This is kind of the secret David Hykes/Harmonic Presence Foundation myspace site...
To learn more, please visit the
Harmonic Presence Foundation website. Here on Myspace, please also see
David Hykes: Radiance and Resonance and David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir . And here's the link to David's
Harmonic Presence blog , through which he shares the ongoing evolution of the Foundation's work, including important outreach projects, bridging contemporary culture with the deepest spiritual and musical traditions.
Cultural visionary, composer, singer, teacher and founder of Harmonic Chant and the Harmonic Presence work, David Hykes's 30 years of pioneering work in sacred art and music, science and spirituality has brought to life wonderful new possibilities and links between Mind, Meditation, Music, Medicine and healing harmonization.
He founded the Harmonic Presence Foundation in New York on September 11, 1981, to explore and share ways that traditional and contemporary sacred music and spirituality could work together to help bring Harmony more to life on Earth.
In bround-breaking trips to Mongila (1981), collaborations with the Gyuto and Gyume Monks (1985-86), His Holiness the Dalai Lama (1989), as well as through projects with Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim collaborators, David has been a pioneer in helping to identify and share key pathways toward essential Harmony, whose resonant presence is at the heart of human experience.
His early certitude that finding and sharing a deep universal sacred music, whose basis would be in harmony with all musical expression and even the very music of the spheres, led him to discover and develop the realms of Harmonic Chant, a "new" sacred music, of which the first widely-heard composition was the album
"Hearing Solar Winds," , released in 1983, with over 300,000 copies sold to date.
The brand-new 11th CD by DAVID HYKES with THE HARMONIC CHOIR, "HARMONIC WORLDS,"is now available here:
In constant evolution since 1975, the Harmonic Chant and the Harmonic Presence work, seamlessly blend spiritual cosmology, music, meditation, sound yoga, and healing harmonization.
His work has been honed, blessed and transformed by direct contact and dialogue with many traditional teachers. He has contributed music to collaborations with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Gyuto and Gyume monks of Tibet, to the recent feature film "Travellers and Magicians," by incarnate lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, and to the "Yatra Trilogy," Buddhist documentary films by visionary film director John Bush, endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
He also was honored to give music to the Gurdjieff Work for the film "Meetings with Remarkable Men," and by the support of Yehudi Menuhin. He also has contributed music to the films "Dead Poets Society", "Ghost" and "Baraka", among many others.
He has been giving concerts, retreats and seminars in many different countries since 1975, the year he founded The Harmonic Choir in New York.
The modern "harmonic singing," "overtone singing" (terms he created) and "healing sounds" fields were just some of the doors opened by his landmark first CD with The Harmonic Choir, "Hearing Solar Winds," first released in 1983 and re-mastered and re-released by Signature/Radio France.
Hykes was born in Taos, New Mexico in 1953, grew up near Seattle, Washington, lived in New York City from 1974-1987, and moved to France in 1987 at the invitation of the French Ministry of Culture. His Taos Pueblo godmother said to him, "we gave you the privilege to sing."
His musical influences and inspirations include sacred chant traditions and teachings from Tibet, Tuva, Mongolia and medieval Europe (he was among the very first western pioneers of "throat singing"); Advaita Vedantin Indian nondual philosophy and the late North Indian raga singer Sheila Dhar; cosmology and astrophysics; the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music and its source teachings; Just Intonation composer-performer pioneers La Monte Young and Terry Riley; master composer Steve Reich; and Sufi music from Persia and Turkey.
He maintains a retreat and research center in a 12th century Cistercian stone farm-site and park in a forest southwest of Paris, and travels the world giving concerts and retreats dedicated to enlightenment and healing through sound, listening, and meditative awareness practices. He gives solo concerts, concerts with The Harmonic Choir, and his other groups in dozens of countries, festivals, cities, sacred spaces and spiritual communities around the world. He conducts retreats, seminars and workshops in major centers in Europe and America (like Esalen, and The Breathing Project, sometimes with breath consciousness pioneer Dennis Lewis).
David Hykes is the author of numerous private publications, teachings, and recordings about cosmological music and meditation.
Here are the liner notes to the recent CD, "Harmonic Meditations."
