By Rajgopal Nidamboor
Our daily life is nothing short of a typical ‘hypnotic’ state. Visualise this — when your boss compliments you, first thing in the morning, for a fabulous job done, you are in a cheerful frame of mind all day. If you are, on the contrary, told that you made a mess of things, you’d be down in the dumps for the whole week. In addition, you’d carry your depression home and spill venom on the paper weight, your wife, or kids. This is not fiction. It is reality, because fiction is often truth — a simmering paradox waiting to happen, or explode, from deep within your psyche.
It is all in our mind, yes. It is also a part of our collective conscious. When you attend a classical music recital, for example, you are drawn to melodious notes just like duck to water.
Not all of us are connoisseurs of music. Yet, music, which is aptly called the highest philosophy, ‘revs-up’ our frame of mind. We do not know how exactly this happens — whether it is the upshot of a certain tempo, soft 'cascading' notes, or tenor. Any which way you look at it, the fact is music is art. It triggers characteristic emotional effects — just like what reading a classy book does to the mind, body and soul. It can also, on the contrary, have a negative effect — extremely loud, or wacky, music can produce a bodily earthquake. It can ‘blow up’ your hearing; it can also lead to sleeplessness.
What does this connote? That our emotional response to art is keyed to some form of empathy. It is entirely up to us to stoke it with positive, or negative, emotions — because, how close, or how distant, we permit ourselves to be with our epitome of ‘expressive’ art determines who we are, or want to be.
Rajgopal Nidamboor, PhD, is a wellness physician-writer-editor, independent researcher, columnist, author, and publisher. His published work includes hundreds of newspaper, magazine, Web articles, essays, meditations, columns, and critiques on a host of subjects, aside from four books on natural health, two coffee table tomes, a handful of eBooks, and an encyclopedic treatise on Indian philosophy. He calls himself an irrepressible idealist. What he likes best is spending quality time with his family and close friends, and in reading, writing, listening to music, watching cricket/old movies, and mindful meditation. He lives in Navi Mumbai, India.
Comments