Today is the eighth day since my teacher left. I bore witness the depth charge of it, straight through the center of the planet from Virginia to Karnataka. And also something else, a kind of radiant expanding resonance that I’m still sounding out.
Back some time before 3:36, my eyes were in the treetops, his hand in both of mine. It was all so subtle. Hard, too. CPR is really hard. And also the whole time, a sparkle in the trees, the uncanny sensation of being watched. And not with eyes.
Some time later, a generation or 25 minutes, or 10, the EMTs brought us into the earth. Of course. We made the first calls to India. That was the first blast, heavy, a big soul falling in the forest. A whole expansive oaktree of a person, far heavier than I had understood. The gravitas of a generation. I had underestimated him; maybe you did too.
And the response through the planet, from people on the phone, was a weight dropped on the heart, the breath punching out as an awful “no,” and then returning with keening wails.
I made many calls those first hours. The internet is a terrible way to learn. It’s a broadcasting, outside of relationship. So having borne witness, I bore the news too. There was nothing else to do. My body was full of action, near empty of sleep, for the next week.
What draws me to write now for the first time in years is the resonant bubble that remains. And expands. I lost a teacher once before and that was nothing like this. It was quiet. This is beautiful-awful. It is not quiet.
There was a conference not so long ago, maybe 2019, where Sharath had a strange tangent about the sounds he heard inside his heart. Do you remember it? He spoke of the silence of the heart in a spiritual sense, but then within that silence, he told us about “so many sounds.” I initially listened as if it was his goofball aspect speaking. But no, this wasn’t goofy. It was surprising. He was sharing something real and cosmic, the vibration of an unstruck bell that he heard in his silence after practice. I began to listen for it in myself, having been guided by him. And yes, in the deepest silence and concentration, there is an unstruck bell in the center of the chest. It makes many silent sounds.
His bell struck.
It radiated into us in waves, the first responders, and then the 50 students with us on the mountain. Then everyone we called. And then more, and more.
This frequency does things.
First it seeks out negative polarities, the situations where two positive magnets repel each other. It flips this to a mutual magnetism, pulling souls across years of difference or weirdness or feigned unfamiliarity. In the first hour after, ears ringing, I was in the arms of people whose interpretations of the practice I think differ from mine, the stupidity of those thoughts collapsed in the reality of our need for one another. The direct, immediate, effect of the striking of the bell. Dissolving a particular avoidant energy that he observed among us, a tendency he really disliked.
Second, the frequency of his heart bell creates uncanniness. Mandelbrot uncanniness. Dense repeating patterns of reference and thought, like a tesseract drawing itself in the air, repeating its pattern first in 3 minds, then 10, then 50, then a hundred, now millions.
We keep thinking the same thoughts, having bizarrely strange dreams and emanations of mind, saying the same words. At the center of the bubble is this absolute density of shared psychic experience that may remain through our lives, if we can stand that much beauty.
This repetition of thought and word keeps happening, in a million channels that cross-reference each other. The process is both concretizing and expanding the tesseract itself. David and Kat called this an intertextuality, the correct term I think for synchronicity that uses not just the heart but now the internet to express itself.
His heart was a powerful strange attractor in life, drawing all kinds of different minds, different motivations, different karmas. I witnessed all this over many years, as his heart softened and its attractive power increased at a patterned, geometric rate. And then suddenly when his his heart bell struck and the pulse simply stopped, that strange attractor that began in his heart became inifinitely MORE strange and MORE attractive.
If charisma is the property of a group and not its leader, as Max Weber wrote, maybe also this dense synchronicity is the property of groups. What matters to me is the natural shape and duration of the vibration of the bell. Yes it will be loudest in the first moment, but it is space itself that dissipates the resonance, across more and more people and across the earth, as the sound slowly falls back into silence.
Third, this struck bell creates state change. From rumination to concentration. From future fretting to the present moment. From solid self, to interdependent bone-wracked soft-bodied grief. From solid matter to highly charged hair. Every action and moment I witnessed inside our immediate 4-day grief container shone with these facets. Words, touches, looks of recognition became jewels to give away and to treasure.
I can only guess there is some law of weird nature, by which his death-resonance will quieten as it expands. But that is not happening yet for me personally. At our shala where I practiced this morning as a student, the air dense with flowers and hearts soft in grief, it was present. I’m so grateful the students can bathe in it. Tomorrow will be the same. And there will be some people who catch the sound of it – maybe in the form of a kind of intimate relational silence – even years from now in time.
It is awful. And it’s the most beautiful human experience I have had, and continue to be having.
P.S. I’d been irritated at Drake for copying my alter-ego. The nerve. This (0v0) came to life in 2007, and he founded 0v0 in 2012. But then that other owl passed out of relevance this summer, caged in a rap battle with Drake’s better, so I figure the guy’s got enough problems. And, it’s also time to bring back the original.
P.P.S. For years, there was an (0v0) newsletter on tinyletter. I sent the last of those in January 2021 and it feels presumptuous to resurrect that list and blast hundreds of old subscribers who haven’t heard from me in years. So here is a new one where you can opt in if you want. I presume substack will enshittify at some point, so will keep insideowl.com, which I own, as the primary anchor for this blog. More to come in this space.