The Power of Mantras, Frequencies that Heal and Transcend

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Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language that is based on sounds and vibrations. Each alphabet with its pronunciation has a specific meaning; like ku denotes earth, khE is sky etc.

OM is the first and foremost of all mantras. It is the sound of cosmic energy housing all the sounds. The spiritual efficacy of OM is heard, not by the ears but by the heart. It surcharges the innermost being of man with vibrations of the highest reality.

All galaxies (including ours) are believed to rotate around the sound frequency resonating with OM.

Frequency of OM is 7.83 Hz, which is inaudible to the human ear with its double strand DNA that cannot discern sounds of frequency less than 20 hertz. 

Birds, dogs and a few other animals can hear it however.

OM has been adapted into other religions as AMEN, the numerical- 786 (OM symbol shown in mirror), SHALOM, OMKAR/ONKAR etc, but they do NOT work like the original OM. While OM releases Nitric Oxide, Amen and Shalom only emit a sound.

Frequencies of various Beej Mantras are -  

 

OM – 7.83 Hz

Gam – 14 Hz

Hleem – 20 Hz

Hreem – 26 Hz

Kleem – 33 Hz

Krowm – 39 Hz

Sreem – 45 Hz

These cosmic sounds were heard by 12 strand DNA maharishis in their spiritual trances which broadened their sense spectrums. However, our brain can register only the vibrations.

Om (also spelled Aum) is a Hindu Sacred Sound that is considered the greatest of all Mantras. The syllable Om is composed of the three sounds a-u-m (in Sanskrit, the vowels a and u combine to become o) and the symbol’s threefold Nature is central to its meaning. It represent several important triads:

The Three Worlds - Earth, Atmosphere, and Heaven
The Three Major Hindu Gods - Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva
The Three Sacred Vedic Scriptures - Rg, Yajur, and Sama

Om Mystically embodies the Essence of the entire Universe. This meaning is further deepened by the Indian Philosophical belief that God first created Sound and the Universe arose from it. As the most Sacred Sound, Om is the Root of the Universe and everything that exists and it continues to hold everything together.


—K. Nagori

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phase-lock

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We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment…

Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous. Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock.

Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous…

Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Telling is Listening
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

 

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[…] for Serres, information is emitted, stored, processed and received by all entities, from humans to crystals, and human communication is only a quiet whisper in the cacophony of the information exchange between entities in the world.

Where Morton’s ecomimesis remains anthropocentric (for only people do ‘nature writing’), Serres’ Great Story is geocentric in a way that does not exclude human communication, but does not give it a qualitatively privileged status either.

So for Morton, a mark will always be “either a squiggle or a letter” (Ecology 50), with nothing in between, but Serres is painting on a broader canvas and, for him, what might be a squiggle or a letter for us human beings (or neither, if its information falls outside our visible spectrum or range of audible frequencies, for example) could well carry a thousand different meanings to a thousand different information receivers, and be meaningless or inexistent to ten thousand more.


—Christopher Watkin
Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology

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The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely large. 

—Louis Pasteur

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All the physical matters are composed of vibration. —Max Planck

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In the year 1905, Albert Einstein proved that we can break matter down into smaller components and that, when we do, we move beyond the material realm and into a realm in which everything is energy.

This is the Law of Vibration, a law of nature that states that ‘nothing rests; everything moves; every-thing vibrates.’ The lower the vibration, the slower the vibration; the higher the vibration the faster the vibration.

The difference between the manifestations of the physical, mental, emo-tional and spiritual result simply from different levels of vibrating energy, or frequencies. So, while the feelings of fear, grief and despair vibrate at a very low frequency, the feelings of love, joy and gratitude vibrate much quicker.

The most common unit of measure for frequency is the Hertz, which is one vibrational cycle per second. So a frequency of 460 Hz means that there are 460 cycles of vibration occurring every single second.

At the very leading edge of biophysics today, scientists are recognizing that the molecules in our bodies are actually controlled by these frequencies. In 1974, Dr. Colin W.F. McClare, Ph.D, an Oxford University Bio-Physicist, discovered that frequencies of vibrating energy are roughly one-hundred times more efficient in relaying information within a biological system than physical signals, such as hormones, neurotransmitters and other growth factors.[i]

Although most frequencies exist outside of our normal range of perception, all can be perceived as both colors and sounds. There are seven colors in a rainbow and seven notes in the musical scale. So the color blue is also heard as the musical key of D, which vibrates at 587 Hz. But what is most interesting is that, if a frequency is vibrating fast enough, it’s emitted as a color of light.

