Please Note: Everything showing as available to buy is physically in stock in our UK warehouse and available for delivery!

Circle, Line, Dissonance and Harmony

Confirming and changing are two aspects of life that are equally important. 


When we are children we are changing fast, Very fast. During this period we need a lot of confirmation, touch, care, love of all sorts. Without this we do not grow physically, emotionally or intellectually as well as we do without it.
Once we are past puberty and beginning to slow down we begin to seek things that excite us through change. challenge, danger, conflict of various types, small and large depending on situations. experiences gained in this way widen our circle of contacts, experience and broaden our thinking.
In adulthood, particularly once we are set in our way of life, creating steadiness and confirmation for ourselves and our dependants it is quite easy to become single minded, take a narrow path towards our goals. set a straight line and stick to it.
When times of change come again we turn to our friends for confirmation of who we are, our value and place in the world.
I would suggest a parallel here between the circle of the known and a perceived 'harmonious life' and see change acting to cut into our circle of safety in a knife like way. 
Of course nothing is that simple and it is our very willingness to embrace change that creates stability and a fixed grasping of the status quo that means that change becomes threatening, yet it is undeniably comfortable to have a circle of friends, warmth in the family circle, a rhythmic round of daily activity and weekly routine with a good flow of income and outgoings circulating in the personal economy.
That one should regard these things as harmonious, or consonant with expectations is perfectly natural. 
That the intrusion of surprising, shocking or threatening events should be seen as disharmonious is clear, yet in these times of predictable harmony we often act to create potential for disharmony in our life,  seeking adventure as the composer spices the harmony with a little close harmony or even dissonance.
These images of circle and straight line are archetypal.
From the beginning of time we have sought our gods in circles, temple domes, stone rings, kivas or wheel images. 
Yet we have fashioned straight weapons, spears, arrows, swords. We have sought individualism, my line of life as different from yours, separating nation from nation, tribe from tribe, with family and single individual more and more fragmenting rather than circulating together.
I do not wish to judge, approve or condemn anything here. Both are needed. 
West and East have focussed on one way or the other. Time in eastern imagery is circular, in the west it is developmental, a line from ancient times to modern. Western religions have tended to emphasise the line of development and none more than Darwinism.
Hierarchical society is a line from top down, whereas allowing individual initiative and decision making as practiced in many modern 'experimental' communities creates a more circular society.
It is clear that both principles are needed. The human body itself is upright with spine and each long bone being circular in section.
Some see the circle as an archetype of the feminine and the straight line as Masculine.
Sounding Bowls bring the circle and the straight line into a mutually dependant/supportive harmony. During the day workshops (www.soundingbowls.com/workshops.html ) we work into the experience of these two and discover, in movement how the spiral arises where circle and straight line meet each other in movement.
All of Life is Being. The idea that we are conscious objects in a world of objects, is an extreme of a philosophy that has created a Science that examines the world with knives and lasers, having little appreciation for the power of circular perception. Waiting, Watching, Considering, Listening, all return, circular fashion to the point we study. Slowly building up understanding layer upon layer till the inner nature of anything begins to reveal itself. Long practiced in Shamanism this process is updated by Goethean Science and underlies some of the most radical advances in our understanding of the world now being made.
Sounding Bowls are also a radical advance, Disguised in great simplicity they are the first and only instrument in the world with strings inside the resonator and adding circle and line to their own line and circle they return a persons perception of the moment to that person's own intrinsic beauty, empowering in unknown ways a new sense of direction and purpose in individual lives.


In making Sounding Bowls we are working, hand on, with the wood, the tree, the drying process. We have learnt that identical perfection is a thing that machines do and it doesn’t actually make stuff more beautiful. We have come round to allowing certain levels of imperfection. This has to be an artistic choice every time: there is no perfect level of imperfection, no perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in, Light, straight lines of it shining into a circular world.


Is it possible to have a harmonious relationship with Dissonance?

Posted: 31 Aug 2012 By: Tobias Kaye Tobias Kaye

Some weeks after writing this a poem came up to be written that weaves with the question of change as the universal constant.


Change


To be an “I” in process
aware of myself in change
To honour the Life moving through me
biography’s growth and change
Acknowledge the passing awak’nings
the constant, remaining as change
Strong in upright awareness
of all in me that is change

Creates within me a new self
creating around me great change
The stars within me are constant
Their patterns dancing in change
The Sun and Moon that are rising
and setting on all that I change
These things that I once thought around me
I see have become me in change

The I that brought me to birth
and in me began a new change
Grew small as I watched me becoming
grow taller and broader in change
The I the universe gave me
I took as my own to be changed
Then, seeing the I of the universe
I offered my own in exchange

The universe fathered my own self
the universe mothered its change
(S)He wants me to know that I a¬m self
and offers her own in exchange
I flow with the pains of becoming
(S)He offers me Joys in exchange
Accepting the gifts of becoming
I settle, in flowing as change

Your basket contains:0 items