#25: Raising Consciousness Through Sound with Alexandre Tannous
So many elements of our human experience affect our consciousness, including sound. Classical music, indigenous forms of drumming, African desert blues, or the mere sound of silence produce different feelings and thoughts. It can shape our inner life in significant ways — in fact, awareness around how we consume sound shapes the way we create meaning and how we live our life.
Alexandre Tannous has been active as a musician, educator, composer, and an ethnomusicologist. For the past 13 years he has been researching the therapeutic and esoteric properties of sound. He has developed a protocol he calls “Sound Meditation” which uses specific sounds to help people tap into the self-healing capacities that we all possess. We discuss Gnosticism, the physics of sound, and how music is weaponized and used to hijack consciousness for religious and capitalistic agendas. Alexandre holds a Bachelor of Music in Theory and Composition, a Master of Arts degree in Music Education as well as a Master of Arts and a Master of Philosophy degrees in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. His works are frequently performed in the United States, Europe, and in Asia. He currently works as a sound therapist, researcher and educator.
Highlights:
- How Sound Hijacks Consciousness
- Therapeutic Properties of Sound
- How to Incorporate Sound into Your Spiritual Practice
Resources:
- Sound Meditation
- Sample Recordings of Alexandre’s Work
- Biocentrism by Robert Lanza
Listen:
Poem Inspired by This Episode
Full Transcript
Adrian:
Welcome to the show.
Alexandre :
Thank you. Very good to be here.
Adrian:
Yeah, maybe a good place to start… just give us a bit of a background of how you first fell in love with all these subjects that you’re so passionate about. Sound and consciousness. And all the things that you’re involved in.
Alexandre:
Yeah. Well, ever since I was a teenager I was attracted to esoteric knowledge, occult knowledge. And I have to define occult here because most people think automatically of evil and dark staff. No, not necessarily. Occult is simply the hidden that which is around but hidden in a way because people don’t have the right tools to perceive and understand it. And interested in meditation and eastern philosophies and the psyche and why the human experience is going on and so on and so forth. And one thing will always lead to another. And, but the most important element here is curiosity. I’ve always had the curiosity to know things. I didn’t know that they’re there to be known. Uh, of course it’s a long and tricky journey, treacherous sometimes. It’s part of the learning process. Uh, making mistakes is important that these mistakes should be perceived as a stepping stone toward betterment and deeper understanding, realizations and, seeking the truth. Yeah. And this grew over the years and still growing. I’m still a student of variety of different things that most people don’t give attention to. The things that informed me a lot and have been really fascinating for me are certain fields such as hermeticism, the knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus. Gnosticism, the body of knowledge that the Gnostics, those who sought Gnosis experiential knowledge. Nonintellectual knowledge. Embodied knowledge. Knowledge that come out of experience. That’s really important because, um, it also appears in other cultures, ancient cultures and systems. The Gnostics were the people who lived around the time of Christ, um, and sought knowledge. The prototype Gnostics were the scenes. But it’s also something talked about in Kabbalah, Da’ath, is intuitive knowledge as opposed to Yeda, learned intellectual knowledge. And Jnana in Hinduism and Rigpa in Tibetan Buddhism and so on. Other subjects I was interested in and still interested, theosophy the school of Madame Blavatsky. Anthroposophy, the school of Rudolph Steiner, even though he started as an Anthroposophist. Eastern philosophies as well especially specific schools, for example, the Vedanta schools in Hinduism and Dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism and other esoteric and called philosophies and practices. And Rosicrucianism as well and certain secret societies. Although these have been, or it seems for the most part that they’d been hijacked by other entities and derailed because the fight at the end is about knowledge. Knowledge is the ultimate power. And then absence of knowledge is the absence of power. And as humans wake up, they realize the level of deception and trickery and corruption that’s going on on all levels, especially political and religious, just the usual hypocrisy that’s part of the human condition. And they’re waking up because they’re gaining this knowledge and this knowledge belongs to people and the knowledge went underground, it was preserved in a lot of these fields that I mentioned, but it was preserved up into a point where consciousness is ready to handle this knowledge and people are aware. And I think this is the time where this knowledge is coming back little by little but you need people to be less distracted and to pay attention to it instead of pop culture and stupid media that’s trying to frighten people and to create the inner instability because the manipulation is through entrainment. We can talk about entrainment later on. Yeah. So the search is still going. I love what I explore and it’s now became part of my life’s work. Um, I quit the things I used to do. I’m trained in music. Four degrees over 12 years. I wore different hats when it came to music. Making I studied composition and conducting performance music, education, ethnomusicology. But now I focus all my efforts to do sound research and scientific studies and fieldwork. And I work as a sound therapist, bringing this knowledge to people where one is being awakened from within. One experiences different non ordinary states of consciousness to understand the self. And meditation, contemplation, mindfulness also go hand and hand with working with sound. Yeah.
Thal:
You know, of course, it’s amazing. Your interests are so varied. But kind of two questions come to mind as you were talking. First, you know, when you’re talking about the esoteric knowledge, sort of the experiential knowledge, it’s like hidden in plain sight and as you said, there are a lot of distractions, I guess. I don’t know if we can answer it or I’m just thinking about like what holds us back? Sort of peeling away the layers of the veil. What is it essentially that’s holding back people, you know? Like I know I’m thinking about fear, but I would like to hear your thoughts around that. That’s one question. And the other one is, um, you know, the fact that you are so multifaceted and interested in all these different types of knowledge. What early experiences in your life, was there a certain moment or like an insight that came to you at a young age or an experience that you’d like to share that sort of initiated you in a way?