If we wanted to convert sound to Light, we would simply raise its frequency forty octaves. This results in a vibration in the trillions of cycles per second. So, if a pianist could press a key way above the eighty-eight keys that exist on a piano, that key would produce Light. They could create a chord of Light in the same way they can create a chord of sound. And it would be seen as colors of Light because it would be moving at the speed of Light.

The philosophical and scientific basis for this Law of Vibration can be found in quantum physics and in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Energy is related to matter and the speed of Light. This is Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation.

When two frequencies are brought together, the lower will always rise to meet the higher. This is the principle of resonance. So, when a piano is tuned, a tuning fork is struck, and then brought close to the piano string that carries that same musical tone. The string then raises its vibration automatically and attunes itself to the same rate at which the fork is vibrating.

Using this principal of resonance, we can actually increase the speed at which the molecules in our bodies vibrate, through our thoughts of love, joy and gratitude.

When atoms slow down, third dimensional matter is created; when they speed up, the higher dimensions of consciousness can be reached. And the higher our consciousness is raised, the closer to spirit we become.


—Vicky Anderson

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each by all the others held

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Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.


—Wendell Berry
Closing the Circle

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the unstable gift of sentience

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Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. 

A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.

Obscure distillations generate juices, salivas, yeasts. Like mists or dews, brief yet patient jellies come forth momentarily and with difficulty from a substance lately imperturbable: they are evanescent pharmacies, doomed victims of the elements, about to melt or dry up, leaving behind only a savor or a stain.

It is the birth of all flesh irrigated by a liquid, like the white salve that swells the mistletoe berry; like the semisolid in the chrysalis, halfway between larva and insect, a blurred gelatin which can only quiver until there awakens in it a wish for a definite form and an individual function.

Soon after comes the first domestication of minerals, the few ounces of limestone or silica needed by an undecided and threatened substance in order to build itself protection or support: on the outside, shells and carapaces, and on the inside, vertebrae that are immediately articulated, adapted, and finished down to the last detail. The minerals have changed their employ, been drawn from their torpor, been adapted to and secreted by life, and so afflicted with the curse of growth—only for a brief spell, it is true.

The unstable gift of sentience is always moving from place to place. An obstinate alchemy, making use of immutable models, untiringly prepares for an ever-new flesh, another refuge or support. Every abandoned shelter, every porous structure combines to form, through the centuries and the centuries of centuries, a slow rain of sterile seeds. They settle down, one stratum upon another, into a mud composed almost entirely of themselves, a mud that hardens and becomes stone again. They are restored to the immutability they once renounced.

Now, even though their shape may still occasionally be recognized in the cement where they are embedded, that shape is no more than a cipher, a sign denoting the transient passage of a species.


—Roger Caillois
The Writing of Stones

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Vestrahorn, Iceland

jetclarke on reddit

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the ultimate That

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The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within.

Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being.

Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.


—Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy

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this, our life

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And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.


—William Shakespeare

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cosmic dancer

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The intersection of the macro universe and the micro universe will create a gate, or a door. Lao Tzu called this “the door to all wonders.”

This is where yin and yang merge harmoniously.
This is also called the Middle Way.

—Henry Chang

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The kingdom of God is not in the clouds, in some designated point of space; it is right behind the darkness that you perceive with closed eyes.

—Yogananda

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die, and be quiet

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Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like somebody suddenly born into colour.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks/John Moyne version

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here we stand

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I and this mystery; here we stand.

—Walt Whitman

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the world exerts pressure on us from the distance

 

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Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects. If, for instance, I walked along a path without being attentive, completely immersed in myself, I did not even know whether trees grew along the way, nor how tall they were, or whether they had leaves. When I awakened my attention, however, every tree immediately came to me. This must be taken quite literally. 

Every single tree projected its form, its weight, its movement—even if it was almost motionless—in my direction. I could indicate its trunk, and the place where its first branches started, even when several feet away. By and by something else became clear to me, and this can never be found in books. 

The world exerts pressure on us from the distance.

The seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. 

I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. 

Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley. This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. 

Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. 

They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.


—Jacques Lusseyran, blind hero of the French Resistance
Against the Pollution of the I

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miracles of scrutiny

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In certain regions of the far north, where the dust content of the atmosphere is close to zero, light is able to move unscattered through the air. In such places, under such conditions, far away objects can often appear uncannily close at hand to the observer.

