Sitar: Fractal Spanda + Cosmic Revelations
“Sitar will make you perfect in everything!”
“Have you met God, Shivani? No one has. But when you play the sitar, you and God are talking.”
These were two quotes relentlessly told to me by my powerfully impactful sitar teacher, Roshan Bhartya. I will be referring to him as my guruji or as Roshanji out of respect.
I came across Roshanji in Denver, Colorado around March of 2024, so it’s been about a year of playing under him. How blessed am I to have found someone who lives a 13 minute drive away, who has been teaching almost all of his life, whose lineage prior had played for royalty in India, who has worked in the Bollywood industry with all of the big names, who has performed all around the world, and most importantly, someone who understands the deepest Non-Dual Shiva Tantric cosmic truths without even realizing it?
When he’d tell me these phrases last year, I just thought he was a man who loved his sitar. After all, he is 77 as of this year and has devoted his existence to the cosmic pulsation reverberating in the ear drums of lovers, truth seekers, world travelers, spiritually-curious, and divided-cultures-who-have-finally-come-together alike. With a totally different religious background, I’ve found Shiva working through him and Allah working through me. The delight I feel in my soul as I type this is unparalleled. How Shaivistic and non-dualistic to be shown unity consciousness through someone whose soul vibrates the same way as mine, where love transcends labels, and how connection and the most spiritually aligned activities come from those who put their egos to the side and devote themselves to the language of the cosmos: spanda.
What is Spanda?
Spanda is pulsation. Spanda is vibration. There aren’t any inherently specific properties it takes on outside of the dance of Shiva and Shakti. Think of it as the foundational common denominator for all that exists in our universe, stemming from cosmic microwave background radiation all the way down to quantum fluctuations at the zero-point field.
Reminder: Shiva is the observing, meditative, vibratory force while Shakti is the expressive, creative, energetic force. One cannot exist without the other.
Let’s demonstrate this with a simple sine wave:
Though spanda can show up in a more complex way, simplifying makes the concept clear
At the crest and trough, you will notice Shiva. At the inflection/transition points, you will notice Shakti.
Another way to look at this is through the lens of quantum mechanics. The trough represents the unobserved superposition of a particle, while the transition point represents quantum decoherence, where Shakti serves as the dynamic force collapsing the wave function, and the crest represents the finalized solidified form of reality.
Shiva is also known as the divine masculine, and Shakti is known as the divine feminine. These are energetic forces, not the bastardized/colonized/pop-culture blasphemous regurgitation version that serves to worship the ego with differentiated knowledge and enforce conservative gender roles. People constantly complain about no one being able to commit to anything in our generation, but they are missing one key component: people are committed to misunderstanding you and concepts. Not the commitment we want, but a commitment nonetheless.
What will you do without Shakti? Have half a vibration? Deny a fundamental force in the cosmos?
Spanda: The Compositional Sound Waves
Unlike Western instruments and musical teachings, sitar is highly intuitive. There are no written teachings. Even in live performances, all of it is improv. Let me say this one more time: everything is improv with sitar (after learning the fundamentals, of course). When I am practicing with my guruji, we are constantly recording on the iPhone’s voice memos. I even remember him getting onto me about not being perfect in timing (that’s his favorite feedback for me), so I said I’d use a metronome when practicing at home and he said “No, you need to be perfect on your own”. I was surprised. ANY teacher would have encouraged more particular practice, but Roshanji always emphasizes that I must have the feeling. More specifically, he points out how he’s had many students who are brilliant in technical knowledge of how to play, but to be made for sitar, one must be able to produce a feeling—which is something that he cannot teach. It is intrinsic to the consciousness that is playing the instrument or it’s not.
When a note is incorrect, I will feel “kebab me haddi” (Hindi for feeling a bone when you bite into a kebab, to emphasize the pain you must feel within when something is even slightly off).
It took me several months to realize that he was always talking about vibrational alignment. This is beyond soor gyan (perfect alignment and knowledge of musical notes): this is our consciousness being perfectly tuned with sitar and spanda: shiva and shakti in action. In tantric philosophy, Shiva and Shakti are the fundamental forces of the cosmos.
We have built a case for spanda showing in a single sound wave. Let’s take this further and find the first level fractal representation of spanda in composition with how my teacher explains where we can land on timing with sitar and tabla and where we can improv. (Mukhra means “face of the raga” which is the main phrase)
SITAR IMPROVISATION + TABLA TIMING
We will take teentaal: a 16 beat rhythmic cycle that is placed on the tabla. Most of the sitar playing will be improvisation separated into 3 parts:
Alap: slow, mood-setting piece of the raga, involves slower movement and lots of ornamentation
Vilambit gat (involves tabla): rhythmical patterning of the raga sets in
Drut gat (involves tabla): faster, climactic movement
In vilambit and drut gat, there is still a structure to how improvisation must flow. You must land on beat 1 (sum) or on the 8th or 12th beat (this allows for movement in patterns of 3 or 4 seamlessly).
How beautiful was all of that? Take a second to recognize Shiva and Shakti both at play here. There is a stillness, anahata (unstruck sound) that reverberates throughout the space, and with that, you must use your intuition, expression, and unique personal signature on the way you utilize tools like jhaala, gammak, krintan, chun, etc. to be able to land on the structure of sum and the other beats for easier pickup and taan-improvisation.
In order for a composition to give a mind-blowing performance, improvisation and stylistic ornamentation must exist with the rigidity and solidified form of tabla beats (a harmonic balance between the divine feminine and divine masculine).