Alexandre :
Yeah. Um, so yes, fear is the number one element that holds people back. Um, but also fear manifests in various ways. There’s some reticence and some holding back in us realizing who we are ever since the quote unquote fall out of Eden, whatever that story is really about. Where humanity, the human being lost the God, the connection to God, God within, not God outside. I completely disagree with the Abrahamic understanding of the divine. There is no divine outside. It’s a trick. So there’s something within us that does not want us to realize who we are. There is a fear. There is hesitation, but there’s also attachment to the material world. Um, in Hinduism and Buddhism, they talk about Maya, which is the state of infatuation with the material world, with the changing world. And um, we lost who we are in the dream. It’s very important to start to create an analogy here. A dream is like this reality when we fall asleep, for the first few moments we are aware that we are falling asleep and we starting to dream. And some people can control that by doing lucid dreaming on demand. It happens to every person let’s say the person wakes up in the middle of the night, then they go to the bathroom and if they stay latched on that dream, they can hop back on it and continue it. But in the first few moments, few seconds or a minute or two, they’re aware that they’re dreaming. But then as they go on, they lose the self in the dream. They lose who’s having the dream. They lose the fact that this is a dream and it’s not consensual reality and they’re not aware of to what extent and how this dream replaces completely consensual reality up until they wake up again. Whether to go to the bathroom again or to wake up in the morning. And then they realize, oh, that was a dream. This is consensual reality. This reality seems to be working in a similar way where, um, we don’t really understand what reality is. We don’t understand how the psyche, the mind, can create reality, that is, uh, similar to the stream and sometimes could be even more powerful than the dream itself. And, um, when people do Shamanic experiences and take psychedelics, exactly the same process happens, is that they live through a dream, the visionary state that is, that can have an aspect that makes it seem more real than reality itself. So this requires some attention. How can this happen? What is reality? So we become deeply engaged in the dream and invested in, especially when we take our emotions, feelings, and thoughts seriously. And this is where the suffering comes from, is that we’re taking things too seriously. People who are experiencing depression or severe anxiety or PTSD, there’s a different flow of chemicals that happen in their body and that becomes the new trip. And there will be great attachment to the new trip, if we can call it, which is, well I should preface here that feelings, emotions and thoughts and sensations all are induced by chemicals and endogenous chemicals that are secreted in the body. And we run on chemicals. It’s really the human experiences is a human trip and all we do is change it. So we can become addicted to certain things. And that’s why you find a lot of people who are angry all the time. They don’t enjoy being in group and they’re attached to being angry or being sad or feeling self-loathing and so on because of the attachment to the chemicals that their bodies secreted. So the chemicals in the way we invest our energy and we pursue them, that ends up by creating form of reality. And uh, we become attached to that. And that’s the only thing we know and we tend to shy away from that which we don’t know. So if you consider all of these things, then uh, you realize to what extent it’s easy to perpetuate this sense of loss of the connection to the divine that’s within and carry on with life as it’s being fabricated through form of entrainment. Entrainment is when we’re playing music and music starts to affect us and we start to move and sync with it even when we’re not dancing. Entrainment is when people watch a film. And the music in the film is affecting people’s reception to the visuals and the dialogue. It’s very, very important. I wrote for film music and I know how important that is. And also in commercials. Why? Because it changes the inner processes, the brainwave cycles, the heart rate variability, the subtle energy and every aspect of being. Sound, music is immensely powerful when it comes to entrainment because you’re dealing with physics. And the universe is ruled by the laws of physics. We don’t give so much attention to the extent in which consciousness is ruled by the laws of acoustics, a specific branch in physics that deals with the study of sound and vibration. And that’s why within sound and music and all sorts of ceremonies, whether they’re religious, Shamanic, traditional, spiritual, mystical fields and so on and so forth. So we can be kept in this dimension and not have to follow to what we came here to do, which is to unravel the nature of being and to understand who we are. That’s something that people used to do in matriarchy. Um, and they understood this complexity that’s within nature. And there was no science back then. There was natural philosophy. Schools of natural philosophy, which science came out from that. Science suffered a huge setback, became reductionist, materialistic. And then we lost this connection to understanding the value of the mathematical systems that we use to understand the nature of being Fibonacci Series, fractal geometry, the relevance and the importance of Phi. And the most important one is the harmonic overtones series that has always been associated with the creation of the universe. With the tool which gets you to find what God is and where God is. We can talk about this later. So when you consider all of these things, then we can on a deeper level why we’re so attached to being in this dimension to being in this reality. And especially that’s being perpetuated. There is media and everyone’s trying to sell us something and trying to get us to buy things that we don’t need. Consumerism is big and you know, it’s easy to become addicted to these things. Why? Because of the literal dopamine reward when people buy something and you know. Shopaholics do exists and there’s a reason why they exist. Um, mostly because of altering this human experience. Our actions, feelings and thoughts alter the way the body runs on chemicals and that’s what constitutes reality. So, um, we are afraid of realizing the self. There is a sense of fear, hesitation, but also there’s a sense of manipulation and loss and that’s contributing to this. Now what’s changing in people is that they’re getting more and more clues and there’s something growing within us that is creating this more serious than ever a paradigm shift, I believe. And it’s, uh, coinciding with things falling apart on political level, religious level. People are losing faith in book religions. People are resorting to archaic revival, you know, Shamanism and traditions and uh, eastern philosophies, meditation, Yoga or working with sound, taking psychedelics and so on and so forth. Uh, I have to say that not all the time is being used in an efficient, thorough and sensible way, but that’s the human condition. You know, it’s not always optimal and, and uh, we can still be manipulated even though we have serious endeavor to achieve these things. Nonetheless, consciousness has the power to circumvent all of that and still gain a higher and higher ground. But one needs thorough attention to the energy that’s being used to the attention to will awareness to curiosity. The totality of the mindset, what we bring to every experience and to pay attention to the phenomenological aspect of the experience.
