The Meeting Room also contains the crystal singing bowls. These bowls play sounds that virtually everyone considers remarkable and spiritually powerful. I ask that no one play the bowls other than me, but I encourage our tour guides to explain them.

My hope is that everyone who comes to the Center will experience sacred reality from something here. For many people, it’s visiting St. Therese. For many, it’s meditating in the sanctuary on this floor. For others, it’s drumming in the Shamanic Journeying/Drumming room. And so on. For virtually everyone, the singing bowls provide such an experience.

First, I’ll describe the bowls themselves. They are made of essentially pure quartz. They weren’t made to make sound, but rather to make silicon wafers, which are then made into microchips. As I understand it, they put large chunks of silicon into these bowls and then heat them to something like 7500 degrees. The silicon becomes molten. They then stick a rod down into the silicon. The rod has some kind of a “seed” on it, and this affects the silicon. They then let the silicon start solidifying, and pull the rod up. The silicon comes up in a column which they then allow to completely solidify. They then slice it, and each slice is a silicon wafer. They then apply a coating and imprint circuitry, creating microchips.

For this to be done properly, the bowls must be perfect. Silicon is very heavy, and the bowls could shatter if they’re imperfect. It’s apparently quite difficult to make such bowls perfectly. The bowls we have were purchased at great cost (as much as $5000/bowl) by a local silicon wafer manufacturer, and they then found they weren’t perfect enough so they decided to throw them away. One of our friends salvaged them and donated three to us. We later purchased other bowls. Bowls like this can be purchased commercially, although historically those bowls have been lower quality bowls that didn’t meet the quality control tests that our bowls passed (before they failed the last tests). As I’ll explain, we’re very lucky to have the bowls we have.

I play two different combinations of bowls. One combination I play only privately for people, doing attunements that last about 1 3/4 hours. Virtually everyone who’s had that experience has said it’s the most or one of the most profound experiences they’ve ever had. I also do less intense, briefer performances for groups. Even when I play the bowls this way, these three things happen:

The entire chakra system becomes opened. Thus, considerable energy is experienced, and great healing in all aspects of one’s being can occur.

The sound and energy that come from the bowls are so significant that one’s mind goes into observer mode. This is common when people hear music, but the effect from the bowls is more meditative. People tend to think they’re nothing more than their thoughts, and their minds never turn off. The bowls remind you that you are more than your thoughts, and hearing them can produce great peace.

Most importantly, hearing the bowls puts you in resonance with God, with all there is. All the world’s religions tell us, in one way or another, that we’re here to learn how to become perfected so we can gain entry to the kingdom of God. All traditions say that at least part of this is to meet certain standards of conduct - the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and so forth. In the East, they go further and talk about changing our very energy and consciousness to be Godlike, so that if God is a sea of conscious energy we become like a drop of water which, when dropped into the sea, merges with it. All traditions also talk about creation as being a sound. First there was the word, and God was the word, and God said let there be light, and so forth. Hindus believe the same thing, and they call that sound OM. This is the sound not just of the initial creation, but of the continual recreation of the universe in every second, as we discussed in the Hindu Sanctuary. Our energy systems seem to be hardwired to recognize certain sounds as being part of OM (OM is more than we can imagine or recreate). When we hear those sounds, we go into resonance with the universe. We’re blessed to have so many bowls (you only see about half of them here) that we’re able to create combinations that our systems recognize as OM.

In sum, then, hearing the bowls puts people into the best meditative experience they’ve ever had, and they don’t have to do any work. The bowls do the work.

Also, when we have this experience - especially when I do the attunements - people often become able to access subconscious parts of their being. This includes memories from earlier in this lifetime, memories from past lives, which are stored in the soul, and access to one’s soul in general and God consciousness.