Well, who knew! Apparently everything has a hum. The yogis knew it and now the police know it – and they claim to be able to place, by date and TIME!!! – a recording of anything you like, according to the hum of the machines in the background. Sounds like jiggery-pokery to me – but still, that’s what the man said on the Today programme. And it reminded me of the yoga idea that the universe hums – and that the sound you can make to get in touch with the universe and feel one with everything and all that fuzzy stuff, is a hum. There are actually two ways you can do this. You can chant OM (OM contains within it all creation, beginning, middle and end; as it is actually three sounds – A, U and M). Or you can chant – or think – ‘So Hum’ (or ‘So Ham’.) So hum means ‘I am’ – or, more precisely, ‘I am that which is’, and it mimics nicely the sound of the breath: ‘so’ for the in-breath, ‘hum’ for the out-breath.
Try it some time. And then go to a pizza place and say, ‘can you make me one with everything?’
LOL.
They’re dropping like flies this week – first Patrick and now Ravi. Farewell then, Ravi Shankar, the best-known – and in fact the only known – sitar player in the West. I first came across Ravi Shankar at the Concert for Bangladesh, where he played a set alongside George Harrison, Eric Clapton and many, many more: I still have the boxed set of that concert, which is unusual in having sides 1 and 6 on the same disc, followed by sides 2 and 5 and then sides 3 and 4. This was because a lot of people had ‘stackable’ record players which dropped down a disc at a time.
I have a sizeable stack of Tomatoes pamphlets this morning – the e-version is coming but will be a few days as apparently I have to type the whole lot out again!
Grr.
I’m going to need that beer tonight…
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 