The Profound Insight Hidden in the Experience of Music

 

The Profound Insight Hidden in the Experience of Music
By Untangle your Mind

 

Imagine you are listening to music.  There is a speaker across the room from where the sound is coming.  There is something really amazing going on here because if we just slow down the process it becomes quiet clear.  So let us start with the science.  The speaker causes air molecules to vibrate and that travels out as sound waves; sound waves reach your ears and in there are all these little components which go into action.  There are your ear drums, the little bones that vibrate and in turn cause the liquid in your ear canal to move. And in your ear canal there are hair follicles which are sensitive to movement and these trigger off signals to the brain which are really just charged ions.  These ions get absorbed by neurons in the brain and then when each neuron reaches a certain threshold it releases its own spurt of ions causing these chain reactions of brain activity but in this entire process which you have laid out here now where do you fit in?  In the entire process there is no hearing, there is no music, it is only at the very end of this whole chain that there is an experience and that brain activity is heard as music.  And it is heard by you.  So what exactly are you anyway.  You are not the air molecules that are vibrating; you are not the components of the ear, you are not the charged ions and all those individual neurons, millions of them in this one process cannot be you either.  They are like the hardware on which the electrical activity is happening and even that activity is of a very different nature than the music you experience.   So there is nothing really in this whole process that you can call me.  But of course you can't deny our existence, you are the one listening to music quite clearly there is music and all this stuff happening underneath the hood..

 

Now some of you will have heard the philosophy around this, the hard problem of consciousness, how we don't really know how matter and energy end up in conscious experiences and those who have not heard of the hard problem will now probably want to google it but hold on let us not go down that rabbit hole, we will cover that some other day.  The way we are framing this question right now is much more intimate, it is not philosophy it is about your own identity.  What you actually are in Reality and there is an answer, which is not a theory cause it has to do with you, it is the only possible conclusion to a deep and thorough self inquiry. 

So now we are moving from the domain of science to meditation, the wisdom of the sages.  But within this rational framework, not looking for anything supernatural, we are looking for an answer to the simple question what am I?  And on this channel you will hear about one a man named Marathi, a man who lived in Mumbai around the seventies and eighties.  Later on he came to be knows as Nisargadatta Maharaj.  Nisargadatta means nature itself which is quite appropriate if you read his teachings in his famous book I Am That.  It really sounds like he is not really a man that is speaking , it is nature describing itself.  Anyway so he gave this analogy once that I read about a fire burning .  There is the wood that is the fuel for the fire, then there is the fire and then there is the enjoyer of that fire.   See the wood is the physical substance, the body in this example where there is music.  The brain activity is maybe what you can call the fire but then that fire is experienced by a sentience and that sentience is an entirely different factor to the rest of the process.  In fact if you think in terms of cause and effect, it is really not really a cause in any of it , nor is it an effect but somehow that final effect is noticed by the sentience that is you as the experience of fire, as music, as warmth, as love. 

All these amazing experiences are being made possible by your very presence, by your very nature.  They are made possible by the fact that you are here and that you are conscious, that is the very basis of our mind.  That little fact is the basis for the entire world, for all worlds because by nature all worlds are subjective, mental, experiential and at the very foundation is the subject of our inquiry - you.  So just keep in mind this question, ponder it, what am I?  What am I that I get to experience all of this.  What am I?







There has been such resonance with this channel that to take it deeper I transcribed the talks.
Part of a sanity project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PtqpmGyq3M&list=PLfi4N5s1HS4MfyztZ_hQ-BMwP-50C_oyU