Because that is at the end what is needed. The individual’s faculty, resources being invested in something that’s going to make a difference. There is cognitive dissonance though that can hold the person back. And for the people listening, if they don’t know what cognitive dissonance they should look at it, which is basically, if someone tells me something that’s so far outside of what I believe in, what I’ve known, uh, even though that’s a more accurate truth or an upgraded version of the truth, I may reject it because it makes me few so threatened. So that’s serious. And these techniques that are used in a weaponized psychology, weaponize anthropology, weaponized sociology, weaponized music, weaponize faith, and all these things that people tend to become interested in are being used against them because of cognitive dissonance and other faculties that are based on ignorance. And what is the ultimate point here? Well, we’ve derailed because we started prioritizing profit over consciousness and that caused us to become attached to money. Money is a symbol of power, a symbol of survival and safety. And when you have cultures that are promoting reptilian brain interaction, that is, they do that because that makes money. And keeping the, keeping people on the couch, watching the news and the reptilian brain, which is the inner most part of the brain that’s responsible for fight or flight and running the body as a machine without the person having to have the awareness to do that. Then the body becomes a slave to the reptilian brain that wants to protect the person and they become addicted to news because they think that the more they watch, the more they’re being informed in keeping themselves safe and money sings well to that. So at the end we ended up by having completely different relationship with the hardware in the body, pardon me for using these terms, but I do that on purpose. So the computer is now not using the entire parts, but focused on specific parts were mostly left hemisphere these days. We rely so much on education and intelligence and less so the imagination, which is what the right hemisphere deal with, um, imagination and inspiration, the feminine side of the brain versus the left brain being the masculine. So we’re mostly running on left brain with a lot of reptilian brain action. And that creates different reality. And this is what’s causing the big fork on the road now where humanity is starting to become split in two halves. And it will become more and more so. In one part, humanity is waking up and resorting to things that really reveal the true nature of the self, of reality, of the divine within. The archaic methods to seek holistic experience, integral discovery, um, and um, you know, pro-organic farming, permaculture and no GMOs and all of the stuff. And then the other part, the other part of the fork in the road is people are going on with the status quo and think that, oh, things are improving because now we have technology and AI is gonna make things much easier and cheaper. And not thinking of the consequences of how much the dehumanization is going to happen in the Trans-humanistic agenda behind all of that. And, um, the, the danger of having AI that you cannot control and it’s going to upgrade itself and design itself. So it’s a very, very, uh, critical time in humanity. Um, and we can go deeper into this if you want at a later point.
The second question, what made me become interested in all of this? Well I grew up in war in Beirut and parents who immigrated to the states. So I lived through a lot of violence and terror and that made me ask questions that you know, a young person would not usually ask from an early age. And to demystify and the nature of suffering and the madness that can, um, affect people and people start to kill each other over either who’s God is more merciful or which way is best to worship that same God. That’s basically why book religions and the denominations and sect within them, whether Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiites and so on and so forth, kill each other. Basically they’re killing each other over who has the better method to worship Jehovah. And the level of fingers go so far that they think that Christians or Muslims like, oh, these Muslims, I mean Christians or Jews think that, uh, let’s say, Allah, the name of God in Islam is a different God. No, it’s not a different God. It’s the same Jehovah God. So there’s a very deep level of ignorance. Basically what’s what I see happening here is that the same old methods is being used but on steroids and rocket boosters because finding God, understanding what God is, where God is is something that we are encoded. Then we need to find that. We came here to understand that. Well that is being used against people and their emotions are involved. And of course then if we have a person who is ignorant enough and passionate enough, of course this person is capable of killing him or herself, uh, blowing up themselves to kill a few people, few innocent people, uh, they come from a good place, but it’s causing terror. So who’s at fault? It’s not the person’s ignorance. I mean ignorance is ignorance. Uh, it’s those who are manipulating these people and fuelling divide because that’s how you bring humanity to it’s knees. Divide and conquer.
Thal:
Yes.
Alexandre:
In any method, whether religious, socio-cultural racial, and sports teams and you know, people kill each other over at the end of certain football games in England for example. Right? Being trampled and hitting and beating each other. So, obsession!
Thal:
It’s such a, like as you’re talking, I’m just, the word paradox keeps coming up. It’s such a paradox. Our human condition. Um, and just, you know, speaking about like your background and I’m just thinking about the Quran. Like there is a verse in the Quran that talks about “Al-‘Ilm Al-Ladunni” which is the experiential knowledge and that that knowledge you can, it’s something that you just is that is just placed in the heart. It’s not an intellectual, quantitative thing. And it’s funny because that same book is used for other interpretations and the more dogmatic like fear based interpretations or whatever. Um, I’m also thinking about like music and sound and the therapeutic aspects of sound, which is, you know, the main part of your work. And similarly, you know, it’s, you know, I’m just going to share this like a lot of the dogmatic interpretations of Islam, some of them have actually said that music is just not allowed at all. Like just avoid music completely, which is insane considering even historically within the Islamic culture, um, you know, there’s someone like Al-Farabi. And there’s the hospitals in Andalusia where the mental health institutions where they were playing music as a, as a form of therapy. So yes, please dig in, go deeper, whatever you’re saying, I’m enjoying it.
Adrian:
And maybe at the same time, if you can share with listeners how, how is sound therapeutic? Like how if someone’s just hearing this for the first time, can you share what’s happening to consciousness and what is sound? Are we talking about instruments and singing? Like there’s, I’m sure there’s a lot of difference in between, you know, within that category.
Alexandre :
Yes. Yeah. Well, this is all stuff I can talk about for the next 10 hours.
Adrian:
Amazing.
