Dear Subscribers,

Story time.

This post has been gestating a long time. If humans are only incubated for nine months plus or minus a bit and elephants stay in the womb for 645 days, I wonder what will be born out of something conceived back in 1968? Here is the short version of the story. After Vietnam and before reporting to the embassy in New Delhi, I drove a Land Rover from England to India. It took about 100 days. At the time, there was a race going on and the participants covered the same distance in 10 days, but I was not in a hurry and I wanted to explore. One of the first stops and the most memorable experience was a visit to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. With a Sagittarian Moon in the ninth house, you can imagine that I would have liked to stay there for months or years. To set the stage a bit, let me simply say that I was aware of perception to some extent because, as an undergraduate, I had taken a lot of courses in anthropology. These included both cultural and linguistic explorations of foreign peoples and their languages. Being an Asian Studies major, the cultures I studied were predominantly Asian but not exclusively so. For instance, at the time, the Japanese word "ao" was variously translated as blue, green, or even brown, basically any color one can find in nature. If you go to a paint store and see the chips for different colors, you can see that people have a field day finding different names for 30 shades of peach. The idea was that if the mind does not distinguish clearly between the nuances of colors or sounds, there is little likelihood that persons would actually notice the nuances. In fact, even if we believe that the eyes see and that they interpret color, this is not 100% true because the eyes transfer electrical signals to the back of the brain where there is no light at all. If the truth be known, all our senses work this way, and it is almost strange that we interpret some vibrations as colors and others as sound.

Oh, that was too fast and people will need stepping stones.

If we take oscillations per second and keep doubling them — we are actually going up one octave each time. We have no senses operating in the lower frequencies. We begin to hear around the 8th octave and we can, as we know, hear sounds in several octaves. We also know that dogs hear better than we do so a dog whistle is silent for us but not for dogs. If we depend on our senses to validate reality, we could easily convince ourselves that the dog hears something that does not exist, an obviously erroneous assumption, but one that can be iterated with absolute certainty by the uninitiated. Because of science, however, we can convince ourselves that vibrations are being produced, even if they are inaudible. Anyway, to keep this relatively simple, let's assume that people can hear sounds from 20 to 20,000 Hz, i.e., ten octaves. Of course, deaf people do not hear so there are many variations affecting what we do and do not hear.

I want to keep this as simple as possible because it would otherwise take volumes to make my points. The eyes function in the 49th octave and only see colors in that octave so, once again, we could convince ourselves and others that sounds do not have colors even though logically, this seems improbable. It is simply that we have a different sense organ functioning in the 49th octave; and it is ignorant not only of infrared and ultraviolet spectrums but also of all the variations of colors that might exist in other lower and higher octaves. The mind can be quite dogmatic so it accepts unconditionally the proof submitted by our senses.

Somewhere along the line, those of us who inherited a Western culture, agreed to slice the octave into seven notes. Pythagoras, for example, may be better remembered for the formula we learned in school than for his influence on music, but according to biographers attempting to explain the sage to yet unborn generations, Pythagoras had his first musical "ah ha" experience when walking past a blacksmith who was hammering metal. Being interested in string instruments, he performed various experiments and came up with a scale that sounds more or less normal to our ears, but the scale is not exactly the same everywhere. The concept of harmony and dissonance is very complicated and also very much influenced by Pythagorean mathematics that we did not necessarily learn in school.

Even if we cannot agree on anything much less everything, we might agree that striking an object involves movement and that movement causes sound . . . that we may or may not actually hear. The pitch is dependent upon the instrument. Well, the length of a string determines the pitch. Where the singing bowls are concerned, the pitch is determined by the size of the bowl, thickness of the metal, as well as where the bowl is struck. What I have been telling those who ask me to select specific sounds for them is that Himalayan bowls are not "tuned" chromatically and there is no consistency at all in the pitch. When the bowl is singing, the needle on the tuner goes wild. What are we to make of this?

