MUSIC IN THE AIR Jon Gudmundson
Sometimes it seems to me that everything is cycles. As a longtime musician, I spent countless thousands of hours pondering cycles. For just one example, to play in tune with other people I would usually tune up to the pitch A, which was typically set at 440 Herz (cycles per second). If you double the cycles per second to 880 Herz, you get the note A again, one octave higher. Double it again and you get the next A, one octave higher, and so on. Eventually, if you keep going higher, the notes become imperceptible to the human ear. Children can often hear sounds up to about 18 to 20 thousand Herz, or even a little higher, but the older we get, the more we lose the ability to hear those higher tones.
On the lower end, the limit for most humans is about 20 to 40 cycles per second. Of course, sounds exist below 20 and above 20,000 Herz. We just can’t hear them. Other creatures can. Similarly, as we go on increasing the cycles per second quite a bit, at some point we experience the cycles as light. Light visible to the typical human eye ranges from about 400 THz (Tera Herz, meaning trillions of cycles per second), which looks red to us, up to around 800 THz, which is around where violet changes over to ultraviolet and then becomes invisible to us. I’m just spit-balling here, you can look it up to get the exact numbers.
So there are frequencies, or cycles all around us, all the time, most of which we cannot detect with our five senses. I remember reading a philosopher once who said that human life is like being put into a fantastic video game, but given just a really crappy headset. An apt analogy, perhaps. Cycles around us everywhere, perceivable and imperceivable, including the 24-hour cycle that comes round and round, the monthly cycles, the yearly cycles, the various life cycles… on and on it goes, up to vastly large cycles that play out in the heavens above. Water, water everywhere, and we are allowed a few sips here and there.
Taoists, I have read, are big believers in “as above, so below.” Therefore, it is believed that the human body represents the macrocosm in a much smaller form. This is one reason why Taoists (not to mention many other traditions) place such an emphasis on going within, and in following the breath. If you want to get in touch with what’s “out there,” you need to go “in here,” into your Self. As someone famously said a couple thousand years ago, not in the Far East, but the Near East: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.”
As a student of the saxophone, I delved into breath quite a bit. I even underwenta kind of “breath crisis” as an undergraduate when I felt quite sure that, regarding breathing, I was doing it wrong. I started asking every wind instrument player and every singer I ran into for their approach to breathing.
At some point someone directed me to a book titled, Science of Breath (co-authored by Swami Rama, Rudolph Ballentine, MD, and Allen Hymes) where I learned that the breath is a cycle that is, of course, very near and dear to us. As Rama pointed out, unlike other autonomic bodily systems such as the heart, the breath is something that even the least enlightened person can easily experiment with. It is the way in, the portal. Ancient swamis and rishis realized this, and once they got a toehold on the breath, it was just a matter of time before they could control other bodily systems. This helps explain how it is that some Indian swamis had the ability to be buried in a box underground, only to be dug up days later, quite alive. The book offered a number of breath exercises that were helpful to me, and that I passed along to my students.
Due to a health condition, I had to give up playing the saxophone. As I advance in the number of cycles completed on this earth orbiting the sun, I find that the desire to “make good use of my time” increases more and more. It’s interesting to me that this has not resulted in a strong urge to visit every square inch of the globe; to race around, checking off visiting the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. Instead, among other things, I spend two sessions each day following the breath with great interest.
There are a few human activities that are primal, and deep, and never boring; these include watching clouds move across the sky, watching a campfire burn, and watching the breath. All three of these practices possess the glorious power to shut out the noise and dust of the world. Of these three, watching the breath has an advantage in that it can be done anywhere, at any time, day or night. Let me encourage you to do this if you do not do so already. The next time you find yourself tempted to read about the latest political outrage, or to scroll Facebook, or watch cat videos, find instead a quiet place, close the door, and turn your attention to your breath. The universe is beautiful, and it all starts here.
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