Alexandre:
So I’m going to make it succinct and but yet packed with info. So yeah Islam uses music, but it does not call it music. That’s the curious part. And Adhan, the call to prayer, is not considered to be music. Um, and um, well what’s music again? So, um, I can’t tell you why it’s not called music, why it’s considered to be blasphemous to call it music. But, book religions did use music tremendously. And if I may say, this may sound blasphemous to a lot of people, especially religious ones. I don’t mean any offense to anyone. I respect people’s faith but I also know that in this faith they’re being tricked to believe that they’re on the right track where actually not completely so. Well Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam and all the denominations, they do offer wonderful teaching and things that can help humanity. But at the same time, at the end, it’s about hijacking consciousness and misleading people. Whether this came to be out of ignorance, out of deliberate action or both combined, I can’t tell you. There’s evidence of all the above. So music is used to unravel consciousness when you go inside any church, especially Greek Orthodox Church because in Christians, the Greek Orthodox Church use music the best. Why? Byzantine chants that are used in Greek Orthodox church are a mixture of classical Arabic and classical Turkish music. It’s when Constantine invaded Istanbul and became Costantinople book, um, he used the music that was going on around which was Arabic and Turkish and they’re both very similar on the classical level at least. And used as part of the church. When you listen to this music in a secular environment, it gives you an altered state. Why? Because… This is a lot better. I’m going to say it shortly… Because the notes that are being used in the modes, modes are like scales, succession of different notes, have different mathematical ratios between them. They have different frequencies and these frequencies are closer to the tuning of the notes in the harmonic series. We’ll talk about that later. Harmonic series is the blueprint for sound production. Um, and it’s responsible for the tone color or timbre. All harmonic systems come from the harmonic series, the place from where the concept of harmony came up from, which is mathematics at the end. Tt’s considered to be the most sophisticated of all of these intelligences, uh, that, that we measure using mathematics. Pythagoreans told us that it’s not mathematics that created the universe, mathematics is what we use to measure that intelligence. What’s there is fields and phenomena systems and patterns. So talking about Pythagorean knowledge here, the knowledge that Pythagoras brought to Europe and Plato and Aristotle and Socrates were his followers, a little over a hundred years later. In Byzantine chants, and the notes that I use. And similarly also in Quranic chants, adhan, call for prayer, you’re using frequencies that are closer to the tuning of the harmonic series notes, which is the place where harmony came from. And harmony is a concept that exists in mathematics at the end when we listen to music or the harmonic series, when you listen to a gong being played or singing bowls, you’re listening to the audible side of mathematical ratios. The mathematical ratio lays between two notes in the musical interval. If you take C and G, for example, that’s an interval of a fifth because it’s C, D, E, F, G, one, two, three, four, five. It’s a three to two ratio. C to D is a nine to eight ratio and so on, so forth. So harmony is audible mathematics, audible mathematical ratios to be precise. When you create a musical system or a chant that is based on these pure tones, uh, it’s going to alter consciousness, just like a normal sound bath or a sound healing… two terms, I avoid using because they’re gimmicky and they don’t give justice to what is being done here. I like to call it Sound Meditation or some therapy sound journey, whatever it is. Something that would indicate that the individual is doing something. Healing is not happening just like that. So, um, they create transcendental, introspective, euphoric state psychedelic states sometimes. So they alter consciousness. These are the same notes that are being used in church, in Judaism, in Cathedral, in mosques. And if you take this out of context, you have a very powerful use of music that is being used in a specific place along with incense and church bell, which has all overtones and golden mean, golden ratio in iconography, in fractal geometry in the ceiling in the mosque and all of these things that lure people deeper into the faith thinking that God is here. Well these are things that humans looked for and understood in matriarchal period. Matriarchy to me, is not that women were more dominant than men. That’s a caricaturesque understanding of it. It’s basically where people, men and women lived in harmony, in equilibrium with nature, with all living things and they understood the power that nature has to ultimately understand who they are to nature, what is nature to humans and where God is and what God is. This was appropriated by Patriarchy and by book religions. And they were expropriated. We know that the early Christians, which is the Roman Empire really continuing to exist under the guise of Christianity. Again, no blasphemy here to the good believers but this is what it is. Seems like it’s a business that hijacks consciousness by using very powerful tools to lure people into deeper faith thinking that God is here. It’s just the labeling that’s wrong. When you expose someone to these things in a church or any other Holy House on these big book religions, you’re going to get the same thing that you do as if you’re doing it in the cave or out in nature or in any other context because everyone does this except here it’s being done in a specific set and setting and the label is different. So people leave the church, the cathedral, the mosque, the temple, feeling elated. The problem is that someone put it as “this is God here. God is here. Come back again.” You get a repeat customer because we’re programmed to understand who we are through music and unravel the nature of being because of what sound, harmony and music does to every aspect of being. It alters your consciousness. It puts you in elated states through entrainment basically. So there is a trickery here. Is that something that happened through ignorance or deliberate action or both? Again, there’s clear evidence to me that all the above are true and it’s not just ignorance. Um, so, um, so sound is often used in a very particular way to get a specific result. That’s what you do when you create music for commercials or when you go inside a store and you hear a specific music that put this type of the prototype clientele to spend money to be in a good mood, to spend money. If you go to teenage clothing store, you’re going to hear different music, then you go to Jewellery store or so on. That’s functional music. It’s used all the time in commercials, to put people at ease through what? Through form of entrainment so that there can be more in the mood to spend money and to spend more time to feel in the mood, uh, as opposed to when you leave. They leave the store and there’s the hubbub of the city and the noise. And so there’s a level of deception here that’s being used without people knowing that you can go very, very far with this because that’s what a Shamanic experience is about. To give you an example, if you do an experience with a Shaman in any tradition, they’ll give you a plant, usually psychedelic that knocks you off of baseline reality. And with you surrendering, allowing, trusting, accepting, you believe that this Shaman who is a professional