My sense, oops, is that a cascade of sounds is unleashed that vibrates in a manner that races through a spectrum. The makers of the bowls were not trying to create instruments for a musical performance by which I mean, the bowls are not like marimbas or even wind chimes. They "pierce" and therefore have the capacity to plow through blockages. Then, they vibrate and hum. What is perhaps even more fascinating is what happens to the sound. If we believe that nothing in the Universe is ever lost, then we have to accept that long after the sound is produced, the ripples keep going and going and going. These cover an amazing range of sounds, most of which become inaudible but we cannot prove they are extinguished. We can stop the bowl from singing, but we cannot stop the vibrations from continuing their journey through space. This is very important because it gives us a reason to exercise discrimination when creating anything. For instance, we cannot be sure that all rubbish ends up in black holes where there is perhaps annihilation but certainly no escape. In fact, this concept is very unlikely to be true because nothing is lost even if our senses do not allow us to prove this to the satisfaction of our peers in academia.

The idea that something is pitch perfect depends, of course, on our concept of pitch. In reality, it probably only means that according to the tuning conventions, the pitch is correct The standardization of A above middle C being 440 Hz took place by international agreements in 1955 and 1975. We don't know how many martinis it took to reach a committee decision; but many orchestras, especially in Europe, ignore the agreement. Before the agreement, A could have been anywhere from 380 to 450-452. I don't make up these stories. The conclusions of experts are based on examination of antique organ pipes. Verdi, my favorite composer, recommended 432 Hz. My feeling is that he understood the voice and the range of the voice; and when his music is played with this tuning, there are fewer catastrophes at vocal transition points, a great help for singers, especially tenors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmauTTi7awA

People can get so passionate about these details that they refer to modern tuning as an attempt to undermine culture through demonic tuning. Well, I am not sure that A=440 Hz is creepy, but if we go on from Pythagoras to Plato, we read the explanations of Pythagorean concepts. Music is heard by the ear, registered in the brain, carried to the blood, and transmitted to the soul. Pythagoras was strict and insisted on discipline and purity, virtues he considered essential to knowledge of truth. Today, truth is very much subverted; but what is worse perhaps than centuries ago is that sound is so much more easily broadcast that we are victims of both the audible and inaudible spectrums which, as Aristotle would go on to say, can be used to undermine society and cause its degradation.

Well, we know that sound can shatter glass, but are we sure it corrupts? I believe that sound can overwhelm and weaken and interfere with clear perception. This is why we need occasionally to disconnect so as to create a clear space in which to reconnect with ourselves. Now, I can ask whether sound is used to bring us into relationship with our souls or whether the soul was the author of the sound and we need to listen in order to reconnect. Surely all music that is inspired has great spiritual power whereas some music is disconcerting, oops, and disturbing, as are some voices and the words used. We are hence responsible for bringing ourselves into harmony so as to perceive correctly and do our part to harmonize with the divine.

There are thousands more issues that can be raised in this brief discussion. For instance, if our physical reality is understood only in terms of the sense perceptions transmitted to the brain and if nothing is actually lost, we can perhaps find other lenses in the brain that allow us to perceive what exists outside of our senses. If we were successful in this attempt, we would lose awareness of our physicality and find ourselves exactly where our brain takes us. It would seem as real as our sense perceptions because the same mechanism of validation is in gear even though functioning independently of the known stimuli. If this part of our brain is also fractal, as seems possible, then we are not just the microcosm of the macrocosm but rather a speck that is a replica of something larger. However, here and there lose meaning when we have no physical method for measuring distance or time. So, tapping into areas of the brain that are not associated with the senses may cause all sorts of unfamiliar phenomena to manifest.

All I am saying here is that a singing bowl may be a meditation device that helps us to open avenues of perception that are not necessarily used. The bowls may therefore be personally beneficial but also of wider impact since they set into motion frequencies that are clearing. Since nothing is lost, everything that hears the sound, on whatever level, is permanently imprinted by the sound. Moreover, everything remembers the sound, which is very interesting in light of Emoto's Messages from Water and the researches of others who are interested in the benefits of vibrational healing.

