[This article first appeared in my A to Zen column in the November/December issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]
Every day at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00
p.m. the bells ring out from the monastery.
Perched on a mesa overlooking
Mission Valley, nestled in the quiet San Diego neighborhood of Normal Heights,
the Carmelite Monastery is home to the daughters of St. Teresa of Avila, the 16th
century Spanish mystic. The nuns live simple lives of silence and contemplative
prayer. Keeping with tradition, the bells are rung by a different nun every day
so their rhythm and cadence varies – an aural expression of the unique human
hands on the other end of the rope.
These cloistered mystics have
little interaction with the outside world, yet the sound of the bells
penetrates every fiber of matter in a two mile radius – the homes and bodies of
thousands of people. For 82 years, twice a day, nearly 60,000 times, these
bells have startled an entire community out of their distracted, busy minds and
into the sacred thrum of this present moment; the ringing clarity of the here
and now. Sound does that. It gets your attention. It passes unimpeded through every
cell of your body and leaves you changed.
The Book of Genesis tells us that
in the beginning God spoke the world into being. He could have pointed his
mighty finger or simply intended the universe into existence with his divine
mind, but instead he chose sound and language as his creative medium – the
original spoken word artist. “Let there be light,” he said. And there was
light. And it was good.
In an act of alchemy the spoken
word transforms intangible thoughts into physical vibrations that travel
through the air and alter distant objects, even the fabric of reality itself. Words
have power. The well-intentioned nursery rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my
bones, but words can never hurt me,” turns out to be disingenuous if not
downright false. While it is true that no one can shame us without our
permission, it is also true that violent hate speech greases the skids to
actual violence. Stemming one curtails the other. Words, it turns out, are real
things.
This is why the Buddha made Right
Speech one of the eight steps of the Noble Eightfold Path. If we are serious
about transforming consciousness, then along with increased mindfulness, right
action, and meditation, we must learn to use words thoughtfully, compassionately,
and truthfully. As Don Miguel Ruiz pointed out in The Four Agreements, our negative self-talk is the first place to
start. If the spiritual practice of being impeccable with our word is to bear
any fruit, it must begin with self-affirmations strong enough to counteract a
lifetime of habitual self-loathing and denigration.
And by the way, in case you were
wondering, when a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear
it, it does not make a sound. The
impact of the tree makes waves in the air that travel a mile in five seconds,
or 767 miles per hour. These waves cannot properly be called “sound” until they
are perceived by a hearer. When they hit our eardrum our brain converts these
waves of soundless energy into an experience called “sound.” Sound, like color,
exists only in the mind of the perceiver, not in the outer world. Perception is
an inside job.
So it is that sound connects us
to each other and to the outer world in an intimate, symbiotic way. We
co-create the perceptual field in concert with the stimuli around us. We are
all creators who hear and speak the world into being.
Every time the nuns ring the
bells, despite their vows of silence and chastity, they join with us and with
the world in a way that transcends the categories of corporeal and spiritual.
Sound joins us to each other and to ourselves by avowing our boundless,
indefinable nature. The toll of the bell moves through us and shifts us on a
molecular level. Throughout world philosophy this truth is affirmed – the soul
itself is a musical harmony, and the sound emitted by all things impacts the physical
and metaphysical composition of all other things. In this way, we are all one
in sound. May we have the ears to hear the needs of others. May we speak the
truth, and sing our love. May we choose to create instead of destroy. May we
repeat the sounding joy in this and all seasons.