who’s job is to hear you using plants, spirit, quote unquote. And using their ancestors and they’re guiding spirits and the power animals. This is all stuff that we in the west talk about and we call the subconscious mind, the collective unconscious, the psyche, you know, and the unconscious, the conscious, all of these things. In the East, they call the Shiva, the Shakti, the Atman, the Brahman. It’s the same thing. So you see how ignorance manifests to a level where it creates different reality to the individual without the person knowing that. Now as the person is going through the Shamanic experience, experiencing that sacrament, whether it’s Ayahuasca or San Pedro or you know, Iboga or mushrooms or Peyote and so on, whatever grows around in the region, um, they receive visions and sound is being played to guide them in the process and the olfactory stimuli is used. Um, so could be Palo Santo or sage or kopa and other, you know, olfactory agents to help the person surrender and let go so that they, they allow the work to happen. But what it is causing here is an unfolding of the nature of consciousness in the visionary state. So a similar version of that happens in church when the priest gives you a wafer or sacrament, it’s like handing you the Ayahuasca cup, the Shaman, and sound is played in a church to put you in the mood, the congregation, electromagnetics between people. The music played in a perfectly acoustical space because there’s connection between the architecture of the space and sound. Because sound reverberates on walls and ceilings, and so the space has to be, has to be optimal for the acoustics to be great. That’s a known thing in concert halls and so on. So and there is a iconography. There’s dazzling visuals that communicate the mathematics of uh, of God. If I can see the math of God is divine mathematics that we’re attracted to. We’re interested in. It communicates something defined, something sacred because of where it takes us. To me, that’s where sacred is. It’s not the sacred outside of us. It’s what that sacred thing, whether it’s a mushroom or sound, where it takes us, that’s really what’s sacred. And now people are being so flippant with saying sacred, this sacred that, and then the next thing, they lose the true definition of what sacred is. At the end, everything is sacred. But when people are distracted, they’re lacking the knowledge, then they’re not going to have the deep understanding what is really, truly sacred? Why is it sacred? What’s in it that is sacred? So people don’t have the time, the energy or the skill to really investigate these things by being scrutinizing and being persnickety about the meaning of a word. The power of word, which is sound. Again, language creates reality. So I hope I covered your questions Thal did I? And Adrian.
Adrian:
I just wanted to mention just speaking of acoustics, so there’s a little bit of, um, I don’t know if there’s another mic that’s rubbing on a shirt. It, we’re just getting a lot of, um, friction as you’re speaking.
Alexandre:
Oh really?
Adrian:
Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know where it’s coming from.
Alexandre:
The mic is not touching anything. Maybe the cord? Is this, maybe it’s the cord perhaps?
Adrian:
Yeah, maybe the cord is also picking up. Is there a mic in the cord as well or?
Alexandre :
No.
Adrian:
Oh, okay. Okay. It sounds better right now. Yeah, it was just while you were speaking.
Alexandre:
I’ll be immobile then.
Thal:
[Laughing] No. Because you are so, um, uh, connected with what you were saying and I think your hands was moving and the cord was moving into the microphone is very strong and it was picking up. Yeah. But um, yeah, we’re enjoying the depth of the conversation. I mean, um, what an honor. Like I, yeah, I I want to know more like about the Fibonacci, about the like all of it, really.
Alexandre :
Yes. It’s very important and that’s, this is something that’s surfacing more and more again, this interest in sacred geometry. Um, uh, the way intelligence manifests in mathematics. We measure intelligence by measuring the value of this mathematical systems. Phi or the golden mean or the golden ratio, Fibonacci series or numbers, fractal geometry. The harmonic overtones is the one that has been considered to be the most important and often associated with creation with God. Now you asked another question, Adrian, it was about sound what is sound?
Adrian:
I was just also curious the difference between like instruments that produce those harmonic overtones versus singing. If someone’s chanting, I imagine there’s another way of producing the sound through vocal cords. Is there a difference on consciousness when it’s listening through the instrument or, or is produced through yeah. Through, through singing or chanting or mantras or…
Alexandre:
Yes, certainly. So I’m going to move around to get some instruments to demonstrate a concept. But, uh, so the overtone system is one that is so important, as I said earlier, because that’s the system that gives us, um, the tone color or a timbre, which is the difference between our voices. Um, the difference between various notes also is caused by various notes played on different instruments caused by overtones. So when you listen to a note, that note is not just one thing, it’s predominantly one thing, one note, one frequency. We call that the fundamental tone or fundamental frequency. In it, there are tiny auditory pixels that they’re not always audible, but their job is to color the tone. If the three of us sing one note the same note “ahhhh” and it’s going to sound different because every person has different overtones. So the overtone series, harmonic series is one that goes on to infinity and has specific intervals and it builds on the fundamental frequency. So “ahhh” is a fundamental tone. If you were to use specific software to analyze the spectrum of my voice, you will find various horizontal lines. Um, the lowest one, the fundamental tone would be the thickest most pronounced that within it there’s the overtones they’re so faint that they may seem to be completely inexistent, but they actually are there except the fundamental tone is greater and it overshadows these overtones. And, um, the value here is that when we use instruments such as gong, singing bowls, discs, bells, overtone singing, I’ll demonstrate in a bit to bring out this overtones to level where they’re clearly audible. And that changes everything. Why? Because the individual now is hearing this magic that’s in sound, although they’re listening to notes, but they’re being exposed to pure mathematical ratios. What binds the notes and the harmonic series together is an infinite series of harmonic, mathematical ratios. So, uh, to bring out the overtones in my voice from this note “ahhh”, I would have to sing it out, but creating a different conditions of physics inside the buccal cavity. The buccal cavity is the area that starts right above the vocal cords up into my lips. And this is a specific size and we have different tone colors because we all have different variables. Let’s say Thal your vocal cords are smaller than mine and Adrian and for sure they will be smaller. This is why women have higher pitched voice. You know, women can sing in soprano, mezzo soprano, alto and men have tenor, baritone and base, sometimes counter tenor, which is made out to song in falsetto, because the vocal cords are thicker or thinner, bigger or smaller. But the throat might be wider, um, the uvular is more protruded than usual. The soft palate is bigger than usual than someone else. If the tongue is bigger and the teeth, all of these create different conditions that eventually give the individual his or her specific tone color.
