Jill Purce the noted UK sound healer says of the voice…
http://www.jillpurce.com/articles_unbelievable.htm
” But the techniques go much deeper than simply drumming up the courage to sing a song. ‘The healing properties of the voice are extremely profound,’ she says. ‘The only way we can get access to the inside of cells and molecules and organs and limbs without being cut open is by making sound. Making a humming sound, you vibrate the body in a very extreme way. When you vibrate the body you affect everything inside it, you can give yourself a positive massage or you can mess things up. If you don’t use your voice, it’s like an instrument lying on a shelf going more and more out of tune. Singing is not only one of the most powerful forms of meditation – working with the emotions and with the psyche and psychology – it is also a profound means for healing and one which everyone has access to, but in general doesn’t understand or use.”
( Nice Jill Purce 70’s Video Documentaries here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUr10sz_hes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlnKk5F8cxw
The Lord’s prayer, chanting version, which she taught me many years ago, was used as a one breath invocation mantra, much like the overtone chanting she teaches and practises. She mentioned the source for this also lay in the works of Gudjieff- Ouspensky, which mentions that monks in the near east were still practising the same way . .Their books here.
http://www.homeoflife.com/page1/maina.html
Or perhaps I’ll send Jill purce an email and ask her for the instructions and source which I remember go like this…
Draw in a deep breath, and on a low tone below middle C use the text of the lords Prayer and without stopping , whilst joing the words up altogether..
actually dear friends I have just found the original material after some painful googling….
here it is in toto as quoted from the source himself Mr G..
” We continued to talk in English, and the conversation, which I have good reason to remember, proceeded somewhat as follows. I reconstruct it as best I can from the notes I made at the time.
“Who taught you to say the Lord’s Prayer like that?”
“Nobody. It just came into my head.”
“Say the whole prayer through in the same manner.”
I did so with one or two hesitations.
“You interrupted it. You said the first lines without stopping, but then you took a breath. That’s wrong. This is the way your Lord’s Prayer was meant to be said. Listen, and watch.”
He folded his hands in his lap, fixed his eyes on me, and began to breathe in slowly and deeply, holding his breath a few moments, sitting motionless. It was very quiet in the room. Lev Lvovitch and the other man were engrossed in their game. They seemed already to belong to another world. I felt I was entering a new one.
A low, rich, musical bass note, about G2 below middle C, began to sound in the room, pure and dry amid the muffling hangings. My host had begun to chant the Lord’s Prayer. The words came slowly and softly, the syllables flowing evenly and equidistant on the stream of the single note. The consonants just sufficed to articulate the words. From start to finish there was no stop, no hesitation, no halt for breath, no rise or fall in tone; it was one single sound, integral and self-contained, imparting to the prayer a meaning far deeper than the words themselves. The “amen”—pronounced, of course, “ah-meen”—trailed off into inaudibility in a way that merged the fading musical note with the ensuing silence. Chanted slowly in a single breath it seemed to last a very long time.”
http://www.gurdjieff-legacy.org/40articles/ozay.htm
(the sound of the aramaic prayer (syriac dialect I believe, though not the Jerusalem dialect) is here with original phonetics :
http://www.thenazareneway.com/lords_prayer.htm
Further, in Ouspensky’s books we can see references that go back to some of the Pythagorean roots of the prayer as quoted by Plato speaking of Socrates..see here
The origin of the prayer is unknown, but in Plato’s Second Alcibiades Socrates quotes a prayer, which very much resembles the Lord’s Prayer and is most probably the original form of the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer is thought to be of Pythagorean origin.
”Zeus the King, give us all that is good whether we ask for it or not, but command all that is evil to leave us even when we ask it of thee.”
The likeness is so obvious that it requires no comment. This prayer quoted by Socrates explains an incomprehensible point in the Lord’s Prayer, namely, the word “but” after the words ” lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil “. This but points to a continuation of the phrase which had existed before but which is missing from the Gospel prayer. This omitted continuation, ” even when we ask them (evil things) of thee “, explains ” but ” in the preceding sentence.
(A New Model Of The Universe…p203) see link here for download its named ‘ New Model Of the World’ ….
http://www.homeoflife.com/page1/maina.html
Whilst these are a lot of quotes to handle in one lump , there are some interesting snippets which join up Gurdjieffs creative Ray design, where he mentionsthe vibrational sound of the planets, which seem unintelligle at first then I came across something which we are all familar with and it is this.…
Boris Mouravieff was an associate of both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. He knew Ouspensky fairly well, and grudgingly admits the influence of In Search of the Miraculous at the beginning of his extensive three volume work, Gnosis. He claims, somewhat vaguely, to have gone back to some mysterious Orthodox Christian source for his extension of the system ideas. In the following, which is one of my favourite sections of Gnosis volume 1, he shows that the do-re-mi notation actually derives from Latin terms that describe the Ray of Creation.