"For Your Silent Original Listening, for Your Radiant Original Presence
HIGHLIGHTS (ONLY ONE REMAINS)"
by David Hykes
Luminous Void,
we saw each other,
only one remains"
Harmonic Chant is an enlightenment-dedicated meditative musical practice, a universal sacred music open to all, centered on the possibility that the heart can open to its true, deepest level, that the mind can find its luminous original nature, and that harmony is omnipresent.
This soundly-silent path, the Harmonic Presence work, employs concentrated musical force with full-spectrum listening, silent awareness.
The listening, the silence, comes first. The quieter we are, the closer we get. The emphasis on silent listening awareness and attunement, on the harmonization and accompaniment at the heart of all "joyful noise," helps Harmonic Chant practitioners to open beyond immediate self to "chant locally but listen globally."
Sound listening awareness can be a moving, luminous lens and help find greater harmony everywhere along the wavefront of existence. The sounds -the vibrations-you hear are your silent listening singing.
When Harmonic Chant is united with the perspectives and meditative practices of the Harmonic Presence work -encouraged, corrected, advised and blessed by high traditional teachers over the past 30 years -- you have the viewpoint and the directions for true voyaging, even etherodynamic soaring, to an inner source of the music of being. (Do make sure you get it right.)
The most up-to-date scientific discoveries also inform your practice--for example, through recognizing the harmonic presence integral to the universe since the Big Bang--the fact that actual harmonic sound waves were present in the Big Bang, helping free the light to travel across the expanding universe and helping bodies on every scale to form--galaxies, stars, planets and therefore beings such as ourselves. The photonal warmth of those harmonic sounds of the Big Bang resonates still now as the Cosmic Microwave Background, subtle heat waves across the heavens. About 400,000,000 of these "photones" resonate per spatial volume the size of your body.
Harmonic Chant and the Harmonic Presence work, are part of, an expression of, this 14-billion year-old tradition. In the beginning was...the wordless... listening...do you remember? At the most infintesimal level of the creation, String Theory's visionaries speak to us of the very first stirring in the Emptiness being nothing other than "harmonic resonance"--some ultimate harmonic DNA making this one a photon, that one a quark, according to some truly original song...or listening...still in the Emptiness, all moving forms...
The "Harmonic Meditations" are for you, your practice, your awakening, for the songline from your innernmost nature. You can stop, look and listen in a new way, one that is familiar to you but which requires your whole-hearted participation. In a way, it's like listening back, way, way back, like those telescopes that see almost back to the beginning of the universe, as if all this were an echo, seen in a light that is outside of time. Deep and still in the heart of the present is a moment outside of time, where the universe and awareness begin.
Shall we begin? Work on listening means cultivating awareness nourished by silence, the way a tree's roots dive deeply into dark rich soil. Your posture is important. Sitting or even standing quietly without outer distractions is best; lying down is acceptable when necessary for health or fatigue reasons; moving around or performing tasks is possible though not necessarily recommended-'possible' meaning it is alright if the listening to the music centers you and brings a sense of quiet attentiveness into the tasks or movements.
If you would like to "use" this music as a support for a specific practice, a yoga session for example, this may well be a productive enhancement, but perhaps permission should be sought where appropriate from the teacher who gave you or supervises the practice. The Harmonic chant's natural habitat and sanctuary is in the Harmonic Presence work, whose scheduled activities you can find out about through the Harmonic Presence Foundation (www.harmonicpresence.org).
The spiritual foundations to which this work is dedicated are absolutely traditional and pure: the search for, recognition of, attunement to, and stabilization in light of what is called here harmonic presence-- the actual reality "as it is".
You could close your eyes...in quiet attunement to the space...and take the time to feel the space and the body slowly meet...adjust and equalize...flow into each other, become less separate....taking time to sense the atmosphere and its living, loving relationship with the breath...that the atmosphere flows in and out of the body space--the breath is in harmony with the whole space...then take the time to listen, to listen deeply, to listen silently...to the sounds you hear...to the inner sounds of the thoughts...feelings...sensory vibrations...each sound or sensation or manifestation arising like a wave, washing onto and dissolving in the invisible shore of awareness, reabsorbed like being lost in an embrace....you let all the currents flow back in, as if the universe had been breathing out, flowing out, and could now flow back infinitely in, like the tide coming back in...the prana is freed, to return, to concentrate, to purify the awareness...the breath, the listening awareness, both borne of the atmosphere, harmonize....what is heard is breathed, what is breathed is heard...the whole body listens, the whole body breathes... the monotonous, tense note of the head lets go, the breath and listening, the awareness find a more natural center of gravity in the abdomen... there is a sense that the presence smoothes out and a more even sensation appears, like a quiet undertone heard everywhere, an overall quiet energetic resonance....from the new-found evenness of the sensation of the body space, with possibly less separation or even none with the space, the natural polyphonies, the natural melodies of the deeper, truer centers appear...in silence as in song....the love in your heart can expand....the universe can take form through harmony, through energetic meeting...little by little a new way of being appears...none of the base functions apply...everything has a new role in sustaining the inner being....the breathing becomes a service to the down-flowing pranic spirit nectar...the light becomes the all-present source...the attention remains attentive, our time in the timeless...can grow.