Right? And um, now I’m going to sing that same note, but I’m going to move my tongue inside the buccal cavity to open and close this space so that I can naturally amplify the overtones that are in my voice. By doing that, I’m creating different conditions of physics called Helmholtz resonance and then I can amplify naturally these overtones that are in my voice but one cannot hear them because the fundamental tone is so loud, it overshadows them. And when I do that, you will hear the fundamental tone, which tend to be most pronounced and upper notes that would be changing one at a time based on what I do with my tongue to open or close it more. And that’s what people do when they play Didgeridoo. They play brass instruments, trombones, trumpets, flugelhorns, and tubas and French horns and also wind instruments. It’s the movement of the tongue also embouchure which is the totality of that. How wide or small the opening of the lips are, the velocity of the air and the position of the tongue inside the mouth. That’s very important for music playing. And people use that as well when they’re doing any form of overtone singing, throat singing. It’s done in a variety of different ways. The Tibetan Buddhist monks do it in a more guttural way. Tuvans do it different ways and Mongolians and so on and so forth. So it sound like this: “hmmmmmm”.
Adrian:
Wow.
Alexandre:
This is what I believe the primordial Om or Aum is trying to communicate. Om is not “om” even though it’s often chanted and written like that, it’s “aum”. But it’s not aum either. It’s what “aum” is referring to. “Aum” is referring to the opening and closing of the buccal cavity. “Aaauum”. You start with open and you close the mouth. By doing that you’re going through all the vowels. And the shades between them and these change the formants, that’s concept in physics. People can look it up. It’s too long to explicate here. Basically when we speak, we speak in vowels and then consonants come and add another layer, another action to the vowel. An example of that is Eee. E. And if you say “D” Dee. There’s the tongue is being involved now touching the back of the upper teeth. And the little bit the gum. And “T” tee would be slightly different interaction. Pee, now “P” is involving involving lips. So all of these are variations with slight addition to what “E” is. So what you’re doing here, you’re creating various packages of overtones, very specific dimension of the package of the overtones that’s coming out. The vocal cords are buzzing and the buzzing is being amplified in the buccal cavity and it’s coming out as language, but it’s at the end overtones. So “Aum” is pointing the finger, “Aum” the primordial “Aum” that created the universe is pointing the finger toward sound once again. But that’s not anything new. We’ve heard that from a variety of different places. You know, aborigines in Australia tell you that the universe was created with two songs. And Ancient Egypt will tell you the universe was sung into being. The word that created, you know, in the first sentence of Gospel of John and the word was God.
The word here is a mistranslation of the concept of Logos. Logos is what the word was when the Bible was brought to Ancient Greece. Logos is a ratio, is reason. So Genesis is not telling you how God created everything a day at a time and rested on the Shabbat, the seventh day. On the first day, God said, let there be light and there was light. What I interpret this now is that you become God when you learn how to create with your words. That’s really what the message is. So this comes from variety of different angles. Sound creates reality. Sound is the creator of the universe. Sound therefore is God. Or you can use sound to understand where the God is within. And that’s why music is used in all Shamanic traditions and all mystical sects, in eastern philosophies and religions book religion, ceremonies. Why? I’m going to demonstrate the concept here. So I’m going to play chimes, two different times with different tuning. These are called Koshi wind chimes, which is fire, but the notes and the harmonies involved have nothing to do with these elements that are just arbitrarily named like that. So when I play the chimes, you’re going to hear different notes. The chime itself is the logos. The logos is the unknowable. The logos is um, the metadata that language expresses. The logos is the feelings, emotions and thoughts that are within us that are in sensations and visuals. Whatever we communicate via language. First it’s in an abstract form. And then when you speak about it using words, in this case, when I played the chimes, you’re going to hear notes. The notes become… and that is the harmony in the logos become the ethos. Ethos is the distinguishing quality, the personality, the character, the beingness, the allure, all of these things of an instrument or person of the company or whatever entity we’re talking about. When we listen to the ethos of this chime or any speech, it creates reality within us. And that is Pathos. Now keep in mind that this is not how these words are defined in, you know, various traditions. I’m defining them with a twist here based on my own research and own understanding, because you can read the whole, the entire book about ethos and logos and still not know what ethos and logos are about. We’re talking about big words that are part of the fundamental structure of reality along with pathos, I mean along with mythos. But we’re not going to address mythos now. We’re just going to concentrate on logos, ethos and pathos. So words creates reality in the ears of the listener. It creates reality inside of you. Just like now I’m talking about things, and the listeners are fathoming internalizing, visualizing, but they’re communicating information. It’s a form of reality. So I’m going to play this logos and ethos coming out of the logo is going to create specific sounds. And then we’re going to talk about this later. And these sounds that people feel inside of them best is to listen to it with eyes closed to focus on the auditory aspect. That would be the pathos.
[Koshi Wind Chimes] So many people describe the sound as being lighthearted. There’s a sense of awe, curiosity, happy, um, whimsical, looking outward, it’s joyful and so on and so forth. So that’s, that’s the pathos that was created in people. It’s pretty universal. People, various traditions, people with musical experience or not all tend to use these words. Compare it to the second chimes, which is a different logos. And when it speaks, it has a different ethos. And when people listen to it, it creates a different reality. A different pathos.
[Second Koshi Wind Chime] So this has more of pensiveness, of introspection, the sense of yearning and nostalgia. Um, gentle but healing, sadness.
Adrian:
Mystery for me.
