Sunyata from Sunyata by Bird Radio
Over the past few weeks I have been reconnecting to my practice as a flautist and reiki practitioner, and researching, with the guidance of Joanna Ebenstein, (founder of Morbid Anatomy in New York City) via online zoom classes during the global pandemic lockdown, attitudes towards illness and death in a wide range of cultures. My interests have gravitated towards 10th - 13th Century Persian poetry, such as the writing of mathematician, astronomer and poet Omar Khayyam, and Sufi mystic Rumi, as well as Tibetan Buddhist attitudes and beliefs towards mental and physical health, healing, life and death. ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’ is only ‘The Tibetan book of the Dead’ in the west. The original text is known in Tibet as ‘The great book of natural liberation through understanding the between’. Although I do not follow any religious belief dogmatically, I find these, and many others, hold fascinating resonances with my instinct and worldview.
I am interested in home, in a cosmic sense - where we began, and where we return to - the same that Rumi describes in the opening of the Masnavi, the home that the Ney flute laments being torn away from. In Middle-Eastern music, instead of the western scale of notes, or ladder, the Maqam is used, meaning place, and the musical melody is a metaphor for home, our departure / arrival, journey of life, its triumphs, failures, mystical revelations, and return. An added layer to this is how important the breath is for flute playing, and indeed life. Psychoanalyst George Frankl described the intake of breath as a joining with and acceptance of everything outside of us, while the exhale represents the creation of our own world. In Tibetan Buddhist meditation, one approach is to breathe in negativity, and exhale positivity. This brings to mind photosynthesis, the conversion of light into energy, the removal of carbon dioxide form the air, and the pumping out of life-supporting oxygen. The tree is intact a fundamental image in the ancient healing traditions of tibet, with its various branches and beliefs that give importance both to physical life-threatening illnesses and poisons as well as ‘mind poisons’ such as aggression, sloth and greed.
The following three statements come from Deepak Chopra’s introduction to Ian A. Baker’s book ‘The Tibetan Art of Healing’:
‘All of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole cosmos. Our bodies are part of a universal body,
Our minds an aspect of a universal mind’.
‘[The Tibetan Art of Healing is about] discovering the place within us where the body’s innate intelligence mirrors the wisdom of the cosmos’.
‘The art of healing is achieved when all our actions are inspired by a higher reality in which our individual identity if inseparable from the creative forces of the cosmos’.
In an attempt to draw this all together and bind it somehow, I discovered that the earth has a fundamental resonating frequency, known as the Schumann Resonances. The Schumann Resonances are a spectrum of the extremely low frequency (ELF) portion of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Schumann resonances are global electromagnetic resonances, produced and excited by natural lightning discharges in the cavity formed by the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. The fundamental frequency is 7.83Hz and falls within the range of natural human alpha brainwaves which is an optimum state for well-being and healing. It is below the human hearing range, but by doubling this frequency six times (each time stepping up one octave), I have been able to emulate the harmonic resonances of this frequency within our hearing range. On the playable range of the flute, this is halfway between a B and C (24 Cents above a B, to be precise). Using this drone, I will improvise an origin, life journey, and return to a sonic, resonant home, as small gesture of reassurance that we already know death intimately, and need not fear it.
This brought me to Sunyata: ‘The pure, immeasurable potential of all that their ever was, is or will be’.
Its symbol is similar to the ancient Egyption Ouroboros, the serpent in an endless cycle biting its own tail.
Sunyata has no beginning and no end - it goes beyond time - and is a core part of Tibetan belief. It is not ‘nothingness’ that I am talking about, as that is impossible to describe or imagine, just as John Cage famously found silence not to exist - in an anechoic chamber he could still hear his own nervous system and blood.
I am talking about a maqam, a musical place, a waterway between two worlds, that we can visit anytime, and wave across to the other side. A beautiful place, a calming place, that has always been there, is there now, and always will be, full of life.
I call this place the Wild Lakes.
This is the world I am creating with my breath.