The esoteric teaching, formerly reserved for the initiated only, was known not only in the Orient but also in the Occident. We can see the evidence of this by analyzing the names of the notes of the musical scale, established, as we know, by Guido of Arezzo, an Italian Beneictine (c.995-1050). To do this, he utilized the hymn to St. John the Baptist, composed two years previously by Paul Diacre or Warnefrid, a historian of Lombardy (740-801). The latter was a secretary to the king of Lombardy, Dider, and after that lived at the court of Charlemagne, then in that of Benevent, to retire finally to the monastery of Monte Cassino, where he ended his days. The hymn to St John the Baptist goes like this:
UT queant lixis
REsonare fibris
MIra gestorum
FAmuli tuorum
SOLve polluti
LAbil reatum
Sanctae Johannes
We see that this hymn was composed by Paul Diacre in hermetic form. Such a procedure was always favoured in esoteric teaching. Comparative study of the diagram of the Great Octave, and the hymn of Paul Diacre, leaves no doubt that he knew this diagram quite veil. So did Guido of Arezzo who, two centuries after Paul, chose that hymn amongst all others, to introduce it into the musical gamut.
We can even see for ourselves why Paul Diacre utilized the syllable UT, instead of DO, to designate the first note. We should carefully note that he conceived this hymn as an ascending gamut, although the Great Octave naturally represents a descending gamut. From the meaning of its content, this hymn tends from the lower to the higher, from the coarse to the fine, in other words, from the human plane toward the divine plane. But he stops, without reaching the latter, at the note SI, consecrated to St John the Baptist, Let us say in passing that the Precursor enjoys a very particular veneration in the Tradition, and is placed above the Apostles. On certain Byzantine icons he is represented as winged, having two heads, one quite severed and bloody, and he bears it with his own hands on a platter.
If Paul Diacre had wanted to prolong his hymn by one more line, he would have had to consecrate it to Jesus, and consequently to start it from the syllable DO. But he did not do that. His eminently human gamut, having begun with man as he is, born of woman in all his imperfection, could obviously not start with DO, which really stands for Dominus. He chose the syllable UT, from the word uterus, the organ of gestation, precisely in order to underline that imperfect condition which is as common to all the devout as to all men, in order to direct them on the track of St John, of whom Jesus said: “Verily I say unto you, among them that are born of woman there hath not arisen a greater than John the Baptist..”
Thus UT—uterus—symbolises the door of birth according to the flesh and SI, the door of the second birth, according to the spirit, without which man cannot see the kingdom of God.
The ascending gamut of Paul Diacre thus comprises an octave of regeneration, going from birth on earth to birth in the heavens.
That is the explanation of this hymn, closely conforming to the sense of the mystical traditions of the past.
An exhaustive examination of the names of the notes that form the musical octave shows direct correspondence with the notes of the Great cosmic Octave, as can be shown from the following diagram:
(UT – UTerus, born of woman)
DO – God. The Absolute manifest. The central Sun. DOminus
SI – Starry sky. Ensemble of all Worlds. SIderus orbis
LA – Our Great World, the Milky Way. LActeus orbis
SOL – The Sun. SOL
FA – The Planetary World, to which our antiquity attributed direct influence on our destiny. FAtum
MI – Earth, our imperfect world, under the mixed rule of Good and Evil.
MIxtus orbis
RE – The Moon, ruler of human fate according to the Ancients.
REgina astris.
Or to put it in Gurdjieffs words via ‘IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS’ page 144
also download at http://www.homeoflife.com/page1/maina.html
” At the next meeting G. again spoke of the ray of creation, partly repeating and
partly supplementing and developing what he had already said.
“The ray of creation like every other process which is complete at a given moment
can be regarded as an octave. This would be a descending octave in which do passes into si, si into la and
so on.
“The Absolute or All (world 1) will be do;
all worlds (world 3).si; all suns (world 6). la; our sun
(world 12).sol; all planets (world 24).fa; the earth
(world 48).mi; the moon (world 96).re. The ray of
creation begins with the Absolute. The Absolute is All. It
is.do.
“The ray of creation ends in the moon. Beyond the
moon there is nothing. This also is the Absolute.do. ”
So there you have it… . I could continue and talk of how these connections fused with other experiences on the way of dear personal friend/ teachers of these ‘esoterica’ making my journey sweet and loving and loveable…and thankfully…
but for now I shall end with some music..
as I mentioned the harp before as an instrument of enchantment (see my SNnews post on Ireland..& the Welsh CRWTH ) then perhaps a documentary on that instrument and other Sacred Music which as you can see from my collections here on this site, I can also share with you to enjoy.
so please do…
and hum along with a ”do ray me fa so la ti do ”..
after all it is the Sound of Music !
… and as Danny La Rue, the famous cross dressing UK comedian once said to me as a little 11 year old boy in shorts , singing that scale ,on the Palladium stage… ‘You sang that very well ‘..
I never knew though that it would have led me all the way here though…
Enjoy… A fascinating lovely informative melodious documentary on the history of the harp..
There is an interesting similarity between certain very well known passages in the Gospels and certain passages in Buddhist books.
For instance, in The Buddhist Catechism there are the following words:
The fault of others is easily perceived but that of oneself is difficult to perceive; a man winnows his neighbour’s faults like chaff, but his own fault he hides, as a cheat hides the bad die from the gambler.1
Oshopirates 