Rhythm, in music, the placement of sounds in time. From the hypnotic beat of reggae to the sound of rhythmic footsteps as the soldiers march in honor of fascism. Those pulses – as everything we touch – transfer the whole range of ’emotions’. Now, scientists have shown for the first time that people without any musical training also create songs using predictable musical beats, suggesting that humans are hardwired to respond to-and produce-certain features of music. Have you ever wondered why a strange piece of music can feel familiar-how it is, for example, that you can predict the next beat even though you’ve never heard the song before? Music everywhere seems to share some “universals,” from the scales it uses to the rhythms it employs. We have indeed music – and the core of it, rhythm – inside. Sound pattern, which in themselves include patterns, and the pulse, the rhythms, the structuring beat, are seen be recent science not just as a game changing human invention, but as basic capabilities ingrained in our neuronal circuitry. This is the plane of realisation, spiritual consciousness, where perception, knowledge and action can occur simultaneously. The rhythm also facilitates the Shaman in journeying to the spirit worlds, the astral level in which our personal over soul lives as well as an immortal being of pure energy.
When a drum is played in a continuous rhythmic fashion the life force within the drum is released through its vibrations and sound. The drum is seen to contain the spirit of this life force energy and therefore has the ability to sustain life itself maintaining wellbeing and balance within a community. The Shaman and his community saw the drum to embody universal life force energy that connects everything and everyone. If one looks at the origins of music, be it in the ancient – traced to 6000 BCE – Ayurvedic tradition or in the pulses of Shamanic rituals, developed a hefty 5000 years ago, the power and significance the attribute to rhythm ecompasses the connection to the infinite, to God, the universe, the very essence of existence. IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS THE BEATīut rhythm is not only the first impression – and the last – we get and keep of this world, rhythm seems to be – much – more than that. So your initiation into life is first sensed completely through rhythm. If you were fortunate, most of the time the sensations generated by her heartbeat and breathing would lull and rock you. It’s your mother’s heartbeat, massaging what is to become you with its consistency and power, accompanied by the steady undulation of her breathing. Take yourself back to those first few weeks in her womb.
You sensed your being as only slightly distinct from your mother’s body, intimately connected to her physical and emotional rhythms, yet very gradually emerging into a sense of your own self. Before you could hear, see, touch, or think, you were unadulterated physicality-pure instinctual and primal substance, a human animal in its infancy, animated by the spark of life that foretold of a human being. Not the sound (initially), but the sensation of rhythm. When you came into this life, your first felt experience was the sensation of rhythm. Not yet able to hear, see, or think – but to feel the sensation of rhythm – me, you, once (listening) to rhythmic vibrations in mothers body