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Vāḍ, in Sanskrit, means the word “to speak,” but not so much the word that communicates—as the sound, the utterance, the flow of tone. So you have, in India, the use of mantra, the use of chanted words, as one of the very basic forms of yoga—understanding the mystery of the world. The Hindus use the word ohm, which would be spelled out a-u-m. Because the letter A—“ah”—is in the back of the throat.
You push it through the vowel to “aummm,” and “m” is at the lips. So the word “ohm” comprehends the whole range of sound. It’s called the praṇava.
And ohm simply means—well, it is the sound. All sounds are basically the sound ohm, but varied. The word that not only signifies but also is what there is.
Everything is ohm. Ohm sweet ohm! The whole universe is this ohm.
So this is a very good word, because you can use it instead of “God.” God has all sorts of nasty associations attached to it—the political boss of the world, the preacher, the prig, the nosy Parker in charge of everything, the rotten grandfather, and all that; the sentimental mother of the world, or whatever it is. And the word “God,” therefore, is a distasteful word, now, to most Westerners. But ohm has no associations with it.
I mean, you might have encountered it in a Vedanta society and associated it with swamis in yellow robes, or something. But, on the whole, ohm has no association, and so it is a clean word and it has no meaning. Except it is the very pulse of life.
So I’m spreading a rumor. In Buddhism, you know, there is a mantram: Aum mani padme hum. And “Aum” means nothing, except everything.
“Mani” means: a jewel. “Padme” is a Lotus. “Hum” is hooray.
You know? So: “the jewel in the lotus.” In other words, imagine a mandala—you see, which is a lotus flower—with all those petals spreading out from it, and right bang in the middle of that there is a little crystal ball or a diamond. And you look into that, and it contains the reflection of everything in it, you see?
You go way, way, way into that thing, and down, down, down, down, you know? And that’s the ultimate turn-on. So “ohm,” and at the end, “hum.” Or H-U-M. You can say “hum” in English.
Hum. You hum. There’s a new religion existing called “hum.” And this religion has no hierarchy, no organization, no doctrines whatsoever.
No words. Only music and ritual. And we will find, in a little while, that “hum” is really what most people belong to.
But you can’t pin it down. There is no address to write to, there’s nothing to join. It’s just something that people do.
Like, they shave, and brush their teeth, and eat breakfast. So they hum. Well now, it’s very, very fascinating for purposes of understanding music as communication.
To look, for a moment, at different fundamental differences between Western and Oriental music. I know a very, very great musicologist who thoroughly understands the world of Bach and Beethoven and is one of the greatest scholars of music I’ve ever run into. But to his ear, Hindu music is childish and he sees no subtlety in it.
He’s quite deaf. But when it comes to Chinese and Japanese music, most Westerners are flabbergasted. They can’t make any sense of it at all, because it sounds as if somebody were making the most ridiculous noises.
So, you know, there’s a Japanese—no drama—singer comes on. [Japanese singing] We think he’s sounding as if he’s being strangled! But he’s giving sounds of passionate love.
See? But to our ears that’s deplorable. You know, when we want to give examples of love: [Western singing], et cetera.
You know? We have really said we’re in love. Well, now, here is the thing: in Western music—when we study music—the first thing we learn is notation.
Most people begin with a piano—or, at any rate, some instrument— where the important thing is to be able to read the music and then do the stuff from the the written paper. Now, this limits you in a curious way because our notation, first of all, is based on the chromatic scale. And secondly, it has fixed rhythmic intervals.
You have your whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note. And you can change the value of the dotting them to give them half their value. And you tend to write in bars: four-four time, three-eight, or whatever it may be.
And when an Oriental listens to our music, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a love song or a grandiose paean of praise, or whatever. All of it sounds like a military march, because it’s that one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. Or one-two-three-four-five-six, one-two-three-four-five-six, one-two-three-four-five-six.
Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, all the time. And he hears a mechanism in it. You see?
He hears this absolute regularity. Now, in Indian music you’ll have bars. Very long measure.
You can count twenty to the bar, sometimes more. And when you learn music from a Hindu teacher, you don’t learn notation. You learn directly from the teacher.
