The Sound of the Universe

This is the story of how I heard the sound of the universe.

This happened sometime in 2001 or 2002, I don't really remember. I was with three other friends, all of us psychonauts. We were in another psychonaut friend's apartment, although the friend who owned the apartment wasn't with us that night (he sometimes lets us use his place). All of us ingested Jekyll, lay down on a mattress, and went on a spirit walk.

This was my vision:

I was heavily clothed, surrounded in total blackness. All around me was nothing but black, total darkness, except for myself, which I could see clearly. I was not floating in empty space; my feet were touching solid ground, although it just looked black to me.

Then I started running in the blackness. Just running, to nowhere in particular. I didn't seem to be crashing into any barrier; I was just running through endless space.

Then a voice inside me told me to take off the baseball cap I had on my head. It wasn't really a voice, for it did not speak. But it was something foreign to me, and it spoke not in words, but in images, and it communicated at the speed of thought. And it told me to take off my cap.

So still running, I took off my cap. As I held the cap in my hand, I saw that it had some designs on the front. As I looked closer, I could see that the designs were of faces. They were the faces of my immediate family---my brothers and sisters, and my mom and dad.

Then the voice told me to throw the cap away. Still running, I tossed away the cap, and watched it disappear into blackness. Then the voice told me to take off my jacket.

Upon taking off the jacket, I also noticed that the jacket was printed with faces---the faces of everyone in my neighborhood. All of them: my childhood friends, the store owner at the street corner, the pesky kids across our house, basically everyone I know from my neighborhood. The voice also told me to toss the jacket, and it too disappeared into nothingness.

The voice told me to remove every article of clothing I had (like I said, I was heavily clothed). Printed on each article of clothing were the faces of people I knew during the course of my entire life thus far: my grade school classmates, my high school buddies and teachers, my uncles and aunts, my cousins, literally everyone I knew was shed off. Soon I was down to just my boxer shorts.

I stopped running then, aware that I would be asked by the voice to strip naked and toss away my boxers. I looked down at my last piece of clothing: printed on it were the four faces of the psychonauts who took the spirit walk with me.

I thought to myself, "These four people are physically in the same room with me (each of us having our own spirit walk), and they are my last connection to real world. Once I shed my boxers, I would have severed all my connections to the physical world." That meant that I would have crossed over to the unknown, having no idea at all what would happen if I did.

The voice assured me that there was nothing to be afraid of, and I knew that everything was good, for I felt no fear nor hesitation. So I stripped off my boxer shorts, and threw them away.

Then I felt myself falling through a portal, like being sucked into a straw, and when I came out the other end, I was back in my body, back in my friend's apartment, lying down on the mattress surrounded by my friends. But something was different. I could see the energy around me.

If you've seen The Matrix, it's similar to how Neo sees the Matrix code in everything around him. In my case, I could see literally thousands upon thousands of fibers of energy, each fiber having different color signatures. The energy configuration of my friends were different from the energy configuration of the furniture, or the stereo, or the mattress we were lying on. The energy of living things was different from the energy of the inanimate objects, but you could be certain that everything was energy, manifested in different forms.

And as I looked around in wonder, I became aware of a low humming sound that I could hear. It was very similar to the hum of a high-voltage cable with a powerful current running through it. It was also kind of like the hum of a Jedi's lightsaber, only it was continuous and uninterrupted.

That, my friends, is the sound of the universe. It is the sound of the buzzing and the humming of the energy around you. This sound is not new; it is as old as the universe itself.

Hinduism and other religions that practice meditation are no stranger to this sound. They have heard it before, and have incorporated them in their meditative practices.

The sound of the universe is written as one syllable, with three letters: AUM. Sometimes it is spelled "Om". John Lennon mentioned this in his song "Across the Universe."

Later on I did some research and found out that "Aum" is regarded by some as the highest sound, by others as the voice of God. And until I heard that sound with my own ears, I never even knew it existed.