Dr. Detlef Krauth, Germany

“This is no concert – this is Raga Ragini Vidya”, said Sri Swamiji in the beginning of the concert in Berlin two years ago and played healing Ragas. Raga is tune, Ragini the Goddess and Vidya means to feel or to experience. If we set aside the description given in Swamiji’s life history, we can say that by listening to this music we can feel or experience God.
Sri Swamiji asked a musician one evening to play a certain Raga. He started to play his instrument, stopped, started again and after several attempts he said: “I play this Raga very often and people call me a master on my instrument, but this evening I am ashamed, as it is not possible for me to play. I feel like a beginner.” And Swamiji said, “On the contrary, you just proved to be a true master, because this Raga should and can not be played in the evening. It is a morning Raga and must be played in the morning only.” This example shows, how music is embedded in Nature itself, so that we can imagine that it has healing powers.

But how should we listen to this music so that we can have the results of healing or even the feeling of God? Firstly we must not only listen to what is played by the musicians. To think “Oh this is that Raga, it has this harmony and that rhythm, oh, now it is violin playing and now tabala starts” this is not the way of listening. We must listen, how the music is played. I give an example from my profession as psychotherapist: A woman is talking about her first relation with a man, which was not good and it is not worth to tell anymore. But I ask spontaneously: “was there a pregnancy?” and the woman burst out in tears, and there is a problem in her life we have to deal with. This was revealed by her voice, how she was talking, which was completely different from what she said.

Swamiji once said that he is 100% nature. So we should listen to Swamiji’s music like we experience an event of nature. Lets give an example: I am coming home on a very hot sunny day. Wind blows. Something is changing. I look back to the west. The sky becomes dark. A thunderstorm develops. The winding is shaking the trees. The sunshine becomes sticky. The sky is black with clouds, the sun disappears, the birds stop singing, heavy single drops of rain are falling. I go faster. And when I reach my home, the rain is pouring down. I am happy to stay at the window and observe the lightening in the west first. It lasts a bit, till thunder comes. But then the lightening multiplies, the room is lightened by their different shapes and the thunder comes at once and fills the room with its ear-breaking noise. I am in the midst of storm. Lightening follows after lightening now, in the south and the thunder crashes immediately and the rain is hammering the roof. And it lasts long – may be half an hour and then the lightening goes to the east and the thunders need more time. Slowly the rain lessens till there are seldom lightening far away and finally the rain nearly stops. The sun enters the sky again and we have “Creation day” : the air is completely clear, the trees are greener than they have ever been and yes, there is the rainbow.

And I sit down and ask myself, where have I been all the time. It is as if I have been the lightening, the thunder and the rain myself. The separation between Nature and myself is dwindling. This is feeling the true existence, feeling God.

“The leaves are falling
Falling as from a distance
As were fading in heaven distant gardens
They are falling with denying gesture
This hand there falls, and look at others:
It is in all of them
Yet there is One who holds this falling
Very delicately in HIS hands”

Here the leaves are human feelings, denying gestures, here there is no separation between leaves and human hands, here the separation between subject and objects dwindle, but there is still duality. There is someone, who is holding the falling. So it is still feeling and not experiencing God.

With Swamiji’s music we can even experience true reality or God. Then we listen to the music till we become the sound ourselves, and when we open the eyes, the music, the concert hall, the musicians, and the audience all are myself. And the neighbour, who looks at me, she is myself. I think her thoughts. I feel her feeling. This is not thought transfer, this is unity. There is no other. And then there is LOVE, an impersonal love, which has no objects or all objects, the love that maintains the world. This is it, just this, there is nothing else. And when we experience this state, even just for a second, we can say, when we leave the concert hall what was said by a woman at the end of an Indian movie:

“I have experienced love
now nothing can happen to me
the events of living and dying
will blow through myself like the wind
that blows through the leaves of a tree
I have experienced love.

This life is passing by, and all essentials dwindle away. We have to awaken from our dream. There is not much time left.

So it is said: Listening, listening only listening till listening disappears and the sound of music becomes ourselves.

Jaya Guru Datta