Little by little, the implications --the echoes-- of intensive meditation realizations inevitably --later if not sooner-- begin to dawn in us, slogging as we do around the wheel of our base functioning again and again: that there is something besides the egotism, or rather, that the egotism is nothing besides what really is.
To go deep we need to pay attention in a different way to what is happening right now. The "Harmonic Meditations" are to help you optimize what is primarily a listening experience, where eyes are closed, heart is opening, and consciousness is reuniting. The centering of attention on listening awareness is a support for the blossoming of polyphonic awareness. Other channels of this polyphonic awareness include breath awareness, awareness of physical sensations within and without the body space, and the songlines of theharmonic chant itself--like the universe, a vibration in a space. These elements--the harmonic sound, your listening awareness, vibrational sensation music in the body space and the surrounding space, the breath awareness-- are aspects of the vibrational ecology of the moment, embraced in the vibrant silence and original luminosity.
This harmonic presence work provides lines of attunement by which you can again recognize, reperceive, the evenness, the non-separation between your state and the underlying original reality. In being truly still, all arises. With your quietest attention melded in the silent awareness, all that arises, always of a vibratory nature, is more purely perceived as it arises in this present creation, goes through remaining and then disappears, returning to the silent ground.
Harmonic Life, an offered updraft...Every thought, gesture, feeling, and action arising during our entire earthly life is like a vibratory offering, like service, which springs up spontaneously from the non-manifest, bows to existence, returning to its source. "Behavior" comes from "Be heave", to heave up, to raise up,-to offer upward, to the light, to the source of awakening.
The culminating offering is the body itself, as in cremation when the searing heat waves rise heavenward, rippling in the sky like thermodynamic prayer flags in the wind, like ripples in the ocean of the universe, when this body is thrown back in. Less dramatically, in the inner spheres, the prayer flags of the mind stream, can ripple and as it were melt into the sky of luminous listening awareness.
The sense of quietness, of silence, of silent listening is crucial. The basic meditation view here is of the re-united quality of silence, listening and sound. The silence listens, the song is silence, the listening sings. It's about the unity of listener, singer and song; the non-separate qualities of what is often called inner and outer space; and the possibility of an evenness in the field of awareness where sense of separate body and space is dissolved into unified unbroken presence. That evenly-recognized presence which is everywhere may be perceived selflessly as omnipresent and omnidirectional light or awareness which is the source of everything. It infuses and creates all being, all that is. It is present there at the first threshold, as the very first stirring of vibration, the very first vibration, whether of the universe or oneself. Nothing is divided and something stirs.
The harmonic laws of the universe, the carrier waves of the creation, stir within that first vibration, deep at the beginning of all this right now, and all these forms, echoes, resonances, bodies, universes infused with the original presence are created the way the glass blower shapes the glass. In this case, it is a primordial and holy substance, which at our level is like a nectar of light, sacred breath which animates and sustains the inner being nourished by
an original spirit source.
This extremely fine line of awareness is like a string or thread or passageway that can be re-opened first vertically and then omnidirectionally by our clearing the axis of awareness, corresponding to the spinal column and vertically-arrayed energy centers of the body space. This infinite axis between finest spirit and deepest matter encompasses the different octaves or energetic densities which awareness simultaneously travels and transcends. This voyage of awareness, through the myriad forms of spiritual work, always means a return to the source.
to complete the current cycle, and the voluntary circulation in all the cycles. Since all that is is vibration, it is finer, finer and ever-finer work on listening --in the sense of receiving finer and finer signals about the true origination of reality-- that will always help guide our voyage, of return or outbound.