The lichen patterns on a boulder can be seen from a hundred yards, cormorants on a sea-stack seem within reach of touch.

Distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.


—Robert Macfarlane
Landmarks (a treasure)
Chapter 7, on Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams
(another treasure)

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When we say that the world is knowable, i.e. that knowledge as such exists, we state through this fact itself the tenet of the essential unity of the world or its knowability. 

We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism - all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it.

The relationship of everything and of all beings is the conditio sine qua non of their knowability.


—Anonymous (Valentin Tomberg
Meditations on the Tarot

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the creative point of life

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We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present.

That now is the creative point of life.

So you see it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that. Also, watch the flow of music. The melody as it’s expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence—you wait till later to find out what the sentence means …

The present is always changing the past.


—Alan Watts

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Moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations—no sooner have they come into existence than they fall to pieces. Life? There’s no such thing; I see lines, planes, and bodies, and they’re transformations in time.

Time, meanwhile, seems a simple instrument for the measurement of tiny changes, a school ruler with a simplified scale—it’s just three points: was, is, and will be.


—Olga Tocarczuk
Flights

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Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.

For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that at any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.


—Algernon Blackwood
Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories

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Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places. —Flann O'Brien

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How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?

—St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 213-268)

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Your thinking that you have to make an effort to get rid of this dream of the waking state, and your making efforts to attain jnana (realization of Self) or real awakening, are all parts of the dream.


—Ramana Maharshi

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Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a universe that is person - and through all of this there blows, animating it and spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of union - and of the Feminine.

The diaphany of the Divine is at the heart of a glowing universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the earth - the divine radiating from depths of blazing matter.

[...] the world will open the arms of God to us. It is for us to throw ourselves into these arms so that the divine milieu should close around our lives like a circle.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Divine Milieu

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on seeing what is to be seen

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The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. 

Your choices outweigh your substance.

—Jarod K. Anderson
Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

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Pirandello said once that we are, in reality, the juxtaposition of infinite, blurred selves. It’s so, and we can’t unblur all the selves. But we can recognize that they exist, and above all, we can let them look at things, remembering always Goethe’s saying that, of all the things that we do, that we can do, the nicest of all is just to stand and look.

From the moment that one pays continuous attention to anything, no matter what it is–a leaf, a nail–whatever is being regarded becomes a world in itself, mysterious, imposing, unspeakably magnified and inexhaustibly fertile in possibilities.

Once you have begun to do this, you have entered into the kingdom of the Other, recognizing its otherness, and wanting to learn from it. The feeling that you get is that the world, and each aspect of it, is a mystery, is unfathomable, and that it glows against the background of universal darkness with a kind of strange and even magical light, both utterly meaningful and utterly meaningless, as the universe itself is.


—James Dickey
The Kingdom of the Other: on seeing what is to be seen

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What a strange machine man is! 

You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and 

out come sighs, laughter, and dreams.

—Nikos Kazantzakis, 1883-1957

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i am that

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I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.

My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world. —Jack Kerouac

Earth, seen from Saturn by NASA's Cassini

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0nce you wipe the dust from your screen, the remaining blue dot is … us

—Col. Chris Hadfield

 

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Consider that:

you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum.

As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy.

90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.”

The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star.

Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist.

So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it.

This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.


—NASA Lunar Science Institute

 

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doer(ship

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is it true
that your mind is sometimes like
a battering ram
running all through the city,

shouting so madly inside and out
about the ten thousand things
that do not matter?


—Hafiz

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Why should you bear your load on your head when you are traveling on a train?

It carries you and your load whether the load is on your head or on the floor of the train. You are not lessening the burden of the train by keeping it on your head but only straining yourself unnecessarily.

Similar is the sense of doership in the world by individuals.


—Ramana Maharshi

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Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Without stirring abroad,
one can know the whole world;

Without looking out of the window
one can see the way of heaven.

The further one goes the less one knows.


—Lao Tzu

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look

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Friend, we’re traveling together.
Throw off your tiredness.

Let me show you one tiny spot of the beauty that cannot be spoken.


—Rumi

 

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this being human is a guest house

 

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Set your life on fire.

Seek those who fan your flames.

Who gets up early to discover the moment the light begins?

What was whispered to the rose to break it open last night was whispered to my heart. 

You’ve gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine. 

Taste this. It won’t make you wild.

It’s fire. 

Give up, if you don’t understand by this time that your living is firewood. 

Set your life on fire.

Seek those who fan your flames. 

The lamps are different,

But the Light is the same. 

