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Ravi Shankar at Three in the Morning

It is three in the morning.

I am listening to The Best of Ravi Shankar, and suddenly I am transported back to my college days in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when classical Indian music first became deeply woven into my life.

The sitar cries out. The tabla answers with its relentless rhythm. Somewhere beneath them, the violin seems to float like a voice from another dimension.

There is something about Indian classical music that is difficult to explain to someone who has never really listened.

It is not merely music.

It is movement.

It is vibration.

It is energy moving through the mind and body until, for a moment, the boundary between body, mind and spirit becomes less certain.

Perhaps that is why it feels so different at three in the morning.

At that hour, the world has become quiet enough for one to hear things that daytime usually drowns out.

The ragas seem to enter somewhere beneath thought. The rhythm of the tabla keeps the body moving while the sitar reaches somewhere beyond it. One can almost imagine the music as an ancient conversation between the visible and the invisible.

And naturally, my mind wanders into the great stories I encountered while growing up in Penang.

I learned much of the Ramayana and Mahabharata not from books at first, but through the classic Hindi films I watched as a boy. Later, with the arrival of YouTube, I was able to watch entire series again, this time with the perspective of an older man.

Then came the Bhagavad Gita.

And suddenly the stories I had absorbed as entertainment began to reveal another dimension.

The battlefield of Kurukshetra became more than a battlefield between the Pandavas and Kauravas. It became a battlefield within the human being.

And where was Hanuman?

Hanuman belongs to the Ramayana, yet in the Mahabharata he appears again, upon the banner of Arjuna's chariot at Kurukshetra.

How extraordinary that these great stories seem to speak across generations, carrying the same questions in different forms.

Who am I?

What is my duty?

Who is the doer?

What is real?

What lies beyond the noise of the mind?

Perhaps this is why I have always felt fortunate to have grown up in Penang, in a country where different races, cultures and religious traditions lived alongside one another. As a young man, I was exposed to worlds beyond my own without necessarily having to choose one world and reject another.

I could listen.

I could watch.

I could wonder.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts a human being can receive.

Music does something similar.

It does not demand that we intellectually agree with it.

It simply enters.

A raga does not need to explain itself before it moves through the body. It reverberates. It awakens memory. It stirs emotion. It can bring the mind into a different state of attention.

For some people, particularly those deeply immersed in yogic traditions, such experiences may be understood in terms of kundalini and the movement of subtle energy.

For others, it may simply be beautiful music.

Both can be true without either needing to defeat the other.

For me, listening tonight, the distinction seems almost unnecessary.

Whether the ancient story is carried through scripture, through a grandmother's voice, through a classic Hindi film, through a book, or through a video on an iPhone, something is being transmitted.

A story.

A vibration.

A possibility of remembering.

And perhaps this is what art and music have always done.

They remind us of something we may have forgotten.

That beneath the noise of our ordinary lives there is another movement taking place.

The body is moving.

The mind is moving.

Emotion is moving.

Energy is moving.

And somewhere above—or perhaps within—all of it, there is the quiet witness.

Listening.

At three in the morning, Ravi Shankar's sitar is still singing.

The tabla is still driving the rhythm forward.

And for a few precious moments, I am not trying to understand any of it.

I am simply listening.

And perhaps listening itself is a form of meditation.

Wallahu Alam.

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