A lot of good people feel no need to discuss such things; they know their place where nothing is missing and where what is truly available is so without forcing. They are instinctively aware of good, of quality, of honesty.
Some passionate seekers are, for better or worse, motivated both by a powerful and often distorted sense of self and the equal or at best even stronger recognition of the need for reality to triumph--whether because of or in spite of the urge to transcend.
A lot of us have a little of both. And in a way, this music --harmonic chant-- expresses both themes--Immanence, the presence within, the ultimate truth being present within all this; and transcendence, the wish to go beyond oneself--higher, if you will.
Immanence may be compared to the inbreath, the reabsorption of projected reality, the flow the cosmic tide of creation back to its source within. We have exercises of this kind in the Harmonic presencework.
The transcendent dimension or approach is in part symbolized --or incarnated-- in the outbreath, the calling up, the calling to, the calling for something higher to appear. harmonic chantis an expression of this.
The harmonic presence bows to authentic practice: always refer to qualified teachers to show you the traps, workings and pitfalls of our egoistic tendencies.
Many people come to this music through interest in or awareness of spiritual practices, or traditional overtone chanting practices, from Asia, especially Tibet, Tuva and Monglia, though harmonic presencein both the relative and absolute sense is as present in the West as in the East. Indeed Eastern traditions inspired me greatly when I began to develop Harmonic Chant, beginning in 1975, and now, again, I find myself surrendering to traditional practice in a way that I only dreamed was possible just a short time ago.
My 20 years in the Gurdjieff tradition, during which time I was often sent or approved to go on "missions" involving Tibetan Buddhism, besides providing both extraordinary moments of opening familiar to all spiritual practitioners, and equally extraordinary moments of complete impossibility of seeing oneself "like this", also prepared me in an extraordinary way to value the universality of the need to awaken and the equally universal possibility for doing so.
The West has had its own musical mystics, and the Just Intonation music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley was a tremendous inspiration, as was the music of Steve Reich. As regards my own spiritual search, the principal "search engine" of my work-- the seeds were sown long ago. I remember consciously practicing awareness exercises starting when I was about 6. Trying to remain conscious falling asleep and remembering my position when I woke up. Trying to be aware each time I did something periodic--the sensation of the glass of water, the hand on the door opening...My Taos Pueblo godmother saying a few years ago "we gave you the privilege to sing" ...sitting when I was 4 listening on a huge shortwave radio to music from all over the world--and the amazing signals inbetween, signals of mysterious ships...mysterious worlds...
I had become aware of the harmonic nature of musical sound in about 1970, when my ecstatic interest in light and sound led me to the path of experimental filmmaking. My teachers, Paul Sharits and then Tony Conrad, introduced me to the world of music based on the natural harmonic series, especially that of composers La Monte Young and Terry Riley. I was also very inspired by the music of Steve Reich.
I played Azerbaijani music for a while on the tar; I've always loved double-stringed instruments like the mandocello, oud, saz, and Persian Tar, not to mention hammered dulcimer and santur. Then I met the late North Indian raga singer Sheila Dhar. The harmonics were going fine --I had founded The Harmonic Choir in 1975-- but we lacked grounding in vocal melodics, which she provided, and so much more--a deep heart-centered musical practice, in which the practitioner is just one votive candle on the altar of the timeless harmony.As I was somehow aware of since the beginning, actual harmonic sound waves were part of the Big Bang, and echo still now, as the Cosmic Microwave Background, a subtle, vibrant photonal warmth omnipresent throughout the universe and in your body, in the volume of which are some 400,000,000 of these primordial photones, as I call them.The harmonic axis stretches from finest spirit to deepest matter, from the absolute original vastness to the first emergent string of String Theory. How lovely its latest variation, M-Theory, carries the name "mmmmm..." the primal seed-mantra from which all chant, all harmonic chant, all creation universe chant, emerges.
This uniform harmonic presence, the selfless "I am" or "it is" mantra of the spectral universe, the primal utterance, resounds at every scale from there to here, from here to there, in one unfailing sweep of the breathing heavens, from earth to the infinite in a timeless and gentle wave.
In the yogic work, the in-breath stretches up to the highest luminous entry point and the down-breath sweeps out and through the body space, in an infinitely repeatable cycle of nourishment and purification of the inner being. The highest harmonic point in the dome aperture of the cranium allows a systematic downpouring of the elixir of pranic awareness throughout the body space and as a blessing into harmonic nature.