To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another dragon, the life-energy of the soul. 

What is the body? 

That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe. 

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival. 

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. 

Welcome and attend them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. 

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. 

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off.

That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief.

You haven’t dared yet lose faith - so, can faith grow in you? 

Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. 

If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. 

—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

this being human is a guest house

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A Ritual To Read To Each Other

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If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes, no, or maybe-- should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep.


—William Stafford

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sitting together

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We sit in this courtyard,
two forms, shadow outlines with one soul.

Birdsound, leaf moving, early evening star,
fragrant damp, and a sweet sickle curve of moon.

You and I in a round, unselved idling
in the garden-beauty detail.

The raucous parrots laugh,
and we laugh inside their laughter,
the two of us on a bench in Konya,
yet amazingly in Khorasan and Iraq as well.

Friends abiding this form,
yet also in another, outside of time, you and I.


—Rumi

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finding the other

 

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Mr. Tayer

When I was about fourteen I was seized by enormous waves of grief over my parents’ breakup. I had read somewhere that running would help dispel anguish, so I began to run to school every day down Park Avenue in New York City. I was a great big overgrown girl (5 feet eleven by the age of eleven) and one day I ran into a rather frail old gentleman in his seventies and knocked the wind out of him. He laughed as I helped him to his feet and asked me in French-accented speech, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”

“Yes, sir" I replied. “It looks that way.“

“Well, Bon Voyage!” he said.

“Bon Voyage!” I answered and sped on my way.

About a week later I was walking down Park Avenue with my fox terrier, Champ, and again I met the old gentleman.

“Ah.” he greeted me, “my friend the runner, and with a fox terrier. I knew one like that years ago in France. Where are you going?“

“Well, sir.” I replied, “I’m taking Champ to Central Park.“

“I will go with you.” he informed me. “I will take my constitutional.“

And thereafter, for about a year or so, the old gentleman and I would meet and walk together often several times a week in Central Park. He had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it, which was “Mr. Tayer” as far as I could make out.

The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr. Tayer seem to have absolutely no self-consciousness, but he was always being seized by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly and literally falling into love. I remember one time when he suddenly fell on his knees, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed to me, “Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhh!” I joined him on the ground to see what had evoked so profound a response that he was seized by the essence of caterpillar. “How beautiful it is", he remarked, “this little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite! Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis.“ He then regarded me with equal delight. “Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?”

“Oh yes.” I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply faced teenager.

“Then think of your own metamorphosis.“ he suggested. “What will you be when you become a butterfly, une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?” (What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl!) His long, gothic, comic-tragic face would nod with wonder. “Eh, Jeanne, look at the clouds! God’s calligraphy in the sky! All that transforming. moving, changing, dissolving, becoming. Jeanne, become a cloud and become all the forms that ever were.”

Or there was the time that Mr. Tayer and I leaned into the strong wind that suddenly whipped through Central Park, and he told me, “Jeanne, sniff the wind.“ I joined him in taking great snorts of wind. “The same wind may once have been sniffed by Jesus Christ (sniff). by Alexander the Great (sniff), by Napoleon (sniff), by Voltaire (sniff), by Marie Antoinette (sniff)!” (There seemed to be a lot of French people in that wind.) “Now sniff this next gust of wind in very deeply for it contains.. . Jeanne d’Arc! Sniff the wind once sniffed by Jeanne dArc. Be filled with the winds of history.”

It was wonderful. People of all ages followed us around, laughing—not at us but with us. Old Mr. Tayer was truly diaphanous to every moment and being with him was like being in attendance at God’s own party, a continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. But mostly Mr. Tayer was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with everything. Always he saw the interconnections between things—the way that everything in the universe, from fox terriers to tree bark to somebody’s red hat to the mind of God, was related to everything else and was very, very good.

He wasn’t merely a great appreciator, engaged by all his senses. He was truly penetrated by the reality that was yearning for him as much as he was yearning for it. He talked to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks as dear friends, as beloved even. ‘Ah, my friend, the mica schist layer, do you remember when…?” And I would swear that the mica schist would begin to glitter back. I mean, mica schist will do that, but on a cloudy day?! Everything was treated as personal, as sentient, as “thou.“ And everything that was thou was ensouled with being. and it thou-ed back to him. So when I walked with him, I felt as though a spotlight was following us, bringing radiance and light everywhere. And I was constantly seized by astonishment in the presence of this infinitely beautiful man, who radiated such sweetness, such kindness.

