Rāga of Music

The Rāga of Music

Yoga is a geeky pursuit, its fans constantly waxing about the intricacies of the human mind-body connection, whereas Sanskrit lends itself to a nerdy profession, its proponents pursuing the language with the acuity of a computer scientist or even a mathematician. 

Music completes the Trinity of the Generative Mind, in the most pleasant manner.

Bhāratiya music, called Sangeet in Sanskrit, has a highly pervasive quality in the psyche, can be both geeky and nerdy at its core, yet its ability to spread through the cultural fabric of the humanScape is immeasurably beautiful. 

This power to create in the listener a deep sense of emotion is what is called Rasa, the juice or essence, of what the performer themselves experiences within. Although Art in many forms has that similar power, yet Music does this instantaneously, both subliminally and overtly.

It’s probably why Music is named so, after the Muses of Greek gods, indeed the sounds of the Devas in melodic form.

What makes Sangeet unique in the Music systems of the world is that it is based on Rāgas, which are melodic patterns that evoke specific emotions and their undertones/overtones. Just as a Guru’s Sanskrit Mantras invoke Devas and transmits them to followers, it would be fair to say that Rāgas invokes our Muses which makes the journey much more pleasing, and Rasa transmits them to the collective.

In Sanskrit, the Muses are called Gandharvas, where Gandha means the primordial sense of smell that evokes the deepest of memories, beneath spoken language, and lying somewhere above Nature’s sounds, thus bridging them in a very subtle way. Unlike all the other senses, the sense of smell directly hooks into the amygdala of the brain, circumventing the brain’s thalamus and plugs right into the frontal cortex. And these deep memories from music are carried within by psychic energies of the Gandharva. Think of them as Musical Intelligences, deified for the beauty they bring into our Mindscape.

Underneath the Rāga patterns are Swaras, the core musical alphabet that are equivalent to seed stage Bija Mantras that then flower into full Mantras that invoke Devas. 

When Swaras, Bija Mantras, Rāgas and Mantras are all woven into an evocative story, with a whiff of pleasant tropical fragrances to add to the experience, we could transform our past and even hum our desired future into existence.