The Imaginary World in Your Ears: Music Through an Advaitic Lens
Genre: Article
The Imaginary World in Your Ears: Music Through an Advaitic Lens
Genre: Article
Maladaptive Daydreaming during listening to music
Author’s Note: This Article is the fifth installment in an ongoing exploration of radical non-duality. To fully grasp the psychological framework used below, I highly recommend reading second section of this article (On Acharya Prashant’s Philosophy), which I wrote in past.
Lately, I have been thinking about music and why human beings love it so much. Data shows that the average Spotify user listens to approximately 148 minutes (2 hours and 28 minutes) of audio per day. While casual listeners spend about 30 to 90 minutes daily, heavy users frequently clock 4 to 6 hours or more. Having once spent at least two hours a day anchored to my own headphones, I wanted to investigate this phenomenon through an Advaitic lens.
Personal Experience
I used not to just listen to music, but to create a different imaginary world of my own altogether, where I am a kind of hero and all my fantasies get fulfilled. In this world, everything happens as I desire, everything used to be extremely fine as I desired it to happen. Later, I found out that it is what Psychologists called **Maladaptive daydreaming, **an intense psychological condition where a person experiences vivid, complex daydreams that distract from real-life responsibilities.
What does the science say?
Scientifically, music is the intentional organization of sound waves over time, characterized by periodic frequency, structured rhythm, and harmonic relationships. While noise consists of chaotic, non-periodic, and random acoustic waveforms, music relies on periodicity (vibrations that repeat at regular intervals) and mathematical ratios between frequencies.
Pitch is the psychological perception of a sound wave’s frequency (measured in Hertz, or cycles per second). Examples of high pitch include a violin or a whistle, while that of low pitch include bass guitar or thunder. In physics, no real instrument produces a pure single frequency (a sine wave). Instead, they produce a fundamental frequency plus a unique cocktail of mathematical fractions of that frequency called overtones or harmonics. Our brain decodes this cocktail as tone quality.
Biologically and neurologically, music is an evolutionary anomaly. It doesn’t give us caloric nutrition, physical shelter, or genetic reproduction, yet it stimulates the exact same primitive survival circuitry in our brains. Neuroimaging studies (notably by Dr. Robert Zatorre) show that listening to music releases dopamine in the striatum (specifically the caudate and nucleus accumbens) — the exact same brain pathways activated by food, sex, and addictive drugs. There is sufficient evidence, along with observations, that has led many musical theorists, philosophers and neuroscientists to link emotion with tonality. This seems almost obvious because the tones in music seem like a characterization of the tones in human speech, which indicate emotional content. The vowels in the phonemes of a song are elongated for a dramatic effect, and it seems as though musical tones are simply exaggerations of the normal verbal tonality.
Evolutionary biologists (like **Daniel Levitin) suggest music evolved as a tool for group survival. Moving in rhythm together (dancing) or singing together releases oxytocin (the bonding hormone) and endorphins, lower stress hormones (cortisol), and mimic human vocal syntax, making us feel deeply connected to the “intent” behind the sound. While other biologists (like [Steven Pinker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker)*) disagree and propose that Just as cheesecake is a technological invention that jacks into our biological craving for fat and sugar (which were* evolutionary necessities), music is a cultural technology that accidentally jacks into our evolutionary systems for language processing, sound localization, and emotional pattern recognition.
Music from Advaitic lens
Considering the second section of this article has been read, I will be directly using terms from philosophical framework of Acharya Prashant.
The ego adapts the biological and evolutionary functions of the body for its own use, i.e., to fulfill the feeling of inner void/incompleteness. For example,. eating is a simple bodily function to provide energy for survival, every animal eats food, but only as much as needed. It is only the human being which eats more than needed and thus becomes obese, because the ego makes food as an object of desire, and tries (unsuccessfully) to fulfill the inner void through it. Similarly, sex is an evolutionary tool designed for reproduction, and animals do it only at the time of heat, while humans do it all the time, again because ego usurps sex and make it the object of desire to fulfill the inner incompleteness. Same goes for any simple bodily function or evolutionary tactic.
As we have seen, it is already scientifically shown that listening to music releases dopamine in the striatum (specifically the caudate and nucleus accumbens) — the exact same brain pathways activated by food and sex. So While it can be debated that whether music has any evolutionary function or is it just an evolutionary anomaly (like Cheesecake), it is certainly clear that it stimulates the exact same primitive survival circuitry in our brains, similar to many bodily functions, and therefore it can be explained like the excess of other bodily functions were explained: The ego is using music as an object of desire to fulfill its inner void. It operates under the illusion that triggering the reward centers of the striatum — whether through food, sex, or a perfectly resolved chord progression (music) — can permanently satisfy the inner incompleteness, and that’s why human beings love music so much! The different types of tone, which correlate to different types of emotion, are just the exaggerations or extensions of primitive emotions, and the ego uses them as scaffolding, playing different tones on different days depending on emotional state in which it is.
Maladaptive daydreaming is the way of ego to escape reality. The ego suffers due to two reasons, One of them is that it doesn’t easily acquire its object of desire because of the randomness and silence of the universe (universe is inert, i.e., it doesn’t care for your wants and desires). So to escape the painful reality, it creates its own imaginary world during listening to songs, where all its desires are instantly fulfilled, everything works with the ego and its ignorance as the center in this imaginary universe. The imaginary world keeps adapting itself in accordance with the tones of the music. The mass popularity of rap music is a clear manifestation of maladaptive daydreaming, where beats and rythmic patterns are used to stimulate all the primitive tendencies of violence, pride and sex, fueling an instantly accessible heroic fantasy.
Conclusion
Music in itself is not the problem, just as biology is not the problem. It is a neutral energy. Just as it can be weaponized by the ego to construct protective illusions and deepen its own ignorance, it can also be inverted for the radical purpose of self-dissolution. When the classical Bhajans of Kabir or the Upanishadic verses are sung, music ceases to be an escape from reality; it becomes a vehicle of truth. Ultimately, the question we must ask ourselves when we put on our headphones is simple: Is this sound being used to fatten the ego, or to dissolve it?
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