Hymns of Multidimensionality

musings on sound, destiny and the Eternal

Once upon a new moon, I arrived on this land to sit and to listen.

I began to sing, intuitively improvising melodies that rang true from the landscape of my heart and from the rolling hills of this mountain.

What resounded from within me was like an old Appalachian march or an Irish ballad - some ancestral dancing memory spun with minor tones and juniper bows.

And as I sang this melody, I realized I couldn’t tell if it was a victory march or a funerary hymn. I felt, “Are we singing songs of celebration or hymns of mourning?”

And I began to weep because I couldn’t decipher the collective consensus of this time in human history, because I couldn’t decipher the melody’s message, I couldn’t sense the truth of what lays ahead.

Sometimes when I sing, it feels like I’m tapping into the collective web of human consciousness, through beauty and praise, through the authenticity of my breath. Sometimes when I sing, I travel; I see places far away, people I’ve never seen with my physical eyes, images and feelings of times and places different than the one we are living in now. Sometimes I see geometries, deities, sacred places, and through the ever-changing currents of life’s mysterious unfoldings, I have found music to remain a constant temple in which I enter, pray and commune.

visualizing sound waves: Chladni Plates, as discovered by Ernst Chladni, German physicist and musician

Sometimes when I sing, time seems to stop. No more minutes, seconds, hours, no more tomorrow or yesterday, just Now and Now and Now, deeper and more mysterious, holier, lighter, cleaner.

I have been thinking a lot about time lately. “Time,” the seemingly linear movement of Life and events that we experience through our senses.

I have sometimes felt that when a major event happens in our lives, we can feel the ripples of it in both directions: both before it happens and after it happens. If we are sensitive and paying attention, hints of what is to come may be reaching us today.

So I started feeling into “time” as if it were a living body of water. If you touch it over here, the movement is felt over there. If a creature at the bottom of the ocean flutters its fins, that movement will eventually be felt throughout the entire body of water, however subtle and microscopic. If I breath on the snow in a certain way, will it be felt in the ocean? As it melts and joins the river, as the river merges with the sea, will my breath be felt among the dancing seaweed and starfish? Imagining how each spoken word, action, movement could affect this living body of “time”, throughout the galaxies, universes, throughout the whole being of “time”, in all directions, everywhere.

I have been gently touching the surface of this idea of time as beyond this world and into many worlds: time as multidimensional. This may seem obvious to some, but sometimes as I sing, I feel this. I feel the possibility of “time” as extending like a web into millions of other dimensions, connecting, touching, pulling, pushing, alive with tensegrity, relating to all other dimensions and aspects at all times, like a huge multi-dimensional quilt or something. So I feel this, that when my daughter hums or squeals, that it somehow affects this “time” web that spins through many, many unseen universes, and that it is somehow, all and completely perfect.

Recently I was listening to a lecture by an Islamic Imam. He said something about how the people of the past used to live their daily lives with a much greater sense of Eternity. He talked about the degradation of the God-feel, my own words, in the face of the ever spinning, “ever diminishing” time, specifically by the use of clocks. He talked about the introduction of clocks into royal palaces in Europe and how the Grim Reaper was seen looming over the ever-ticking arms, counting down the minutes.

Can we imagine a world without carefully computed, consensually relevant, measurements of momentary-ness?

And, how does Eternity relate to this living being of “time”?

Have you ever felt Eternity? In a moment of presence or intense focus, have you felt it when time seemed to stand still?

Maybe Eternity serves to collapse “time” as we know it, to eradicate the mental entanglement with “before” and “after”, and alleviate sequential importance from the vast expansiveness of mind.

How deeply has our mental bondage to linear time limited our abilities to go Beyond? Beyond beyond? ✶ Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha ✶ “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, oh what an awakening, All hail!”

I wonder, in the context of seasonality, if we can anchor into that sense of Eternity, daily, as a mode of Being on Earth.

In that way, can we transcend the funerary hymns? Can we alter the course of humanity and the Earth? Can we attune to a different dimensional reality?

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