In the next stage of our collective evolution it is the hearts of individuals that will hold the cosmic note of the planet. This note can be recognized as a song being born within the hearts of seekers. It is a quality of joy that is being infused into the world. It is the heartbeat of the world and needs to be heard in our cities and towns.
One night we visited camp for devotional songs. One man would start the first line of the song, his companions joining in. Then the women would begin, huddling together under their dark wool, keening their lungs out... It was as if they took a spiritual bath in the music, their troubles washed away with songs as old as the subcontinent. How comforting it must be to pass through life's storms always with the support of the group infusing every action and every thought with one voice extending down through the generations, saying,
"It is all right. We are all here. There is no such thing as alone."
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.
The universe is a perfect, pulsating, rhythmic mechanism that sings the music of the spheres.
I remember as a boy standing at the side of a gorge watching the swift, shallow water and a girl standing in it up to her knees. Everything was settled and at peace in the sunlight. As I watched the hills began to sing -- I could hear them as an indistinct choir. Then they began to shimmer and dance. It seemed clear that we were linked -- hills and humans -- in a deep, objective way. And this connection made life true, and my usual fears irrelevant.
I know that we hear God in the silence. And for this reason, it is crucial to avail ourselves of silence. For there is a sound in silence that is the voice of God. There is that divine whisper.
Driving home on a rainy day, Lorna was rear-ended by a truck just before the woman playing Rosina in Act I of the Barber of Seville was to sing. The impact was sudden and stunning. "But even as I entered a world of shock and pain, I found a world of bliss and order. I listened to the aria and fifteen minutes of the opera as firemen tried to free me from the wreckage of my car." Though told she had been unconscious until she was in the ambulance, she remembered listening to Rosina's voice throughout the ordeal. "My spirit stayed with my body. The music kept me alive. I was able to listen and stay conscious, alert, and at peace with the music. ... From the beginning of that aria, I knew I had to finish the opera of my life."
Music is, and always will be, a method used by beings to bring about a unity between different vibrations, causing a harmonious note to the ear. In mystical fashion, one endeavors to achieve the same result with our intermingling vibrations of polarity. The thread, which binds in harmony, is the "music of the spheres." Its song plays continuously, but our ears cannot hear, unless our soul is tuned in.
Essentially neuter, silence, like light or love, requires a medium to give it meaning, takes on the color of its host, adapts easily to our fears and needs. Quite apart from whether we seek or shun it, silences orchestrate the music of our days... If it's true that all symphonies end in silence, it's equally true that they begin there as well. Silence, after all, both buries and births us, and just as life without the counterweight of mortality would mean nothing, so silence alone, by offering itself as the eternal Other, makes music possible.
There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.