Since I have been interested in music healing for a long time, I want to close this Sunday post by saying that when people use sound to heal or to become more conscious, the effects can be incredibly profound. If you think of every dysfunctional pattern as what we would call dissonance, then sound has the potential to correct "wrong notes" but I believe this explanation to be simplistic because it may be construed to mean that our chromatic scale is somehow inherently perfect whereas the reality is that the spaces between notes are not empty. They are simply skipped because of our tuning. Listening to music using other scales, such as gypsy music or gamelan, brings our attention to vibrations that are not normally registered by the brain. Then, keeping in mind that every frequency has content, we can see what happens when we open ourselves to a variety of vibratory experiences.

As I have been suggesting, though we are designed more flexibly than some of us realize, authority blocks us from having certain experiences. Worse, it preconditions us to believe that some experiences are wrong. They may be flat or sharp or wobbly or screechy, but they also have existence since there is no one way to slice an octave. I am repeating this because, if you think about it, you see that the color spectrum has also been divided into seven colors of the rainbow whereas the reality is that we can create these colors with a few inkjet cartridges and the click of a mouse. The beauty of the computer age is that we can sometimes see the spectrum without its distinctions and this brings in more nuance.

If we allow ourselves the free fall into inner space, we might find a reality that is difficult to corroborate through the senses, but is it less real? Or, have our minds been closed to frequencies with different information, literally mind altering information. My contention is that experimenting with different scales, pitches, and overtones can unlock what is hidden. This is what Pythagoras and his followers called mysticism, but does this not mean insight into what is not common knowledge?

So, this is my third post on singing bowls. I am writing this because my experience suggests that music and sounds are ways to unlock memory, including memory of self. By finding who we are and aligning with what we discover, we eliminate an immense amount of chaos and replace it with pure intent. Once the mind is aware of true self, this knowledge cannot be banished. Therefore, we can possibly overcome the effects of vibrations that subvert and replace them with vibrations that restore and guide.

My next experiments will be to imprint water and see how the plants respond to water that has had the unique experience of listening. Since water remembers, it might be possible to use water to educate water that has not been imprinted and thereby to create a hundredth monkey effect with very little personal effort. Obviously, I am speculating. I have no idea what the outcome might be, but being intensely curious, I want to try various experiments.

Many blessings,

Ingrid
https://bioethikainternational.com/shop_herbs/singing_bowls.php

Story time.

This post has been gestating a long time. If humans are only incubated for nine months plus or minus a bit and elephants stay in the womb for 645 days, I wonder what will be born out of something conceived back in 1968? Here is the short version of the story. After Vietnam and before reporting to the embassy in New Delhi, I drove a Land Rover from England to India. It took about 100 days. At the time, there was a race going on and the participants covered the same distance in 10 days, but I was not in a hurry and I wanted to explore. One of the first stops and the most memorable experience was a visit to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. With a Sagittarian Moon in the ninth house, you can imagine that I would have liked to stay there for months or years. To set the stage a bit, let me simply say that I was aware of perception to some extent because, as an undergraduate, I had taken a lot of courses in anthropology. These included both cultural and linguistic explorations of foreign peoples and their languages. Being an Asian Studies major, the cultures I studied were predominantly Asian but not exclusively so. For instance, at the time, the Japanese word "ao" was variously translated as blue, green, or even brown, basically any color one can find in nature. If you go to a paint store and see the chips for different colors, you can see that people have a field day finding different names for 30 shades of peach. The idea was that if the mind does not distinguish clearly between the nuances of colors or sounds, there is little likelihood that persons would actually notice the nuances. In fact, even if we believe that the eyes see and that they interpret color, this is not 100% true because the eyes transfer electrical signals to the back of the brain where there is no light at all. If the truth be known, all our senses work this way, and it is almost strange that we interpret some vibrations as colors and others as sound.

Oh, that was too fast and people will need stepping stones.

If we take oscillations per second and keep doubling them — we are actually going up one octave each time. We have no senses operating in the lower frequencies. We begin to hear around the 8th octave and we can, as we know, hear sounds in several octaves. We also know that dogs hear better than we do so a dog whistle is silent for us but not for dogs. If we depend on our senses to validate reality, we could easily convince ourselves that the dog hears something that does not exist, an obviously erroneous assumption, but one that can be iterated with absolute certainty by the uninitiated. Because of science, however, we can convince ourselves that vibrations are being produced, even if they are inaudible. Anyway, to keep this relatively simple, let's assume that people can hear sounds from 20 to 20,000 Hz, i.e., ten octaves. Of course, deaf people do not hear so there are many variations affecting what we do and do not hear.

