Power of sound by Swami and modern science

[Guest guest]

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 piercedby concentration; thus one becomesunited 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.

2. "Exploring the Musical Brain" by Kristin Leutwyler; Scientific American.

com. October 2003.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0006255F-8BAA-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21&chanID=sa008

(available for rs Scientific American).

 

Namaste - Reet