I ran the striker hard around the bowl's lip and suddenly the space just filled with ringing as if out of nowhere. Or maybe an unheard sonaressence pulled from the corners of the room into the bowl and poured out again, an invisible but tangible aural reflection.
It made me wonder if there were bowls that sang, like celestial choirs, or others, a dark portal of lowest basso pouring up from an Abyss. Genesis stories state that matter gets created from sound, God conjuring the world from The Word, and the Aum, same as song evoking an emotion from nothing.
I asked an esotericist I know about the bowls and he mentions the blocks of the pyramids, after somehow getting treated, being lifted with a tap from a resonant staff or tuning fork (perhaps our ankh ...). I think of lamas & saffron robed priests levitating in their Himalayan temples, attuning themselves, perhaps with the bowls as a focusing tool. I'm sure my odd source also thinks of rounded saucers with their otherworldly humming being a slight friction against the atmosphere as they spin & turn at high velocity -- ships also rumoured to land or originate from within the Earth's highest mountain ranges.
Apparently around since 11th century BCE, the bowls were made with a now lost technology that used 5 to 12 metals, including amounts of silver and gold, all of which seems alot of trouble for a simple bell or container for offerings, so there's more here than meets the ear. On a molecular level everything vibrates. If you place one singing bowl near a silent one including some of the same metals, it will begin to sing.
Silver's negative charge attracts particles, and gold's noble and electrically conductive qualities may have factored in the forger's choice of materials for the bowls. The older the bowl, the darker a tarnish it has, affecting the tone.
Listen to the still, to the silence where there's supposedly absence. Instead you'll hear presence, the hum of yourself & your echo reflected back, a low roar awash with subtlety, as blood passing through artery and vein. Call this frequency or soul or anima or chi, the bowls reveal the ringing that is everywhere to begin with.
Last week, dozens of dealers in imported wares brought bowls into Tucson to sell at our international gem show. After playing hundreds of bowls, many centuries old if not unknowingly older, I found the bowl that hummed my song, a deeply shadowed opera conducted in infinite wavicles that push and flow through the invisible so hard you can feel it through your very skin.
With the right bowl one could summon the prima materia sound, to fill the bowl with intent, as a magician does a cauldron, and then send it out with the sound's return to whence it emanated to act on that will & wish from within, to affect the timbre & fibre of existence, to destroy, to refine, to reform, to remake the World. That is the secret of the Golden Bowl.
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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
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