Music As Gateway To Infinity

    To us young shagirds or disciples, Guru Pandit Amarnathji would often repeat the phrase, ‘Swara hi Ishwar hai’, a subtle declaration that would mark the end of many a brainstorming session held on classical music...to impress upon us that “music took you to God” – or in other words, to infinity, to the Self.
    The etymology of ‘swara’ is ‘swa’ meaning the ‘Self ’ or ‘Soul’, and ‘ra’, meaning to ‘proffer’ or to ‘hold out for acceptance’. The word ‘acceptance’ refers to the connectivity requested by a musician when his music is offered to the Lord. Indeed, the human voice, producing naada or cosmic sound, is a gateway to infinity. 
    The gateway is revealed by the sensitive guru who constantly opens up the psychological congestions of swaras in the human voice, to reveal the exquisite beauty of the infinite Self within. During the course of training, the siddha guru, with intense intuitive power, will coordinate the psychological or mental placements of the swaras with their vocal placements in the disciple, constantly locating and correcting her misplaced conceptions, which create discordant areas in the disciple’s swara mandala or tone table. You will enact what you conceive. Any lack of coordination – which makes the student no less uncomfortable as well – is a result of the mythical ‘darkness of ignorance’ about the swaras in her psyche, and therefore in her soul as well. As the swaras are corrected, she will experience a constant release, and therefore spiritual liberation. Not to speak of an immensely improved melodiousness in her singing or playing. For each swara is potentially the gateway to a flood of infinite light. 
    The connectivity of one swara with another is equally interesting. When we were young we were told that swaras were in relationships very much like familial relationships, and that the beauty of each swara was enunciated by the measure of its distance from the other swaras. Just as distance created the classification and meaning of a relationship, so, too, distances between the swaras marked the tone and meaning, and the colour and fragrance of musical relationships, which turned into beautiful musical phrases and sentences. And so we discovered how all the agony of a raga like Bilaskhani Todi lay in the treatment of a suspended gandhar or Ga, all the pleading in the raga Gorakh Kalyan was produced by the silent ambience of its nishad or Ni, and that you lit the lamp in the raga Durga at its madhya saptak dhaivat or middle register Dha, sung like an ecstatic call, even when the same Dha in the lower register or mandra was as peaceful, and as quiet, as ever. I remember once asking Panditji about the difference between the swaras when a musician was young, and when she was older. Panditji loved the question, and replied that when you were young, the swaras felt ‘apart and separate’. When the musician was older, their outlines tended to fade away; and having ‘ripened’, their shrutis or microtones, addressing and relating to each other, belonged to each other more profoundly than ever before. 
    It was only years later that i realised what he had actually meant. He had spelt out the experience of samadhi or meditation during the rendering of the raga. When, for the musician, all the swaras started merging and becoming One in a loving, ecstatic whole...from ‘Swara’ to ‘Ishwara’. From offering to acceptance.