Sound Sequence Meditations
The role of meditation is to become a seed point for an active calm that can grow into the rest of your life. Sound based meditations give us a special chance to simplify the mind, unclutter the thinking and bring in this active calm, the presence of True Self.
Short sequences of notes on a Sounding Bowl can have profound effects in body and soul. You can find a sequence that has meaning for you, selecting notes from your bowl that move you or you can find in various spiritual traditions sequences of notes that have srved many over centuries. A popluar seuqence is B,A,E,D a sequence within the pentatonic scale.
The essence of this meditation is to make our being in our bodies more harmonious. Based in that truth that we are spiritual beings seeking an incarnate experience rather than physical beings seeking a spiritual experience these notes and intervals are about harmonising our passage into this body, this moment, this life time, the better that we may give the gifts that lie within us. This sequence ceoms from the work of Rudolf Steiner.
Using the techniques described in my previous article, Simple Sound Mediations find the strings for these four notes on your bowl, maybe even mark them with felt tips for ease and settle into the first note. Once this settling has opened up the space for you move on to the second note while the first is still sounding feeling the movement within, the harmonic and melodic progression. Then, sounding the first note again move onto the second and the third note and once again give yourself time to feel into the movement that happens within before returning to the strings and sounding the whole sequence.
There are two distinct areas of enquiry here:
- ‘Where is the note or interval coming from?’ is enquiry into the hidden nature of the manifest and the unmanifest world.
- ‘What changes are occurring in me in response?’ is enquiry into the inner nature of the self, body soul and spirit.
Ultimately, if you find your way into the very essence of these spaces they become the same source, but finding that far/deep essence can be a life time’s enquiry. Initially they are two distinct directions of equal importance, they quickly become mutually fertilising. Begin with such questions as: How can the spaces within this interval be seen, be felt, what can you find as source of this interval, what comes through the space between these notes?
Do not seek verbal answers, ignore the mind for now. The more you ignore it the more wonderful and deep seeing it’s answers become, but they are still mind answers, accept them as more than possible illustrations on a journey and they become dead ends in your enquiry.
This is not about learning, it is about becoming, about Being in this world, gladly.
Follow the music
NB: If your instrument is tuned to a pentatonic that does not include these notes you can use different notes on the same intervals. Any whole tone pentatonic or diatonic scale will have these intervals amongst it’s notes. Do ask for guidance if you are not sure how to apply this pattern to what you have.
