Something magical is happening at The Singing Bowl Museum

We can't explain everything that happens. We have become great at explaining the material world of our perception. However, many subtle experiences in life go unexplained or unnoticed.

I have always had an unusual relationship with the singing bowls. There is a magnetism I feel with them and odd experiences have always happened between myself and the bowls. If they are just bowls, why would that be so?

Once a twenty year meditator watched me with the bowls and only said, "you and these bowls - it's something else." She summed it up perfectly with the amazed look on her face and the feeling she communicated, more so than the actual words.

The bowls seem to call to me even when they are not being played. The Tamang traders in Nepal started giving me names; "bowl guru," "singing bowl king," they often had puzzled looks as I would discover treasures hidden in dark rooms.

It really feels like magnetism. Early in my years of collecting, I was driving down the highway near Petaluma, California. I suddenly had the feeling to exit. I made a few turns through town and arrived to an old junk shop. Inside there happened to be a singing bowl.

Another time in San Jose, I pulled off the road to a carpet store of all places. It was not a Tibetan carpet store but just a regular flooring store. Inside they did have an area of oriental rugs and some decorative items, including a stack of singing bowls.

Perhaps there is a sort of spiritual magnetism, an attraction between people and bronze. Perhaps it is something karmic with the bowls. Perhaps it is just the power of concentration and specialization in one's work. There are different ways to look at subtle phenomenon. However, they do not necessarily subject to a logical explanation. We are unable to explain the mysterious, for mysteries are beyond the mundane existence of explanations.

What has been happening lately with the bowls goes to another level completely. This year we relocated to Vermont and I finally have a space for The Singing Bowl Museum. I have unpacked and sorted all the bowls by size and type. This gives me the best access I have had to the whole collection since 2011. They have not all been out of their boxes and crates since then.

As I have been organizing the collection, I have been revisiting the history that I wrote in The Singing Bowl Book and looking at the bowls with a fresh perspective. I am looking at them in great detail, under magnification and using measuring tools, comparing every aspect. I have cultivated it as a daily practice and am discovering something new every day. I can now discern different tools that were used to make the bowls, can separate them by workshop and can tell which have been made by the same person or people.

As I am doing carefully organizing the museum, it seems the bowls are speaking to me. When I have a question, I pick up a bowl and find the answer. For example, I wondered if one type had been hammered in a certain way. The next bowl I looked at I saw an imperfection that gave me the answer.

Another time, I wondered if the same workshop could have made two different types of bowls, then I immediately found a bowl that bridged the two styles. I am not so well organized that I am consciously remembering these details. In fact, in most cases I would not know from knowing the individual bowls - I have to look with a magnifying lens to see these small details.

Something else seems to be happening, intuition or communication. There is some deeper connection and I have a new ability to understand the singing bowls. Moshe Feldenkrais said that intuition is an unconscious process that is able to draw new conclusions from a lot of life experience.

Perhaps this is all a higher function of my brain and not a spiritual connection. For example, I had an idea that the engravings may have been needed to finish the bowls. Sure enough, I immediately found some bowls with engravings exactly on top of the seam of the metal. The engravings were indeed used to make a final press on the metal, ensuring it would not separate. Thus I have a new explanation for the engravings.

This solution just came to me intuitively, as an insight. However, was it just my brain remembering the many photos I have taken and summing them up in the background? Probably, but that does not explain how I can travel to a foreign city and find singing bowls in a back alley.

Once I visited a small and obscure temple in northern Thailand. It was not on the tourist circuit at all and I just happened to be in this town. There in a corner of the temple, in a glass case that was caked with dust inside and out, there were a lot of bronze bowls, just like the singing bowls. This was one of the discoveries I talk about in The Singing Bowl Book.

Personally, I do not think it is coincidence and I do not think it is just neurology. I tend to think it is a higher form of communication, perhaps a wider spiritual view. It is certainly an example of the power of intention and focus. However, most of it is accidental.

I did not really try to be the bowl guy. I just loved the bowls and had a generous attitude about them. I used to observe how people would hoard the bowls and I consciously applied a different mindset. I remember in the early days of collecting the bowls I would say I had an "open handed approach" to the bowls. I just wanted to take care of them and share them.

This is the kind of attitude people say will lead to success. In my private practice helping people, I saw a similar thing. Since I was involved with training people under my teacher Anat Baniel, I saw hundreds of practitioners come through the door. The ones who had to get clients to pay the bills really struggled. They could not get clients because they had an attitude of desperation. The practitioners who had a job in a hospital fared better because they did not need to associate clients with money. However, they still struggled because they pressured themselves for results. The people who had the most success, both in securing clients and in getting good results with them, were people who only wanted to help.

Buddhism calls this right motivation and the more pure the motivation, the better the results seem to be. For me with the bowls, I have the motivation to unlock the history of these objects. I kept the museum collection together so I could examine them and understand as much as I possibly can about them. I did not simply collect them to sell them. I have held on to these bowls for up to 24 years now because I want to tell their story.

The goal of The Singing Bowl Museum is just that; to understand the history as much as possible and not just treat them as merchandise. I am moving from the materialistic to the spiritual in all things. In doing so, I am discovering new insights.

The information is getting very specific, to the point I know when a bowl was made by the same maker. I start to have a feeling for each bowl, as if I can still hear the hammering. I honestly do not know where this inquiry will lead. My hope is to sustain the collection as it is for a while, so I can continue to examine and contemplate the bowls.

I just sit and look at them, study each and compare them to others. I walk around the room, putting two next to each other, then another and another. It is like a temple space here with the thangka paintings and statues blessed by my gurus. We still have the financial pressure to sell the bowls, so I will sustain this exercise as long as I can; looking, listening, allowing my intuition to run free and my mind to mingle with the mind of the guru.