I remember one occasion when he was quietly watching a very old woman watching a young boy play a game. “Madame”, he suddenly addressed her. She looked up, surprised that a stranger in Central Park would speak to her. “Madame,” he repeated, “why are you so fascinated by what that little boy is doing?” The old woman was startled by the question, but the kindly face of Mr. Tayer seemed to allay her fears and evoke her memories. “Well, sir,” she replied in an ancient but pensive voice, “the game that boy is playing is like one I played in this park around 1880, only it’s a mite different.“ We noticed that the boy was listening, so Mr. Tayer promptly included him in the conversation. “Young fellow, would you like to learn the game as it was played so many years ago?”

“Well…yeah. sure, why not?” the boy replied. And soon the young boy and the old woman were making friends and sharing old and new variations on the game—as unlikely an incident to occur in Central Park as could be imagined.

But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr. Tayer was the way that he would suddenly look at you. He looked at you with wonder and astonishment joined to unconditional love joined to a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one. I felt myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential palpably changed. I was yeasted, greened, awakened by such seeing, and the defeats and denigrations of adolescence redeemed. I would go home and tell my mother, who was a little skeptical about my walking with an old man in the park so often, “Mother, I was with my old man again, and when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind.” That deeply moved her. You could not be stuck in littleness and be in the radiant field of Mr. Tayer.

The last time that I ever saw him was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah. Escargot.“ he exclaimed and then proceeded to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour. Snail shells, and galaxies, and the convolutions in the brain, the whorl of flowers and the meanderings of rivers were taken up into a great hymn to the spiralling evolution of spirit and matter. When he had finished, his voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, “Omega …omega…omega..” Finally he looked up and said to me quietly, “Au revoir, Jeanne”.

“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer,” I replied, “I’ll meet you at the same time next Tuesday.”

For some reason. Champ, my fox terrier didn’t want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, looking back at Mr.Tayer, his tail between his legs. The following Tuesday I was there waiting where we always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 83rd Street. He didn’t come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn’t come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had suddenly died that Easter Sunday but I didn’t find that out for years.

Some years later, someone handed me a book without a cover which was titled The Phenomenon of Man. As I read the book I found it strangely familiar in its concepts. Occasional words and expressions loomed up as echoes from my past. When, later in the book, I came across the concept of the “Omega point.“ I was certain. I asked to see the jacket of the book, looked at the author’s picture, and, of course, recognized him immediately. There was no forgetting or mistaking that face. Mr. Tayer was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet and mystic, and during that lovely and luminous year I had been meeting him out side the Jesuit rectory of St. Ignatius where he was living most of the time.

I have often wondered if it was my simplicity and innocence that allowed the fullness of Teilhard’s being to be revealed. To me he was never the great priest-paleontologist Pere Teilhard. He was old Mr. Tayer. Why did he always come and walk with me every Tuesday and Thursday, even though I’m sure he had better things to do? Was it that in seeing me so completely, he himself could be completely seen at a time when his writings, his work, were proscribed by the Church, when he was not permitted to teach, or even to talk about his ideas? As I later found out, he was undergoing at that time the most excruciating agony that there is—the agony of utter disempowerment and psychological crucifixion. And yet to me he was always so present—whimsical, engaging, empowering. How could that be?

I think it was because Teilhard had what few Church officials did—the power and grace of the Love that passes all understanding. He could write about love being the evolutionary force, the Omega point, that lures the world and ourselves into becoming, because he experienced that love in a piece of rock, in the wag of a dog’s tail, in the eyes of a child. He was so in love with everything that he talked in great particularity, even to me as an adolescent, about the desire atoms have for each other, the yearning of molecules, of organisms, of bodies, of planets, of galaxies, all of creation longing for that radiant bonding, for joining, for the deepening of their condition, for becoming more by virtue of yearning for and finding the other. He knew about the search for the Beloved. His model was Christ. For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ was the Beloved of the soul.

Years later, while addressing some Jesuits, a very old Jesuit came up to me. He was a friend of Teilhard’s—and he told me how Teilhard used to talk of his encounters in the Park with a girl called Jeanne.


—Jean Houston
Pomona, New York
March, 1988

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Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

—Marcus Aurelius(121 CE - 180 CE) 

Roman Emperor and Stoic

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everything that rises must converge

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The Universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. 

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. 

The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.  

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

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To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the ‘other.’ 

The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. 

The same holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egoism.’ Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalises itself.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man

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My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him. 

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. 

Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! 

At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

—Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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