Alexandre:
Mystery, contemplative, and we can add more and more words or visuals and sensations. It doesn’t have to be just words, but you see what creates reality. You see how sound can create reality. If the person is very attentive and getting their mind out of the way and not quickly labeling things. But wait, wait, wait, feel it, feel it. And then choose carefully the words. And this is where miscommunication happens. That people are not always careful with how they speak to really bring their ethos out. And, and we’re becoming more and more sloppy now with words. And there’s a lot of speech disfluency um, and inaccurate words. And even people using the wrong inflections, we sing the words differently now. A lot of redundancy, repetition or even, um, talking in an ascending tone, like that and repeating it over and over. And you know, this is so common these days. It’s not really singing the words correctly. We don’t just speak words, we sing words all the time and this is the most important part. And that is something we’re losing because of the high reliance on texting and emailing. So you see how technology, when it’s mishandled. I’m not against technology. I’m against technology being used in a way that can jeopardize the existence of a human being and modify humanity and take away the humane elements that are within us. We sing language, the inflections, the changes in the tempo, the articulation, the emphasis on words, syllables, the changes of the tempo of the speech, the dynamics, how loud or soft, the silence between the words, how gestures and grimaces and body language in general aligns with this. All of this is adding to the context and emojis are not going to replace that at all, at all. We’re losing a very important part of speech that creates reality. And the speech disfluencies especially “like”, and of course when I mentioned these things, I have no judgment to people who use it, but it’s indicating a lack of self awareness. There’s really no need for 10 or 20 “likes” a minute. We’re making great effort in doing something, saying something that has absolutely no value. On the contrary, it’s causing the person listening to sift out all the likes that are not needed for meaning to come to place. So we should take this stuff very seriously because that can change the human being. This is trans-humanism, which has a very old agenda is didn’t just start now. There’s clear evidence that it started in the forties. So, um, so sound is very, very important and what human beings are resorting to is sound as we know, you know, sound therapy or sound gong bath and sound healings, vibrational healing, whatever people choose terms.
I highly encourage people not to use any gimmicky terms, but use something that indicates that the individual is doing something. That’s why I use Sound Meditation, which is not term that I coined. Yes my website is soundmeditation.com. That was gifted to me because I had soundmeditation.us and anyway, uh, but I’m not promoting it. No, because it’s indicating that, well, if we don’t talk about anything, uh, you know that you’re doing something if you come to Sound Meditation. And, but we should say some things, we should give people the tools and create a protocol so that people are tapping into the self healing capacity within us. It’s about that. It’s about using sound and other stimuli to create the conditions for healing to happen. That’s also entrainment. Except here we’re doing it in a positive way.
Thal:
Yeah. Um, you know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about a few things. Um, so I’m thinking about noise pollution.
Alexandre:
Oh yeah.
Thal:
And I’m thinking about the distraction of… In fact, we have so many sounds right now, like you said, and um, you know, like pop music, you know, and I’m trying hard, like this is not to be judgemental. I’m just really, um, trying to, um, uh, connect to what you’re saying. Like I’ve, I went to a 10 day silent meditation, the one time I went in my life and it was so amazing to be able to sort of, um, go on a fasting from the noise pollution.
Alexandre:
Yes.
Thal:
And I remember when they would, they would beat the Gong for lunch time, the sound of that Gong was everything. It was, um, sorry, something happened to Skype. Okay. Yeah. The sound of the Gong was so delicious and it was so like, it was, it tasted like honey and
Alexandre:
[Chuckle]
Thal:
Yes. And then at that point I was like, wow. Like we do need discernment when we’re choosing who even to listen to.
Alexandre :
Yes,
Thal:
And the artists that we’re connecting with, like the music that we’re listening to. The state and the condition of the artists that singing will transfer through what they’re producing. I mean, what, what are your thoughts around that?
Alexandre :
Yeah, that’s very important. So this is called synesthesia. When you hear something and another sense becomes involved in what you’re listening to. The senses are bleeding into each other. Some people are natural synesthete. They see hues and colors when they listen to pieces in particular keys. D minor versus g major and B flat minor and so on. Some people see shapes when they hear numbers. Um, some people smell things when they hear specific words or see colors and so on and so forth. And when people take psychedelics, uh, this happens where the psychedelic that they’re taking causes them to see visuals in their mind’s eye with eyes closed, uh, upon hearing specific sounds. And that’s what triggers the visionary state. Why? Because the brain that does a variety of different things involved in reality. The brain is a transducer of consciousness. It receives consciousnesses. Transduction is when you change the state of something. For example, when you turn on a radio and you hear music, clearly the musicians, I’m not in the radio. The radio, the transceiver is transforming a transducing frequency to audio. A TV set gives you audio and video. So the brain transducers consciousness consciousness is not all made in the brain. It’s non-local. That is from locality, Bell’s nonlocality. Um, and uh, the brain also filters reality because there’s so much information out there. It needs to be confined to specific things so it filters a lot of things out. And also indoctrination and conditioning has a lot to do with what is being filtered out. And this is how a lot of nascent capacity within us becomes dormant or inexistent. Uh, the brain also, um, uh, tweaks reality, judges it. So sound affects the brain, the entire body that is involved in the creation of reality. That’s what really is at the end. That’s what music does to us. And that’s how entrainment can be effective. Human being is not a completely autonomous person. It’s always imbued by external sources. So that’s why people must always pay attention to their diet. The diet to me is not what people eat, it’s what they listen to. Music or speech or news is what the films that they watch, documentaries, they watched the commercials they watch or they become exposed to even just, um, commercials in the street, the noise pollution, all of that becomes part of who we are. And it wreaks havoc on our awareness and especially when you deal with noise pollution. It’s so detrimental. Noise ,sound is also used in military application. We’re not going to cover that because it’s a whole thing by itself. So, um, people think that they’re sovereign, that they can decide. No. It’s always, we are product of who’s around us, friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Other people’s electromagnetics. Um,EMF’s and all of this stuff becomes part of the human consciousness because of how it secretly, inconspicuously impacts the individual. And we are being changed by these things more and more. So we’re losing sovereignty. We’re losing, uh, so many things because of entrainment. So we need to be extremely careful. Inform ourselves of these things and not to dismiss them as woo woo and conspiracy stuff. No, no, no. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really valid and impactful.
