Looking for a Rope to the Sky ~ by Rob Diggins

 

Looking for a Rope to the Sky

by Rob Diggins

 

When I was first approached about writing another article for the AHYMSIN-Americas newsletter, I reached out to my mentor for guidance, offering a few preliminary prompts I had been considering—many of them the result of gentle editorial nudging.

As usual, my mentor responded quickly, if not instantly, with this advice: “Dearest, use your intuition and consider what is most needed.” And with that, I was off to the races. Or was I?

 

What is needed?

A Rope to the Sky?!

Allow me to approach this question—a kind of Zen koan—by offering a little of my backstory.

 

I’ll begin by describing an activity I know intimately, in the hopes that this description will allow us to draw out a particular, essential element: focused listening and cultivated awareness. These, in turn, give rise to what the Parampara refers to—alongside other attributes—as skill in action. In a word: enlightenment.

 

Having spent more than half a century as a professional violinist, I would like to respond to this first instance of “what is needed” with an analogy drawn from the world I know best. Specifically, the fascinating phenomenon of tone production on the violin.

 

For those unfamiliar: the violin produces sound through tightly stretched strings. When bowed or plucked, these strings can yield agreeable tones—or, just as often, harsh and disagreeable ones. Unless the bow—made of carefully selected horsehair, properly rosined and tensioned—is drawn across the strings with skill, the resulting sound may be a mix of scratches, hisses, and ghostly whistles. In short: noise.

 

And so, what is needed here?

Attention. Focus. Awareness.

Sound familiar?

 

To produce a pure tone on the violin, the player must bring a highly refined focus and awareness to the task—and this begins with one thing above all:

Listening.

 

I cannot remember the exact moment I learned the difference between merely hearing and truly listening, but I suspect it was through the violin—under the persistent guidance of my first teacher. And here, in writing this article, it dawns on me:
This is the answer I had been seeking.

What is needed?
Listening.

 

Let me speak a little more about this process of listening, particularly as it relates to tone production. I’ll later draw a parallel to the emergence and experience of the Guru Mantra—and by extension, to the inner resonance of all mantra.

 

As I mentioned, when the violin bow is drawn carelessly, or even intentionally across the string in the wrong way, the result is usually an unfocused hiss or scraping noise. This is noise, yes—but not meaningless. In fact, within this bundle of apparent static lies an astonishing collection of harmonic tones—each a distinct frequency, part of an interrelated system of ratios. These tones, given the right conditions, can rise from the background and assert themselves with a kind of laser-like clarity.

 

Here, dear reader, allow me a side note:
Consider that the ongoing internal mental chatter—those fugues of memory, dream, inner dialogue, and distraction—form a kind of internal hiss, not unlike the undifferentiated noise on a violin string. And yet, within this seeming chaos, something pure waits to emerge.

 

Back to the violin.

 

At around age seven, my teacher, Alice Schoenfeld, demonstrated a remarkable technique. She listened intently while drawing the bow slowly across the string, locating a single harmonic tone within the broader noise. With the subtlest adjustments—of bow pressure, velocity, string contact point, initiation, release—she brought that tone forward. Gradually, the harmonic tone swelled with clarity and resonance, and then she made it spin, lifting the bow slightly at the end of each stroke without disrupting the continuity of sound.

It was captivating.

 

Under her firm and masterful guidance, I began to practice the same. Slowly, I learned to listen for and draw forth the “preferred” tone from the field of noise. Did she use speech to instruct me? Yes—but only in the gross particulars. The real transmission was non-verbal.
It was in the listening.

 

This phenomenon—and its psychological and perceptual echoes—stayed with me for years. Though the specific skill might be considered an esoteric flourish, its co-evolutes proved profound. They remained quietly present in the background of my awareness until, one day, they rose again—unbidden and joyfully—in meditation.

 

During a Gayatri purascharana many years ago, I had an experience that rekindled that early lesson. In meditation, the Guru Mantra—imparted to me by my spiritual preceptor, Dr. Usharbudh Arya (later Swami Veda Bharati)—emerged with a similar clarity and purity as that drawn-out harmonic tone. It was in that experience that I first caught a sense of the phenomenon of smṛti, or "remembrance” —spiritual remembrance— as a silent śruti. An inner “hearing,” “seeing,” and “knowing.”

 

It was then I realized:
The practice of drawing forth a mantra—of refining one’s inner attention to hear the subtle resonance—resembles nothing so much as coaxing a harmonic tone out of a background of noise.

 

Like that tone, the mantra exists with specific waveform properties—eternally vibrating, like the “most ancient traveler of the universe,” as Swami Rama once described.

 

And so, dear reader, I return to where I began:

 

What is needed?

Listening.

Not just hearing.
Listening deeply, attentively, receptively.

Perhaps you, too, can recall—or feel inspired to cultivate—that same capacity, that same discipline, that same devotion, and spin together those many threads of continuity, endlessly flowing, into your very own, metaphorical, rope to the sky.