~SYNTHESIS~
NADA BRAHMA: THE WORLD IS SOUND
By Joachim-Ernst Berendt
The word Nada Brahma in Indian spirituality means “God is Sound”, the primal creative word, the prime power of the Cosmos, Source of the world and sacred knowledge. It also refers to India’s great classical music. The term nadi is also used to mean “stream of consciousness”, a meaning which goes back four thousand years to the sacred Vedic scriptures, the Rig-Veda. Thus the relationship between sound and consciousness has long been documented in language.
Koans are given to meditators to unwrap the deeper meaning and experience of the simple words. Koans are questions or problems that seem to be rational and yet have no rational solution. They can only be solved in meditation and each solution is absolutely unique to each meditator. No one will solve it in the same way. Answering a koan can take a lifetime. When one finally finds the answer, it takes only a few seconds. Richard de Martino compares the koan to a fiery ball that the meditating person swallows, only to try to immediately spit it out again. But the ball grows and grows until it is so large that the ego itself becomes a single glowing ball. ‘At that point, ego has at last become koan’. Then the ego can burst naturally like a bubble of water.
Japanese Zen masters ask their disciples this Koan question:
“If you blot out sense and sound what do you hear?”
The goal of this koan is not to be able to be understood or written down as an answer. It is to be directly experienced. The sound asked for in this koan is a sound beyond sense and sound, a sound also beyond all music.. and yet it is a sound that is the basis and goal of all music. The sound that is left when sense and sound are taken away is nada.. the primeval rushing, the primeval roaring of the primal nadi, the primordial river that is the world. (“Quantum mechanics is the Zen koan of our times.” Fritjof Capra)
Lama Govinda speaks of the sound ‘mantra as primordial sound and as archetypal word symbols.’ The greatest of all mantras is ‘OM’. It is spoken, sung, meditated on. Om is the bow, the mind is the arrow and God or Brahman is the target. Om is one of the four great mantric ‘seed syllables’. Lama Govinda names three others: AH, HUM and HRIH. They contain the four basic Sanskrit vowels. OM is the ascent towards universality, HUM the descent of universality into the depth of the human heart. HUM is the mantric measure for what is human. OM and HUM are like counterpoints in a musical score. The mantra AH is ‘the expression of wonder and direct awareness; of marvel, praise and adoration.. the sound of love. The seed syllable HRIH, Govinda says, has ‘the nature of the flame ; it has its warmth, its intensity, its upward movements its radiance and its color. HRIH kindles the upward leaping flame of inspiration and devotion.
“Heinrich Zimmer has pointed out the fluency of the transition from sound to mantra and from mantra to the magic word and to the power of great poetry. “As in its first sounding, immediacy came over the seer-poet in the form of images and words with mystic compulsion, becoming a magical tool, for any one conversant in the use of mantra, words to create immediate reality . Indeed this is the characteristic of a true poet: that his/her word creates indisputable reality, that it directly summons and unveils real things. The poets words do not speak, they create reality.”
Our Western concept of logic is strongly conditioned by Western language. Aristotelian logic came into being in language that separates subject and object common to all Western languages. In Greek, it found its first clear expression. Philosophies are closely related to the grammatical structures of their language. The subject object scheme of Aristotelian logic corresponds to the grammatical structure of the Greek sentence. By way of contrast the thinking behind Chinese and Japanese languages does not move in a straight line from the subject to the object. It circles around its object circuitously and envelops it until it is specified as precisely as the objects in our Western languages.. However, in the process, subject and object have become one. The Japanese language not only avoids the use of “I”, the subject but also the “you” the object. No Japanese person will say to his or her lover “I love you”. He or she will say “Aishiteru..which means “loving” (implied in the verb tense is: in this present moment).” There is no need for subject or object. How differently reality out pictures simply from the way a language is structured.
The Latin word cantare is generally translated as “to sing”. Its original meaning however, was to work magic, to produce by magic.” Carmen the Latin word for poem originally meant ‘magic formula” and it still is that today. The words for “poet”, “singer” and “magician” go back to the same linguistic root not only in Latin but in many other languages. Quite often they have the same meaning, which makes sense when one considers that the magician’s main tool is language, the word. It is the word/mantra that produces the magic. Even in our contemporary brains there smolders a remnant of awareness that name is not mere designation, that behind the act of giving something a name there lies something meaningful and mysterious, something actively creative.