Adrian:
Yeah. There’s so much I want to ask, but I’m also realizing that we don’t have all the time in the world. So, um, at this point though, I’m considering just for people who want to start intentionally incorporating sound into their practice, if they’re regular meditators or they have other forms of spiritual practice, where do they begin? If sound is a new element to their practice, where would you direct them?
Alexandre :
Yeah, various things. First, the voice. Just toning with lips closed to experience the vibration. And when we, when we speak or tone, we experience a lot of our voice through bone and tissue conduction and not only the auditory part. An example of that is when people close their ears and they speak, that is bone and tissue conduction. Uh, so experience sound in two different ways. So toning vocalization is very powerful because gets the body to vibrate. Um, if they want to go deeper into it, they can learn overtone singing. Uh, there are many youtube videos now that can teach people can take lessons with some of these experts on youtube. Um, and to sing. Singing is for everyone, not only singers, but if they don’t want to deal with the voice, then… Well even if they want to deal with it, I highly encourage them to get some instruments that would be great. Singing bowl or two. Small handheld gong, tuning forks, any of these instruments. And I have a list of them on my website soundmeditation.com they can get a few things and these are very easy to play instruments. They don’t need to practice for years. Like people practice, you know, playing guitar or a piano. No, it’s, it’s easy to handle them and to make them part of their practice or listening to recordings of singing bowls, gongs or the above. I’ve made six albums. Uh, some tracks are available on my soundcloud that if you are interested, they can contact me to purchase them directly from me, um, at some point soon and they’re going to be released along with eight other albums that I recorded recently, uh, sounds for meditation. They’re very, very effective. They’re not the same as listening to these instruments in person and acoustically, but they’re very powerful. Why? Because acoustically you feeling sound, you’re not just listening to it. There’s a lot of information that cannot be captured using microphones. So to receive more of the sound therapy sessions that are happening more and more and realize that there’s certain knowledge required to how to still the mind. I always talk for at least half an hour before I facilitate the sound meditation to give people the tools of understanding why these instruments are powerful, how to listen in a very particular way, judicious, attentional, intentional. Um, and how to get the mind out of the way. How to use a contemplate of state versus a mindful state versus a meditative state. How to work with discursive thinking and how to disengage from that instead of trying to fight it. But to involve sound in their life. And also to keep ear plugs on them when they’re walking in the streets and there’s noise pollution or uh, in subway stations or whatever to really at least block their ears. Because the ringing in the ear and people losing hearing. Just very, very delicate. We have 20,000 Cilia hearing cells in each ear that they start dying, the day we’re born. They die more when people are exposed to loud sound and they don’t grow back. This is a really tiny number compared to the over 120 millions photoreceptors we have in each eye. So hearing is so important on a variety of different levels. So it’s very important to protect the hearing. And also when people are listening to music, using headphones or airpods to not blast the volume loud to heighten the mood to get the body to secrete more of you know, chemicals, endogenous chemicals that can heighten the mood or to raise the volume so loud to drown out the external noise pollution. In this case it’s not the noise pollution that’s causing the hearing loss. It’s the music that they’re listening to and they love. So there’s a great level of unawareness. So protecting the hearing and using sound in a correct way to affect the vagus nerve, the autonomic nervous system to switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic. The parasympathetic state is not state that we often go to, which is when the body is not doing anything based on the fact that there’s nothing happening outside of us around us to do something. Sympathetic is when we are concentrating, we’re doing something and that can cause fatigue. And these days that’s also becoming epidemic. People work for many hours and they go home and they need to do more things, answer emails or do domestic work, cook or watch TV. There’s not enough of a state of relaxation to get the body to be in a parasympathetic state. And that’s why people start to have problems sleeping or taking pills to sleep or having to smoke weed or having to take alcohol to fall asleep. That’s forcing the body to shut down. So the people need to learn about the sympathetic state in the parasympathetic state and how the autonomic nervous system runs the body as a machine. And deeper research that’s coming out now on the vagus nerve, the central nerve that runs the body house, slow, deep breathing exercises, toning, vocalization, working with sound are great ways to massage and tone down the vagus nerve. Vagus, spelled V-A-G-U-S which in Latin means vagrant meandering. So the, the body is full of various elements. These are the hardware. And if we start to misuse the hardware, then there’s a different operating system that’s gonna be happening. And different software and reality becomes different. And that’s what we’re going through right now. The reality that we going through, this awkward point in the history of humanity is the result of what’s going on in people’s hearts. It’s a consciousness crisis. It’s all projected out. So to change that, we need to go inward and change the way we’re feeling because the inner world is the same as the outer world. That’s what the hermetic principle is really about. As above, so below. As within, so without. It’s the biocentric nature of reality that we’re now starting to hear about from coming from science. That consciousness is not a product of the universe. The universe is a product of our consciousness. Great book to read about this is called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza.
Thal:
Amazing.
Adrian:
Alexandre, I know you’ve gotta go in like one minute, so yeah, I just want to thank you for that really rich conversation. Um, maybe we’ll do a part two. And that was really beautiful. We covered a lot of ground.
Thal:
Yeah. I feel that this is an introduction. Definitely would love to have you back. Thank you so much for sharing all that knowledge. Thank you.
Alexandre :
Great pleasure. Happy to be here. Thank you.
