Music and Human Transformation

It can be interesting to think back of our teachers, people that had an impact on our lives. I recently found myself thinking about an unusual teacher I met soon after finishing my graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University.  Unusual, because the man I’m thinking of liked to boast to me that he never read a book!

It begins with a curious dream I had of a slightly rotund and merry man who said he was a music teacher, and was prepared to be my instructor, casually adding with a smile that there would be no instruments.  I woke up puzzled. I in fact had a jazz musician friend who gave me a few lessons for the flute I was learning. I had a special interest in music, thanks to an incident in the last days of the life of Socrates.  Facing execution, Socrates is said to have dreamt several times of a goddess who had a message for him. “Socrates,” she said, “make music.”  Socrates replied by saying that philosophy was the greatest music, but this did not fly with the goddess. She returned to his dreams and repeated her message urging him to make music. 

Meanwhile, puzzled by my dream, a few days later I received a telephone call from a friend of mine, a psychotherapist, who told me about a new music teacher she discovered. Fresh from an ashram in the Himalayas, and on a world teaching tour.  Swami Nada Brahmananda was a rare practitioner of Indian sound yoga, and I should take lessons from him, my friend Alida said.            

So I checked out the place on the lower West Side and arranged for my first lesson with the musical swami.  I still recall how I felt when he first called out my name to come into his little space. It was as if we were old friends; he invited me to sit on the floor next to him. “Mind-control is life.  Rhythm is music,” were the first words he spoke.  It wasn’t long before I realized I was in the presence of a different kind of fellow human.  Educated and evolved, but not in the Western mold. “I never read a book,” he said.  He had no interest in paper, he said triumphantly.  Everything he knew, he knew by heart, and with heart, I would add. In fact, he had memorized about five hundred ragas.  The ragas were songs, stories, and lessons from various Hindu styles and traditions, touching on every aspect of life.  These he sang, played, and taught.  His musical lens on reality was magical and transcendent

To begin with, consider his name, Nada. In one scholarly translation, it refers to the fusion of breath and the fire of intellect.  This could be a description of John Coltrane and his transcendent jazz. Nada was singular in several ways. He had amazing health and lived to be ninety-eight. I met him when he was in his eighties; his skin was like a child’s.  Energy without limit seemed available to him.  He normally slept two hours a night.  Stranger yet, he never had dreams; scientists who studied him while sleeping saw no physical signs of REM sleep. By far, I am struck by the way Nada meditated. Nada Kumbaka was the monk-musician’s daily sadhana (spiritual practice), his special form of meditation. This consisted of him taking one breath and drumming on the tabla while he focused on an icon of the god Shiva. On the one breath, never blinking, he played for thirty-five minutes, an ability he demonstrated in an airtight chamber while under study by the India Medical Institute of New Delhi. His various abilities have been verified by Indian and American scientists (e.g. the Menninger Foundation.)

One more point I want to make about my former teacher.  He often reminded me that we humans are at the tail end of the Kaliyuga, the Age of Conflicts.  It was Nada’s conviction that music, which touches and can transform the soul, is the best antidote to the horrors of the Kaliyuga.  Ordinary, practical consciousness, tied to the normal ego, will not save us from the violent and heartless world we have created. A new paradigm of consciousness is needed.  Would like to hear from readers on this point.