Transcendent Experiences
The Gong
I don't even believe this one. "Fagedaboutit."
Miracles, prophecies, words of wisdom, visions, revelations, answers to prayer...You name it, I have experienced it. So if the story of the gong was utterly isolated it could be so easy to dismiss it. But in context it at least seems possible. Of course you can say I made it up, etc...I'm tired of saying it.
A couple of years ago Dan was into gongs.
Big, radiant, glorious gongs. Rub them and they glow...hit them and they snap and growl. With frequencies low to high. And every time you are talking while you walk by the gong it vibrates with your speech...Resonant, grand, glorious, mysterious things.
They represent the Great Central Sun, the Cosmic Center of the Universe.
I wanted a gong. It seemed the right thing to do.
So I went to the local major-name music retailer. I went into the drums and percussion room. The guy running the place that morning had been there almost daily since the place opened three years earlier.
"I need a gong."
"Well, all we've got is this little one." It was a tabletop model, about 6 inches in diameter.
"No, that will never do. I need a real gong."
"Well, sorry buddy, but that's all we've got. Don't get much call for them. We could special order you one."
That would not do.
I closed my eyes...prayed and...well, it's hard to describe...
I opened my eyes and...There, hanging from the ceiling against the wall, over the counter itself, was a glorious 24 inch gong.
A real gong.
The percussion manager had this strange look in his eyes...this was his shop, and he had never seen this thing before. It didn't have a tag, wasn't in the computer. He had to look it up in the book to tell me the price.
I took my gong home and called Dan.
He immediately got on the phone & started telling the group that I had manifested a Great Central Sun Gong out of thin air.
It seemed a bit far fetched.
I would never have believed such a ridiculous story.
Except that it happened...just...like...that.
p.s. Did you know that if you have 2 perfectly matched microphones, one in front of the gong and one behind, placed exactly the same distance from the gong, with perfectly matched signal paths, recorded on a perfect system...You can strike the gong and hear NOTHING AT ALL?
Yup.
A scientific fact.
All sound is a vibration, moving things (like wires and speakers and vocal chords) in and out, up and down.
For every part of the gong moving in there's another part moving out.
The sum total of the system remains neutral. Unmoved.
The Unmoved Mover.
Ani + Ain = No-Thing
Oddly, one of the great mysteries in science is how anything can exist at all. We now know that for every particle there is an antiparticle. When they combine they return to the mysterious unknown from which they came. The only thing we can't figure out is exactly the mechanism that somehow keeps them separate.
Just thought I'd toss that one in for free.