In other words, he takes the instrument and plays it, and you copy him. with the same instrument, sitting in front of him. And they think, you see, that notation could never record music.
They do use a notation. They use a notation to remember, simply, themes. There is a certain rag, a certain theme, and they can write that down.
But they don’t play from it. What they do is: according to certain traditional procedures, they improvise on the basic forms. And you, therefor, play the instrument, and what you’re trying to do is to make it as completely as possible responsive to the subtle motions of which a human organism is capable.
In other words, just as in in moving your hand, there’s an infinity of waves you can put it through. So, likewise, in using your voice, there is an infinity of sound that you can produce. In the same way you can, with a stringed instrument, in moving your finger—where there are no rigid stops as there would be on a piano—so on the continuum of a violin you can move your finger and produce an infinity of subtle sound.
And what they do is, they delight in the infinite possibility of making sound with the human organism. And they like instruments which are very easily and directly related to the organism. So the flute, the vīṇā, the drums.
See, these are direct human contact with an instrument. With a piano you’ve got something interspersed. You’ve got a hammer mechanism and a rigidly tuned string.
With a harpsichord the same way: the pluck. and went Wonderland Moscow— marvelous as she is—plays the harpsichord, you get a hurdy-gurdy effect: clicketty-clicketty-click, clop, clop, clop, clop, clicketty-click, clop, clop, chicketty-chick, chick, chick, clop, clop, click, click, click, click, click. Get this going on all the time.
With a clavichord there’s a difference because the clavichord doesn’t have a mechanical relationship between the finger and the string. So that every variation of touch you make on the clavichord is represented in the sound. In other words, the piano and the harpsichord are like electric typewriters which have a uniform touch, whereas the clavichord is more like an old-fashioned typewriter where, however hard you hit, it has some effect on the print.
So in Oriental music, then, while there is an incredibly subtle discipline—and the Hindu drummer can do the most astounding things; and you can count it out, he counts it out in these very, very elaborate patterns—but at the same time there is a an attitude about it that’s just fascinating. We attended a concert of the de Young Museum a few weeks ago where there was Ali Akbar Khan’s orchestra. And there was a drummer in this it was just out of this world!
The wonderful thing about it was that, as he was playing with the rest of the orchestra, they were all talking to each other with their instruments. And they made eye contact while they were playing. And this guy was just in sheer delight.
He was laughing as he was playing, and all the other musicians were just loving it, so that he wasn’t this dead-earnest person looking at his music, you know, and reading that and doing it. He was joining in with everybody, dancing with them. His fingers were like butterflies—bummingbirds, better to say—just vibrating in the most extraordinary way.
Because it takes years and years and years to learn this. But he was really enjoying it. But what was he saying?
They have a language for the drums and they can speak a drum rhythm by using syllables like dit-dee, dit-dah. Dit-dee, dit-dah. Or din—meaning one kind of a hit—din and thin.
Din-thin, din-thin, din-thin. Dit-dee, dit-dah, dit-dee, dit-dah. Dah-da-da, dah-da-da, dah-da-da, dah-da-da.
You know? And they explain a rhythm like this sometimes. First they say it, and then they play it.
But what it’s all about is, dit-dah. Dit-dah. I suppose some of you have read a book of mine called The Joyous Cosmology, in which I referred to, once, a very curious experience I had with Hindu music.
I happened to have acquired from Timothy Leary some of this extraordinary Mexican mushroom. And I was feeling awful. I’d come back from a trip to the East and was tired, and had a sore throat, and was just lousy.
So I took this thing. And at first it just felt terrible. And everything turned into mud.
You know what you expect of mushrooms, the fungus, everything fungoid, and kind of bland and ghastly. Well, after a while it all changed, and I found myself listening to this Hindu music. I didn’t know what it was, because my host, whose house I was at, didn’t explain anything.
And I thought when I listened to this, “What kind of idiocy is going on?” I thought—you see, my friend with whom I was spending the day is a pretty wild kind of fellow. And I thought he’d put on a tape recording of his and his friends antics. Because they weren’t doing anything that anybody is supposed to do.
It was like children making faces. You know how they go like this. Children love to make these awful faces and make weird noises.
I thought this is just something absolutely absurd going on. And then came this dit-dah business in the middle of it. So I said, “Roger?
