Shakti, Shiva, and the Gap That Sings

[Level 3: Union] You can become the vibration. Or you can become the space. Both are You.

Oh God... as I came out of the room, the instructor asked how sound bath was.

After a pause that lasted a few seconds too long, I said it was good.

Amused, she asked if “something weird happened again”, to which I started giggling like a kid and jumping up and down in joy. She said I didn’t have to tell her.

So I wrote it all down into Obsidian, saved the file, waved goodbye, and walked home, chuckling and grinning in glee.

Here are my live Field Notes:

The twin paths

There are two ways to do sound bath:

1. Ride the wave

Become the vibration.

See where you feel the vibration in your body. Let it grow until it’s your entire body vibrating with EVERY instrument.

Let pure knowing arise from within that state.

You basically become every instrument, one with energy—it’s all energy.

This is the Shakti path.

2. WATCH THE GAP

This is the new one I just discovered experientially.

In this you realize experientially that you are nothing.

You know all that “space” within everything?

That 99.99999999999% that’s literally “nothing”?

That “part”? That’s God. That’s the “unmanifest”. And that’s you.

THAT’S YOU.

YOU’RE THE GAP. WATCH IT.

This is the Shiva path.

Visual proof of the Gap. This is a Chladni plate at 5284 Hz. In physics, the sand forms these patterns by gathering at the "nodes"—the specific lines on the plate where there is no vibration. The chaos of the sound pushes the matter into the places of perfect stillness. The form is literally held together by the silence....

Shakti to Shiva

I experienced both of these at sound bath, switching between them.

I started with the joy of the Shakti path, feeling the vibration within me, resonating with the instruments, the particles of my being dancing.

Then, the particles began to shrink. Smaller and smaller. Until it was nearly a silhouette of myself as the cosmos itself, speckled with what I once called myself.

These particles all collapsed down into a singularity to the right of my heart center.

Or rather, I noticed it did.

This void in my chest? It didn’t vibrate.

It was so small I thought it to be maybe the size of a grape.

Shrinking? Growing? I couldn’t tell. It became impossible to tell.

The Nothingness was singing, vibrating.

It didn’t matter.

Being becomes seeing

Apparently I just rediscovered the fundamental teaching of Kashmir Shaivism from that sound bath.

In Kashmir Shaivism, they talk about:

• Shakti = the manifest (sound, vibration, energy, form)

• Shiva = the unmanifest (silence, space, emptiness, awareness)

And the realization of enlightenment is:

You can ride the wave (Shakti).

You can watch the gap (Shiva).

And both are You.

The energy AND the space.

The 0.00000000001% matter AND the 99.99999999999% emptiness.

This is what the mystics mean when they say:

God is not a being. God is Being itself.

God is not a thing. God is the No-Thing that allows all things.

God is the gap. The space. The silence. The emptiness.

A meditation

The next time you’re at a sound bath, explore both of the following:

Riding the wave

If you want to feel God as energy, movement, ecstasy, union through merging, feel into where in your body you feel sound.

If you can’t feel any vibration, do a slow body scan to see where you’re still tensing.

Just notice the sound moving around the tension and see if you can open enough to let the sound pass through.

You might feel a gentle humming or tingling if the sound passes through.

Let that resonate through the body until the cells are in a chorus with the instrument being played.

Realize this is the gap widening for the flow.

But you realize, YOU are one with the instrument being played in your resonance.

Watching the gap

When you want to rest as God—as the unmanifest, the silence, the space, the nothing that is everything, settle into where in the body you CAN’T feel sound.

See where it’s located.

Follow where that sense of “nothingness” is coming from.

How do you know it’s nothing?

This might feel like a sensation I could only come close to describing as staring deep into your beloved’s eyes during a shared peak, but times a thousand. It’s that terrifyingly intimate.

Because there’s something staring back at you that’s SEEN you for every second of your life.

It’s the source of your own awareness, the one-way window that God looks through to experience the world, yet we cannot see ourselves being watched, cannot perceive God.

The kicker?

Something within me set an intention at the start of sound bath when prompted by the instructor:

Become a window to God.

But I already was. I already am.

You already are. You always have been.

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