Wilfried Kruger a musicologist discovered an overwhelming treasure of structures at those points in the microworld most decisive for the development of life: in the atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus and in RNA and DNA. With the atomic number 8, oxygen is the element of the octave, The eight electrons of the oxygen atom shell and the eight protons of the oxygen atom nucleus form a major scale. The concurrence between microcosm and harmonics becomes even more astonishing when one notes that the model of the nucleus of the oxygen atom with its protons has twelve steps, the exact number of intervals found in the scale formed by the atomic model. The electron shell of the carbon atom saturated according to the rules of nuclear physics and in the steps of the basic theorem, produces the tone scale C-D-F-G-A. The entire microcosm is replete with harmonic concurrences.
By quantum physics establishing that time stands still, that place is nowhere and everywhere, and that the mass of a particle moving at the speed of light is equal to zero, nuclear physics approaches a threshold that mystics have always approached from the other direction. Conventional science has busied itself with immense repression. Science has been trying to explain the basic processes of the universe and the microcosm purely in physical and chemical terms. They have encountered the dimension of the spiritual, the metaphysical but whenever this has happened, they have closed their eyes as if warding off an allergic reaction or as if that dimension did not exist.
The electron is a miniature black hole. Time for electrons is not identical with our material time. It rather runs cyclically so that everything once stored can be retrieved during any further cycle. While scientists are searching for where memory is held, the physicist Jean Charon, considers electrons to be the “prime stores” of memory. They are among the few elementary particles that do not disintegrate, in other words, they exist from the beginning of the cosmos to its end. An electron that was part of a tree, a human being, a tiger and another human being will remember for all time the experiences it has collected during those different lives. The electron’s recollections are stored and controlled by its spin, and they are assembled with the help of photons. Each progression of spin leads to an increase in information/consciousness. It was Charon’s knowing that photons control not only memory but the process of cognition. They are messengers. The language in which they communicate is a language in the tones of harmonic progressions!
The scientist Carl Von Weizsacker has pointed out that it is part and parcel of the methodological foundations of science; that one does not ask certain fundamental questions. In order to exclude such fundamental questions, science has no choice but to employ taboo reactions similar to those of a ‘primitive’ society. Again and again in the critical writings of contemporary philosophers of science, you can find one observation: What a totem is to an African tribe..is precisely what a ‘proven theory’ is for certain groups of scientists. These scientists dance around it as if it were the golden calf. Both the African tribe and the scientific community have manipulated their living and working conditions in such a way that they constantly ‘prove’ that the totem or the theory are ‘correct.’ In reality, the theory is no more ‘correct’ than the totem and essentially is in no way different from it. Both have exactly the desired ‘effects’ and thus confirm themselves just as their creators want them to. Today the word ‘science’ is used to maintain a ridiculous fetishism. Reductionism in the academic world is not simply a kind of abstract mental shrinking, but a phenomenon that threatens all of life on Earth, or as Winston Churchill said, ‘It might be that the stone age is returning on the glowing wings of science.’ ”
In one of his Fairy Tales, the author Herman Hesse talks about an ancient sage who had “perceived the oneness of the world as a harmonious consonance of the heavenly spheres.” About his Glass Bead Game, he wrote that in it, ‘the cult of music and meditation intimately belong together.’ When Josef Knecht, the young hero of this novel, meditates, the world changes into tones, the sequence of notes turns into mathematical figures and rhythmical patterns. The Glass Bead Game as Hesse puts it, is unthinkable without the conviction that is the theme of this book, that the world is sound. ‘During all ages, there was a close connection between the Glass Bead Game and music. It was usually played according to musical or mathematical rules. It was an exquisite, symbolic form of search for perfection, a sublime alchemy, a process of getting close to a spirit which is one with itself, in spite of all images and variedness, that is, to God..Nada Brahma. Hesse called the Glass Bead Game a world language fed from all sciences and arts, which plays itself and heads toward perfection, harmony, toward pure being, toward completely fulfilled reality. All the insights, lofty ideas and works of art brought forth by mankind during its creative ages, all that for which subsequent periods of learned contemplation found the appropriate terms and of which they took intellectual possession, this entire, immense wealth of spiritual qualities is played by the player of the Glass Bead Game the way an organ is played by the organist. And this organ is of a hardly conceivable perfection, its manuals and pedals sound out the whole spiritual cosmos, its registers are almost innumerable, theoretically the entire spiritual content of the world could be reproduced in playing this instrument.”