I want to keep this as simple as possible because it would otherwise take volumes to make my points. The eyes function in the 49th octave and only see colors in that octave so, once again, we could convince ourselves and others that sounds do not have colors even though logically, this seems improbable. It is simply that we have a different sense organ functioning in the 49th octave; and it is ignorant not only of infrared and ultraviolet spectrums but also of all the variations of colors that might exist in other lower and higher octaves. The mind can be quite dogmatic so it accepts unconditionally the proof submitted by our senses.

Somewhere along the line, those of us who inherited a Western culture, agreed to slice the octave into seven notes. Pythagoras, for example, may be better remembered for the formula we learned in school than for his influence on music, but according to biographers attempting to explain the sage to yet unborn generations, Pythagoras had his first musical "ah ha" experience when walking past a blacksmith who was hammering metal. Being interested in string instruments, he performed various experiments and came up with a scale that sounds more or less normal to our ears, but the scale is not exactly the same everywhere. The concept of harmony and dissonance is very complicated and also very much influenced by Pythagorean mathematics that we did not necessarily learn in school.

Even if we cannot agree on anything much less everything, we might agree that striking an object involves movement and that movement causes sound . . . that we may or may not actually hear. The pitch is dependent upon the instrument. Well, the length of a string determines the pitch. Where the singing bowls are concerned, the pitch is determined by the size of the bowl, thickness of the metal, as well as where the bowl is struck. What I have been telling those who ask me to select specific sounds for them is that Himalayan bowls are not "tuned" chromatically and there is no consistency at all in the pitch. When the bowl is singing, the needle on the tuner goes wild. What are we to make of this?

My sense, oops, is that a cascade of sounds is unleashed that vibrates in a manner that races through a spectrum. The makers of the bowls were not trying to create instruments for a musical performance by which I mean, the bowls are not like marimbas or even wind chimes. They "pierce" and therefore have the capacity to plow through blockages. Then, they vibrate and hum. What is perhaps even more fascinating is what happens to the sound. If we believe that nothing in the Universe is ever lost, then we have to accept that long after the sound is produced, the ripples keep going and going and going. These cover an amazing range of sounds, most of which become inaudible but we cannot prove they are extinguished. We can stop the bowl from singing, but we cannot stop the vibrations from continuing their journey through space. This is very important because it gives us a reason to exercise discrimination when creating anything. For instance, we cannot be sure that all rubbish ends up in black holes where there is perhaps annihilation but certainly no escape. In fact, this concept is very unlikely to be true because nothing is lost even if our senses do not allow us to prove this to the satisfaction of our peers in academia.

The idea that something is pitch perfect depends, of course, on our concept of pitch. In reality, it probably only means that according to the tuning conventions, the pitch is correct The standardization of A above middle C being 440 Hz took place by international agreements in 1955 and 1975. We don't know how many martinis it took to reach a committee decision; but many orchestras, especially in Europe, ignore the agreement. Before the agreement, A could have been anywhere from 380 to 450-452. I don't make up these stories. The conclusions of experts are based on examination of antique organ pipes. Verdi, my favorite composer, recommended 432 Hz. My feeling is that he understood the voice and the range of the voice; and when his music is played with this tuning, there are fewer catastrophes at vocal transition points, a great help for singers, especially tenors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmauTTi7awA

People can get so passionate about these details that they refer to modern tuning as an attempt to undermine culture through demonic tuning. Well, I am not sure that A=440 Hz is creepy, but if we go on from Pythagoras to Plato, we read the explanations of Pythagorean concepts. Music is heard by the ear, registered in the brain, carried to the blood, and transmitted to the soul. Pythagoras was strict and insisted on discipline and purity, virtues he considered essential to knowledge of truth. Today, truth is very much subverted; but what is worse perhaps than centuries ago is that sound is so much more easily broadcast that we are victims of both the audible and inaudible spectrums which, as Aristotle would go on to say, can be used to undermine society and cause its degradation.