Hey, let me see the album.” I got the case. And here it’s says: Classical Music of India. Edited by Alain Daniélou—who is the most scholarly, respectable pundit on the subject of Hindu music.
I said, “Somebody is pulling my leg!” No, not at all. Here were these babbling sounds. Not only with the dit-dah business, but they also could use their voices like oboes.
You know how they… [makes noise]. Like you’ve got a clothespin on your nose and do an oboe sound. And it sounded like this, and it was just this whole kind of business of children just going out of their heads.
Well, I listened to this and I suddenly realized that that’s what life’s all about. And, you know, it was the most fantastic sudden recognition: that everything in this world is gloriously meaningless. And it’s curlicues like on ferns.
We get mixed up about it, because sometimes we think that, the play that is going on—when you see a fern it has, first of all, the main branch. Then it has sub-branches. And out of these subbranches come sub-sub-branches.
And out of the sub-sub-branches come sub-sub-sub-branches. And so you get a fern. So now, you could number each of these levels on which things are happening.
And you say “Well, this is a number 1 level, this is a number 42 level, this is number 65 level. And you judge events and say it’s good, it’s bad, it’s proper, it’s improper. But what you don’t recognize is that you say something is improper because you thought it was a 63 level whereas, really, it was 112.
And you didn’t know. You didn’t realize the level the thing was on. So actually, in the whole play of human life—with all its joys and sorrows, its tragedies, its evils, its good—is just something like a fern.
It has tumors on it. That means, just simply, another clan is making its life there. See?
A clan of bugs of some kind are living there, too. And they’re doing their stuff. They’re living off the fern, the fern’s living off something else.
We’re all leaning on each other in one way or another. And I saw the whole thing as this fantastic play. So, can you get into that state, you see?
You get into it by listening to sound. That’s one way in. There are lots of ways in.
But one of the easiest ways in is through concentration on a tone. Because, you see, this is the easiest way to stop thinking for most people. If you just concentrate on a single sound—it’s very easy to do it, and this stops your thoughts.
In other words, it stops you talking to yourself inside your head; verbalizing. And the important thing is, if you want of the vision of the world as it really is, you have to stop talking. At least temporarily.
It doesn’t mean that talking is a bad thing, it means it’s too much of a good thing. So that if you silence talking, and you experience yourself just in the same way as you experience you nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah—that’s what’s going on. And it may be going on, you know, in a kind of a way that you call nice, which is aaaah, or it’s AAAAGH!
You know? It may be going on that way. But so what?
Finally, it is that. That’s what’s happening. And we’re all taught by our mothers—and fathers—to put a value on it.
See, when it goes a certain way… the rhythm of life goes in a certain way when we say “Eugh! Watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out! Because that may be the end!” What will the end be?
CLUNK! What’s wrong with that? Things that start have to stop.
Things that go on have to go off. And things that go off have to go on. But, you see, we get involved by putting a value on it all.
Alright, now I could say that’s bad, you should do it. But at the same time, getting involved and putting values on it is all part of the game, too. Getting hung up.
Getting hooked. So you don’t get unhooked by saying to yourself, “I shouldn’t be attached. I shouldn’t do this.
I shouldn’t do that.” All you do is you see that getting hooked on is simply another form of it. More nonsense. More jazz—but deeper jazz.
So, like, you feel you have an ego: that’s an illusion. But it’s a very weird illusion, you see? It’s a very far out scene.
A person who you might call a square, who’s thoroughly committed to the illusions of standard life, is a very far out person because he doesn’t know where he started. He’s completely lost. But you could say it’s a great show to get that far out.
To get that involved in seriousness. So when you look at a square who has this kind of determined, set, inflexible attitude, you have to say—secretly, you laugh and say “My! You’re doing a wonderful job!” How far out could you get?
You can learn, in this way, to love squares. And this is the only way that will ever change anything. You must never condemn the squares with harsh language.
Because they’re very far out people, but they don’t know it—involved, in other words, in the ultimate curlicues. It’s like a labyrinth, you see? All life is a labyrinth.
It’s a system of tubes. And there are tubes within tubes within tubes. And out far on the very, very great fringes of this labyrinth you get all kinds of hothouse growths; very complicated games.
