While listening to stringed instruments, hear their composite central sound; thus omnipresence.
- In the flowing notes of a sitar or any stringed instrument there is one composite central current — the ‘backbone’ around which all the notes move and which holds them together, like the spinal column holding the body. Penetrate past the surface notes, find that continuous thread, and stay alert to it.
- For the musician: play outwardly while tracking that innermost core inwardly with intense awareness — outer music plus inner alertness produces samadhi, the highest peak. When the inner music becomes more vivid than the outer, the player breaks the instrument: the outer has become a disturbance to what is now directly accessible inside. The instrument was only the device to grow alertness — but the inner cannot be found without first using the outer.
- For the listener: the same inward penetration is possible. The common perversion is using music as alcohol — for relaxation and self-forgetfulness, an inducement to sleep. This exactly inverts the technique: a device built for awakening is turned into a drug for deeper sleep.
- Misused this way, music deepens sleep and sexuality together (the more asleep, the more sexual); used meditatively and awake, the same energy becomes love.
- Marker / result: the ego-point — the ‘somewhere’ you occupy — dissolves, and omnipresence replaces location: you are everywhere instead of somewhere. Finiteness belongs to mind; infiniteness enters with meditation.
- Music and dance were originally developed as meditation vehicles, for the performer and the audience alike; a musician without meditation is only a technician — a body with no soul in it.