Well, we know that sound can shatter glass, but are we sure it corrupts? I believe that sound can overwhelm and weaken and interfere with clear perception. This is why we need occasionally to disconnect so as to create a clear space in which to reconnect with ourselves. Now, I can ask whether sound is used to bring us into relationship with our souls or whether the soul was the author of the sound and we need to listen in order to reconnect. Surely all music that is inspired has great spiritual power whereas some music is disconcerting, oops, and disturbing, as are some voices and the words used. We are hence responsible for bringing ourselves into harmony so as to perceive correctly and do our part to harmonize with the divine.

There are thousands more issues that can be raised in this brief discussion. For instance, if our physical reality is understood only in terms of the sense perceptions transmitted to the brain and if nothing is actually lost, we can perhaps find other lenses in the brain that allow us to perceive what exists outside of our senses. If we were successful in this attempt, we would lose awareness of our physicality and find ourselves exactly where our brain takes us. It would seem as real as our sense perceptions because the same mechanism of validation is in gear even though functioning independently of the known stimuli. If this part of our brain is also fractal, as seems possible, then we are not just the microcosm of the macrocosm but rather a speck that is a replica of something larger. However, here and there lose meaning when we have no physical method for measuring distance or time. So, tapping into areas of the brain that are not associated with the senses may cause all sorts of unfamiliar phenomena to manifest.

All I am saying here is that the a singing bowl may be a meditation device that helps us to open avenues of perception that are not necessarily used. The bowls may therefore be personally beneficial but also of wider impact since they set into motion frequencies that are clearing. Since nothing is lost, everything that hears the sound, on whatever level, is permanently imprinted by the sound. Moreover, everything remembers the sound, which is very interesting in light of Emoto's Messages from Water and the researches of others who are interested in the benefits of vibrational healing.

Since I have been interested in music healing for a long time, I want to close this Sunday post by saying that when people use sound to heal or to become more conscious, the effects can be incredibly profound. If you think of every dysfunctional pattern as what we would call dissonance, then sound has the potential to correct "wrong notes" but I believe this explanation to be simplistic because it may be construed to mean that our chromatic scale is somehow inherently perfect whereas the reality is that the spaces between notes are not empty. They are simply skipped because of our tuning. Listening to music using other scales, such as gypsy music or gamelan, brings our attention to vibrations that are not normally registered by the brain. Then, keeping in mind that every frequency has content, we can see what happens when we open ourselves to a variety of vibratory experiences.

As I have been suggesting, though we are designed more flexibly than some of us realize, authority blocks us from having certain experiences. Worse, it preconditions us to believe that some experiences are wrong. They may be flat or sharp or wobbly or screechy, but they also have existence since there is no one way to slice an octave. I am repeating this because, if you think about it, you see that the color spectrum has also been divided into seven colors of the rainbow whereas the reality is that we can create these colors with a few inkjet cartridges and the click of a mouse. The beauty of the computer age is that we can sometimes see the spectrum without its distinctions and this brings in more nuance.

If we allow ourselves the free fall into inner space, we might find a reality that is difficult to corroborate through the senses, but is it less real? Or, have our minds been closed to frequencies with different information, literally mind altering information. My contention is that experimenting with different scales, pitches, and overtones can unlock what is hidden. This is what Pythagoras and his followers called mysticism, but does this not mean insight into what is not common knowledge?

So, this is my third post on singing bowls. I am writing this because my experience suggests that music and sounds are ways to unlock memory, including memory of self. By finding who we are and aligning with what we discover, we eliminate an immense amount of chaos and replace it with pure intent. Once the mind is aware of true self, this knowledge cannot be banished. Therefore, we can possibly overcome the effects of vibrations that subvert and replace them with vibrations that restore and guide.

My next experiments will be to imprint water and see how the plants respond to water that has had the unique experience of listening. Since water remembers, it might be possible to use water to educate water that has not been imprinted and thereby to create a hundredth monkey effect with very little personal effort. Obviously, I am speculating. I have no idea what the outcome might be, but being intensely curious, I want to try various experiments.

Many blessings,

Ingrid

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