Today I went to a choir session. What happened there was a very intense shared experience. I will try to describe it as objectively as possible. We (about sixty participants) began with breathing exercises, ‘warmed up’ the vocal cords, sounded four-part chords and moved through pitches. The choir director pointed out that we were not here by chance. We were in Auroville because something had drawn us here. I think most people in the room understood what he meant; for others it may be somewhat difficult to follow. It is a little like when we take pleasure in something that others do not like. Many cannot understand it at all; some meet it with tolerance, and only very few can put themselves so fully in the other person’s place that the other pleasure becomes understandable. Yet it is really understandable only when we share the pleasure.
There was, then, a certain consensus: we had all somehow come to Auroville because we wanted to be here. Many share a spiritual openness.
OM
The choir director, then, reminded us of this. After we had warmed up our voices, discovered the diaphragm and abdominal muscle and tried out the basic principles of breathing technique, and reminded ourselves why we were there, the actual part began. Singing OM in chorus, three times seated and once standing. The instructions? Leave one’s own I outside, do not feel embarrassed, sit together in silence for a short while (about one minute) and wait for someone to begin with a tone. What developed from this was indescribable. A complex harmony, with microtonal shifts that repeatedly allowed a polyphonic circling around centers of harmony. It was a singing together that merged into ONE highly complex voice. It was profoundly meditative, and activating at the same time.
The spiritual overtones of this singing are the thought that we are all the same, and this unity of being in the sense of the Upanishads manifests in Brahman. Further up the overtone ladder of spirituality: the sounding of a music that did not exist before, no composition, no individual or collective improvisation, but a sound that uses the participants only as its medium. The sound itself, the sound waves—still further up the spiritual overtone ladder—is a harmony that could also be found in texts by Sri Aurobindo. At this point, at the latest, I too find it difficult to keep up. But who knows, perhaps it is an Atman of Brahman, an avatar speaking here, the Supramental manifesting itself. Why not, actually? It is certainly better than the idea that money rules the world 🙂
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