Mindlessly scanning the BBC website recently, as is my occasional wont, generally looking for interesting snippets of the latest science news, to stretch my mind – a necessary balancing exercise for someone with such right brain tendencies as me – I chanced upon an item about an ingenious scientist in Virginia who’s been busy measuring cosmic background radiation (CMB) in space, from the era just after the Big Bang and has deduced from his observation of ripple patterns in the CMB, that the Big Bang was in fact utterly silent, this reminiscent of the Zen koan (existential riddle), if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Nonetheless, it appears that as the universe expanded, allowing CMB soundwaves to grow, silence became a whimper and a whimper grew into a roar - a dissonant chord that gradually settled into a major 3rd, but which then became a minor 3rd – probably – and this is my guess, when we all started using mobiles and messing with the microwaves – kidding. These soundwaves are 30,000 light years wide and at an octave 55 times lower than the human ear can pick up. Imagine dancing to that kind of sub-bass. Well, in fact, according to yogis who practice the yoga of sound, that’s precisely what we’re doing – dancing to the pulsations of a sub-bass, 30,000 light years wide and 55 octaves lower than we can hear. They don’t put it that way, of course. They just say there is a sacred sound at the core of existence, the shabd and that practicing constant awareness of it – training and sensitising the subtle mechanism of your inner ears to detect it – will bring you enlightenment. Personally, I’ve never believed there was a Big Bang – the whole idea just seemed too ejaculatory but have, strangely enough always believed in the sacred sound – way before I ever learned it was an actual thing called shabd. It started was when I was just a small boy of 6. I was lying on my bed one cloudy, North London afternoon, as you do – in a perfectly ordinary state, when out of nowhere and everywhere at once, a sound emerged, somewhere between the sound of a million bus engines and the sound of a million lamas chanting, forming a major-minor 3rd, rammed through a giant reverb, with extra thickening and the studio Viagra button pushed in. I heard it in my head and felt it throughout my body. I wasn’t suffering delusions – I knew that. But I also knew it was inaudible to the naked ear, so there was no point shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy – can you hear that?’ When you’re a kid, your head’s less cluttered with years of collected judgements and opinions and is hence more open to information the brain’s picking up. I don’t think there’s anything extraordinary about it. All that was happening, was that, for whatever reason, my inner ears had become attuned to a sound 55 octaves below their usual range. Somehow, I’d aurally tapped into, or had been tapped into, by the very primordial generative force of existence itself. I knew this – I just didn’t know it was called shabd back then. It’s reassuring to have both scientific and esoteric back up for this but the real value comes from actually experiencing it. I’ve worked a lot with the yoga of sound, both in the Indian and Taoist sense – mostly to regain access to that original sonic blast, for never have I felt so alive or total in my being as at that moment – and what I’ve found works best, is a two-pronged approach. Spend time chanting a sacred sound to simulate in a miniscule, microcosmic way, the larger, macrocosmic sound. Try the Hindu word, ‘Ram’, meaning the divine and which is similar to the actual sound I heard as a kid. Chant it repeatedly, resonantly and deeply and you start hearing the natural harmonics in it. This will attune you to the finer, subtler layers of self and thus calm your mind and relieve your mental stress. Also, spend time not actually chanting the sound but neveretheless hearing it continue vibrating within as if you were and allow your mind and inner ear to tune into the actual sound of CMB. It takes about 3 minutes to attune to it but just one or two seconds of it will give you an instant centring and deepening of awareness you won’t forget.