So complicated that the people involved in them are lost. But that’s simply a function of being a long way from the center. When a fern or any form of plant expands from its center, what is happening is this: inside the stems and the stalks and the tubes which constitute this organism, there are all these little creatures.
And they’re going, traveling along. And they’re getting out there. They want to go out.
Of course, there’s always somebody along with them who says, “Now, be careful! Don’t you get too far out. Because if you get too far out, you spoil the form.” Instead of keeping inside the bounds of the fern, you will just go off into gas.
And that would be awful, you see, because you’re a fern! You’re not gas! But those little creatures out on the end say, “Man, we’d like a gas.” You know?
So that they want to get way off. But it is a result of the tension between those little fellows that want to go way up—see?—and the people who want to stay in. [That’s how] you get the outline, the clear form of a leaf.
They’re working against each other. But they are working even though the one thinks it’s right and the other thinks it’s right—they’re both right and they’re both wrong. They’re both right and wrong, but by being both in a counter-position, like this, they create what we call existence.
What we call the shape of the leaf, the form of the fern. So you will find, of course, that some of them are, in fact, escaping. And some of them are going off into gas.
And some of them are not—some of them are staying put. And if there weren’t some of them going off into gas, there would be no energy in the thing. You see, all energy has a quality of follow-through.
When you hit a golf ball you mustn’t stop the hit at the ball. You have to go zhhhhhp, like that, see? Right through.
So all energies of life have in them a possibility of an excess; of going too far. When you bring up your children, and you tell your children your various far out ideas and the children suddenly believe in them! I’m horrified!
You know? All kinds of philosophy I’ve talked about is being believed by children. And they’re taking it literally.
Oh my God, what will they do next? But everybody feels that way in regard to the strength of a younger generation is coming on. Because it’s younger generations that have zhhhhroom—energy.
See, we think about young people. We have terrible ideas. We think that we know what life is, and that they have to be told, and that they will learn it from us and be like us.
We don’t take that attitude when we see the new vegetables come up in the spring. We don’t say the vegetables have to be educated to be vegetables. We say hooray!
At last, young vegetables with all the life and energy in them! New meals for everything. So, when we see young people come up, say, “Good gracious, isn’t this great to see the human race is still doing its stuff!
I wonder what they’ll have to teach us.” Because wisdom doesn’t come from above down, it comes from below up. That’s where the wisdom is. Surging into us.
The old people, they have a function bu, in order to fulfill that function, they have to understand first that they can learn from the young sources. If they understand that, then they can be wise and be teachers. If they don’t understand that, they never can.
To be wise—that’s the meaning of the saying that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you have to become again as a child. And finally, to get back to my point, to become as a child means that you do things which adults consider unimportant. There is a wonderful Buddhist character.
His name is Hotei in Japanese, Putai in Chinese. And he carries around a bag—enormous—in which he collects rubbish, every kind of inconsequential rubbish, And gives it away to children. Because children understand the meaning and significance of rubbish.
Something which—my father, when I was a small boy, once said “You are a picker-upper of unconsidered trifles.” Because the rubbish is the most wonderful thing in the world from the point of view of a child. So, once a Zen master was asked, “What is the most valuable thing in the world?” and he answered, “The head of a dead cat.” why? Because no one can put a price on it.
So in this man, you see, who is wandering around picking up rubbish, all the trivialities of life, who sees leaves floating down the wind and laughs at them. This is becoming again as the child. In other words, from the child’s point of view, the things which the adult considers irrelevant to survival are perfectly important.
And so children collect pebbles and colored glass and all sorts of trivia which they consider as precious as diamonds. The adults say, “Oh, frippery.” But they really have the secret, you see? Now the child, as child, doesn’t know how to play the adults’ game—which is a power game—and so has to be educated to learn the values of the power game to learn what’s what and what is important.
But when he has mastered that game, he realizes it has no rewards. That all the things that the adults thought they were gaining by their power game are, after all, not worth having. That’s why you can be rich and miserable.
So that, having learned and having seen through the adult power game, you come back to the point of the child. And so you say… bla-bweee-bll-deee-blll-deblblblblb-bleep! Well, let’s have a brief intermission.