The Mystics Were Right: The Universe Is Humming

Scientific breakthroughs are confirming ideas of the universe that Hindu mystics taught centuries ago.

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         But first, your moment of Zen … the full “Sturgeon” moon — so named by the Algonquin because of the fish’s abundance at this time of year — rising over Marathon, Texas, on August 1, 2023.

August 3, 2023

         During my 20s, I began a serious study of comparative mythology. I read William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and Sir James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough before I hit what would be a lifelong mother lode: the writings and teachings of Joseph Campbell. He combined dazzling scholarship with an accessible writing and speaking style. I read The Masks of God, his magisterial four-volume survey of world mythologies. Then I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, about how hero myths (including Jesus) around the world had a common structure, which he called the monomyth:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

         Campbell’s The Power of Myth accompanied the award-winning TV series of the same name hosted by Bill Moyers. Myths to Live By, based on a series of lectures he delivered in New York, neatly summarizes the main themes of his work and contemplates the mythic import of humans walking on the moon. The Joseph Campbell Foundation keeps his legacy alive, with access to his books and his audio and video recordings.

         Two things have always fascinated me about Campbell’s scholarship. The first is the unity of mythological themes – the Creation of People, the Fall from Grace, the Flood, the Virgin Birth – across cultures deeply separated in time and space. Everywhere, it seems, angry gods have sent death-dealing floods or been incarnated via virgin births. (He attributes this to psychological processes within us, not divine revelations from without.) The second is his obvious respect and affection for the stories he tells, whether of the Christian Jesus, the Norse Odin, or the Trickster Coyote of the southwest United States. And much of it is caught on audio or video in his many lectures.

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      One of his more fascinating lectures is about Kundalini yoga, the Hindu spiritual discipline. In it, he discusses the sacred syllable “Om” or “AUM,” which he calls “the sound of the energy of the universe, of which all things are manifestations.” In this lecture, Campbell explains it this way:

         In Hindu iconography, “AUM” is represented by this symbol:

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         Now we find that astrophysicists are finding evidence for the physical reality of metaphysical concepts the Hindus were discussing thousands of years ago. A recent article in The Atlantic begins thusly:

The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.

         The story, by the astrophysicist Adam Frank, goes on to summarize the evolution of scientific knowledge that brought us to a stunning announcement last week. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity postulated space-time to be one continuum, a flexible fabric. If a sufficiently violent cosmic event occurred, it could cause a ripple in space-time itself, like snapping a bed sheet, that would spread outward through the universe at light speed. These he called “gravitational waves,” and he predicted their existence more than a century ago.

         Their existence was not demonstrated until 2015, when scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, mercifully known as LIGO, were able to detect a distinct gravitational wave emerging from the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away.

         Now there was empirical proof of discrete gravitational waves. But scientists also believed there was a background hum, composed of billions of gravitational waves bouncing around the universe since the dawn of time. And last month, scientists at the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, reported on 15 years of data that demonstrated the existence of that “cosmic hum.”

         More research will be necessary to fully understand the phenomenon, but the groundwork is there. The universe “hums” — and not just “out there.”

         I’ll let Adam Frank take us out:

All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been. It’s all within us, around us, pushing us to and fro as we hurtle through the cosmos.

         The Hindu mystics who “discovered” AUM 3,000 years ago would be proud.

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