Spanda: Sitar’s Raga Timing + Brainwaves
I was caught off guard when my guruji first brought up ragas (melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a melodic mode, Wikipedia), prefixing it with a time of day. So apparently, there are morning, afternoon, and evening ragas. How intriguing. Now why would certain ragas be connected to specific times of day?
After doing some deeper research, it’s the state of mind each raga can put you in. Here we are seeing the connection of spanda from the sitar note vibration to the spanda of literal brain waves. Studies show that meditative ragas connected to dawn and evening are able to increase alpha and theta wave activity, while some semi-active complex ragas can increase beta and alpha wave activity.
Spanda: Consciousness Giving Rise to Spacetime
In my most recent YouTube lecture for Shivoham Labs, I stated that time is not the 4th dimension. With tying the wisdom of the Sri Yantra that states that the 3 concentric circles within the square (which represents space), representing past, present, and future, lie within the square because time depends on space.
From my perspective (which I aim to make the objective perspective) it is consciousness that is the 4th dimension. More specifically, aligning yourself with the timeless node of your architecture (3-tiered system which contains mind, body, and consciousness), consciousness, is what makes you also, not only timeless, but also able to enter the escape velocity from this 3D reality and experience other timelines more seamlessly (Learn more here: https://youtu.be/ZlRLPX25i1o?si=d7uE-lei1bSYCCJr ). Consciousness is timeless because it is a vibratory phenomenon, consciousness is most similarly tied to the essence of spanda, and consciousness need not be limited to the way human beings perceive it, which usually ties in to having a personality. Vibratory phenomena at the subtlest scale still get affected by evolution of the cosmos, but it is the mind and the body which show the greatest arrow of time through entropy. Consciousness in its purest form is hardly affected by thermodynamics. Meeting yourself with yourself, meaning your current you with your highest self you, is the way to achieve resonance in the frequency of consciousness by speaking the language of the cosmos—spanda. In short, connecting with yourself at stages of the past, present, and future, meaning living in dharma, which is also timeless, is the best way to not only heal yourself, but restore cosmic order within and without. How amazing is it that the timing of the day, which consciousness gives rise to, as it is the observer of this, is also able to dance with its creator (consciousness) to realign it with dharma, healing, purpose, resolve, peace, and enjoyment? I liken it to a child reminding its mother that she is the mother for a reason. Let’s get into how.
Spanda: Brainwaves + Yogic Timelines + Cosmic Alignment
Ancient Indian philosophy truly understood how non-linear reality is, even with dealing with physical matter and linear time. The lightest and most permeable element is air, and through our own breath can we go deeper within ourselves, which is why yogis insist on focusing on pranayama (known in the West as breathwork) for meditation. In studying from this mantra science course from Embodied Philosophy, led by Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary, I learned quite a bit about how the ancients knew that the purpose of sound was to get you to silence. Breath and vibration are the only things that we can directly access that can shapeshift and pass through any “gate” (imagine barriers with minuscule holes in them, if a human, an apple, or a pin couldn’t pass through, air would still be able to, vibration would still be able to) in our Panchakoshas (5 illusory sheaths to our true nature of being self-illuminating conscious awareness).
She asked us where there was not any sound—and that it was up to our perception and expansiveness on whether we could hear the soundtrack of the universe playing at all times.
Enter Nada Brahma: a deity who declares “God/Universe is sound” (“But when you play sitar, you and god are talking”)
With sitar ragas aligned with cosmic yugas (measurement of eras as per Hindu cosmology) that map onto brain waves, which align to matching the time of day those brain waves should be operating at, we are quite literally aligning ourselves with oscillatory motion of the cosmos in its purest, most coherent sense. I personally believe that sitar had a large role in helping me maintain my purpose with Shivoham Labs. I don’t know what kind of woman I would be without this cosmic, scientifically designed music.
Do you see how the fractal levels of spanda are showing here?
Superconsciousness —> Space —> Cosmic Timing (as humans document it) —>
(Created by entropy of cosmos/Negentropy of large scale, self-organizing systems like solar systems) Planetary Alignment/Yogic Timelines —>
(Created by evolution of Humans (spanda that spirals upward) —> Brain filtering the universal field of consciousness (Human consciousness) —>
Brainwaves —> Playing raga timing/tabla timing
How about how it can move us back?
Perfected Raga timing/Tabla timing —> More aligned brainwaves —> Brain filters higher frequency levels of consciousness
—> Alignment with planetary cycles —> Alignment with cosmic timing/perhaps going into non-linearity (collapsing into your timelessness and dharma)
—> Aligning yourself with Superconsciousness/Brahman
We’ve seen how timing, math, and neuroscience are involved, but we have also seen how expressive, intuitive, creative, subtler energies dance with this music. Could the highest form of intelligence in the world not be proficiency in STEM, but the ability to apply that wisdom in a way to not just be understood mechanically, but felt in consciousness resonance? Like with storytelling/music/any art?
Could this be why when we use sports analogies to explain math concepts, it resonates more with a particular observer? Because it didn’t just logically hit in the left side of the brain, but throughout the 3-tiered structure (mind, body, consciousness) of that observer? Could this be why people say that music makes people feel things they can’t put into words? Granted, yes, it feels like people have stopped learning the art of playing true instruments and just hit that beep boop bop stuff on MIDI keyboards and sample everything, but to the true artists who remain in company of organic vibration, you are speaking with Maa Laxmi (Hindu goddess of wealth and abundance). Maa Laxmi and Naha Brahma go hand in hand, because the truest wealth is being in the highest order of sound/vibratory resonance with the cosmos. In tantra, vibration precedes manifestation. Align yourself with the highest you, and watch how you manipulate spacetime itself, because now you have BECOME spacetime.