We stopped the boat about two miles
offshore, and switched off the engines. Immediately we could hear
the singing of a humpback whale. I have heard them underwater
many times. They are the ocean equivalent of birdsong in a
forest; their moaning songs playing in the background, sometimes
coming from miles away. But to hear the sound in the air is most
unusual. It meant the whale was very close indeed.
So we donned our gear and slipped in. And there were its tail
flukes, fifteen feet beneath us. Singing humpbacks usually hang
vertically, head down. Swimming down, I could see its immense
body hanging motionless below me.
And now the sound was intense. I was not just hearing it through
my ears; my whole body was resonating with its song. The moaning
base notes were vibrating through my chest. My muscles were
quivering with the shrill chirping.
After ten minutes or so, having completed a cycle of its song, it
gently surfaced, still singing, and looking curiously at these
strange leggy creatures that had appeared next to it. Then it
sank back down, head first, to continue singing.
Since then I have listened to whale songs continuously for many
hours. (To listen, see below) Hearing long stretches of song, I’ve
become aware of how each phrase of the song is repeated with a
slight variation, progressively transforming the phrase into
something completely different, and then continuing to transform
until it ends up back where it started. That is one complete
cycle. The next cycle is a slightly different variation, and the
next slightly different again.
Listening to the singing I have began to get a sense for how it
might feel to be a whale. It could, of course, all be
anthropocentric projection, nevertheless, when I hear those long
yearning calls, or those bubbling stochato chirps, I imagine that
the way I feel is the way the whale feels. Whalesong is a window
into the whale soul.
—–
Listen to whalesong. There’s
a hydrophone hanging from a buoy off the coast of Kihei in Maui,
which broadcasts live whalesong on the net.
More info at http://www.whalesong.net
From a talk by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee,
Shaykh of The Golden Sufi's
given at Seattle, Washington in 2007.
"I have a friend who recently went to India and she went
near to
Dharamsala -- there is a place called Tashi Jong -- because we
have a
friend there who is a nun, Tenzin Palmo. She was a Western
woman
from England who went and met her teacher in India who was a
Tibetan
teacher. She spent 12 years in a cave. She did the
proper training
in the cave and she is now making a little nunnery there in the
hills
in Tashi Jong. And also in those hills people have been
meditating
for hundreds of years. And my friend, when she was there,
she was
amazed because the hills were alive. She'd never realized
what it is
to experience it when the land is alive, when the land is singing
--
you can feel the magic in the air when you can feel the devas
present. For us it is like a myth, it is like an ancient
story, it
happened somewhere else. But there, people have been doing
practices
that welcome the sacred in the land. There is this
relationship, so
the land is alive. And the soul of the world is full of all of
this
magic, full of all of this creative potential, and it is waiting
for
us to relate to it, to welcome it back."
posted to Awakened Awareness by Tom
McFerran
Why are you so afraid of silence,
silence is the root of everything.
If you spiral into its void
a hundred voices will thunder messages
you long to hear.
- Rumi
posted to AlongTheWay
One, One, One
The lamps are different,
but the Light is the same.
So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp-shop,
Forget about them.
Concentrate on essence, concentrate on Light.
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,
The Light streams towards you from all things,
All people, all possible permutation of good, evil, thought,
passion.
The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,
Endlessly emanating all things
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.
The small man
builds cages for everyone
he knows,
while the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.