This sort of exercise is best undertaken after the necessary purification and dissolution exercises which are available to practitioners in the Harmonic presenceretreats. The esoteric experience level only begins when the "me, myself and minefiled" is first quieted, then silenced through its own inner work, and when the emotional opening possible when I can humbly admit my own living emptiness, and therefore can become equally open to the plenitude, how the universe always answers our calls when the resonance rings true.
So personal discovery can bypass the one true path of initiate. Gurdjieff liked to speak of "self-initiation," a sincere but ultimately limited path unless the necessary extra steps are taken, for it is the steps at the beginning that guarantee the final steps into liberation.
In the harmonic is the breath, in the breath is the listening, in the listening is the space, in the space is the awareness, in the awareness is the light, in the light is the ultimate ground, the Absolute. By taking the path of return, the path of preincarnation, you arrive at the source of your consciousness and of all this manifestation.
The space you're in...is harmonic space. The harmonic vibrations, sung or unsung, sounding or silent, and the space--are one. The vibrations make the space and the space makes the vibrations. The consciousness is a blend of the space and the luminosity. Luminosity has a sound. The correct balance of all the elements, the vibrational ecology, allows the smooth, even state of non-separation to reappear. The even sensation of body as space and space as body, the luminous space of non-separation is experienced by the silent witness consciousness.
The mind is quiet and is just seeing-light. Seeing-light and listening-sound are the true audiovisual theater of consciousness. The various delights and benedictions occur spontaneously once the ground experience has acquired some stability.
Meantime you still need a path that purifies, meaning it leads to humility and openness.
Sensations, thoughts, emotions all arise and are perceived spatially as immanent to the ground, and are reabsorbed.
The body and the surrounding space are like one bloc of presence, one vibration. There is no sense of the body expanding, for self is just witnessing silent consciousness. There is no sense of space penetrating, as there is only unified awareness.
The silent state is a humble one-- "Thy will be done." Reality is already harmonic, there is just the one step of opening to it.
The purpose served by the Harmonic presencework is to help you take that step. Forward or back? A step backward, into yourself, is perfect-- the ceaseless outward flowing of attention, the projection of and into the "outer world"--let it go. A step forward, into Reality--perfect. Leave behind the endlessly echoiong old thoughts, old feelings, old patterns. The naked body of awareness is one with the elements--light, space, sound, silence
The first 7 pieces, the "Harmonic Meditations", were recorded in a huge, empty undeground water cistern near Seattle; the final piece, "The Silent Ground", was recorded by WNYC-fm in New York at the newly-inuagurated, reconstructed Winter Garden space next to Ground Zero.
"The Silent Ground," based on Mode 12 of the 32 Mode Harmonic Mandala, was composed in honor of the Supreme, that undefinable, inconceptual Reality behind the appearances--of which the realm of harmonic space and light, the light that is outside of Time, charged with awareness, is an expression.
"The Silent Ground" was also composed in the aftermath of reflections about 9/11. In the 70s I had a loft practically next door to the Trade Center, on Thames Street. The lowest-Manhattan lowest-cost neighborhood to which we had fled from Soho, Tribeca and Noho had been dubbed "Uh Oh". The building later (was?) burned down, in midwinter, no loss of life, and I returned to see a 2-story icicle (out of 6 floors), frozen solid from the Fire Department waters, but steam vapor drifing in the corridors. I often had a feeling of foreboding near the Trade Center towers, because our civilisation seems hell-bent on putting up without ever thinking about taking down. But what goes up always comes down--only the uncreated is not destroyed, only the unborn is undying. The 3 cycles of appearance, remaining, disappearance are united in the primordial space from which all comes and to which all returns. Nothing happens to Primordial Space, it's still there, empty, radiant and pure. It's not empty, it's emptiness itself--a quality. So, "The Silent Ground" is to the space in which the sounds, the listening, the feelings, the fullness, the emptiness all arise and with which they ultimately reunited. We rightfully react to the "terror of the situation" as Gurdjieff called it--but the the fact is, that both what is here and how it disappears can blind us to what is. Both what is and what is not take the place of the real, until we Awaken.
Writing about silence is a conceptual exercise, unless I'm listening for it right now and so are you. Where is the silence right now? Where silent listening meets breathing, there is
With love,
David
fire-hearth month, first world, 2004
