responses to sounds,
in part because their auditory cortex is more extensive.
Peter Schneider and his co-workers at the University of
Heidelberg in Germany reported in 2002 that the volume
of this cortex in musicians was 130 percent larger. The
percentages of volume increase were linked to levels of
musical training, suggesting that learning music
proportionally increases the number of neurons that
process it. Each type of music elicited a different but
consistent pattern of physiological change across
subjects.
It may to conclude that music listening, training
helps to stay spiritually young in old years, as brain's
areas obtains the possibility for hyper development
thanks to chanting mantras, Vedic hymns, bhajans
singing, etc... Who from us is not to wish to stay
young? These ancient tunes as remember that we are not a
bodies, but Atman (more correctly, a cosmic holograms of
Atman) what is neither young nor old but eternal
observer the Cosmic Play. Our Swami is an example for
us.
Modern psychology reached to the truth that music,
sound (be they mantras, sacred texts, Vedic
hymns chanting, bhajan singing, etc.) are amplified more
brightly and clearly when one has the true faith to
Almighty - the promoter that can to create miracles.
Here is about what to contemplate.
However, several skeptics hesitated that is would be
possible. Maybe there is a seed a truth as classical
modern neuroscience is inadequate to explain
consciousness of the human brain completely.
Consciousness is an attribute of Nature, Atmic quality
and it cannot be explained only by brain areas functions
and brains 'send-receive' quantum fields of neuroscience
and biophysics.
(What are quantum
fields? They have discovered by modern science and
partly may serve as an expression of Atman by scientific
approach. By quantum fields, consciousness is related to
Atman. How - today science does not exactly know).
It seems that God is playing His Divine play and
step- by -step is discovering His mysteries to humanity
through science, maybe, with the aim to multiply the
power of Divine. It seems, here is hidden the inner
meaning of the integration of spirituality and science
as a divine power for the spiritual development.
On the early 60-th's Niels Bohr explained: "We are
both onlookers and actors in the great drama of
existence" ( Niels Bohr. Atomic Theory and the
Description of Nature.Cambridge. The University Press,
1961, p. 119).
This sentence hides the belief of great scientist of
unite spiritual nature of Creation.
References:
1. "Music and the Brain" by Norman M. Weinberger.
"Scientific American." Section Neuroscience. November
2004.
Source:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/saibabanews/message/5183
