The Spirituality of Flute Making:
While carving out a new flute one day, I heard a voice ask "What are you doing?"
I replied, "I'm making a flute."
The voice said, "No, you're not making a flute. What are you really doing?"
Well, I thought about that for a few minutes and realized that I was just making a hole in a piece of wood - I was actually making nothing. Then I was reminded of something I had read on the website www.NavaChing.com where the author was writing about the making of a Zen flute. He wrote that "the flute isn't the container, it isn't the wood or the finish, it's the empty part. . . . The wrapper the emptiness comes in has a vanishing small influence on the emptiness itself. Only when the emptiness is shaped/sculpted properly will the true sound take up residence and manifest itself. So flute makers are Sculptors of Emptiness."
Then the voice said to me "Why have you been using straight pieces of wood and forcing them to be what you want them to be? Don't you realize that each piece of wood has its own voice?"
So now most of the flutes I make are from natural pieces of wood and simply tune them to whatever that piece of wood "wants to be." I am no longer concerned with what key a flute might be, or what scale is used, or any of that - I am simply creating Emptiness within a piece of wood and hearing its tones.
I also have come to the realization that making flutes in this way has a much deeper spiritual aspect for me. As I split the wood into two pieces, it reminds me of our 'illusion' of the God/Human duality - that once we were one, and we became two. As I hollow out the pieces, it is like the emptying of ego so we can return to one - just as the two halves are glued back together after they are carved out. The glue is the Spirit that binds us together with God. And that brought up the thought that once this has happened, the Breath of God can then pass through the flute and create the Songs of God.
As Hazrat Inayat Kahn wrote as an explanation of Krishna's playing of the flute:
"Krishna is the ideal of divine love, the God of love. And the divine love expresses itself by entering into man and filling his whole being. Therefore, the flute is the human heart, and a heart which is made hollow will become a flute for the God of love to play upon. When the heart is not empty there is no place for love.
Rumi explains this idea more clearly. He says the pains and sorrows the soul experiences through life are like holes made in a reed flute, and it is by making these holes that a player makes the flute out of a reed. This means that the heart of man is first a reed, and the sufferings and pains it goes through make it a flute, which can then be used by God as the instrument for the music the He constantly wishes to produce. But as every reed is not a flute, so every heart is not His instrument. As the reed can be made into a flute, so the human heart can be turned into an instrument of the God of Love. No earthly instrument can produce that music which the heart produces, raising the mortal soul to immortality."
While carving out a new flute one day, I heard a voice ask "What are you doing?"
I replied, "I'm making a flute."
The voice said, "No, you're not making a flute. What are you really doing?"
Well, I thought about that for a few minutes and realized that I was just making a hole in a piece of wood - I was actually making nothing. Then I was reminded of something I had read on the website www.NavaChing.com where the author was writing about the making of a Zen flute. He wrote that "the flute isn't the container, it isn't the wood or the finish, it's the empty part. . . . The wrapper the emptiness comes in has a vanishing small influence on the emptiness itself. Only when the emptiness is shaped/sculpted properly will the true sound take up residence and manifest itself. So flute makers are Sculptors of Emptiness."
Then the voice said to me "Why have you been using straight pieces of wood and forcing them to be what you want them to be? Don't you realize that each piece of wood has its own voice?"
So now most of the flutes I make are from natural pieces of wood and simply tune them to whatever that piece of wood "wants to be." I am no longer concerned with what key a flute might be, or what scale is used, or any of that - I am simply creating Emptiness within a piece of wood and hearing its tones.
I also have come to the realization that making flutes in this way has a much deeper spiritual aspect for me. As I split the wood into two pieces, it reminds me of our 'illusion' of the God/Human duality - that once we were one, and we became two. As I hollow out the pieces, it is like the emptying of ego so we can return to one - just as the two halves are glued back together after they are carved out. The glue is the Spirit that binds us together with God. And that brought up the thought that once this has happened, the Breath of God can then pass through the flute and create the Songs of God.
As Hazrat Inayat Kahn wrote as an explanation of Krishna's playing of the flute:
"Krishna is the ideal of divine love, the God of love. And the divine love expresses itself by entering into man and filling his whole being. Therefore, the flute is the human heart, and a heart which is made hollow will become a flute for the God of love to play upon. When the heart is not empty there is no place for love.
Rumi explains this idea more clearly. He says the pains and sorrows the soul experiences through life are like holes made in a reed flute, and it is by making these holes that a player makes the flute out of a reed. This means that the heart of man is first a reed, and the sufferings and pains it goes through make it a flute, which can then be used by God as the instrument for the music the He constantly wishes to produce. But as every reed is not a flute, so every heart is not His instrument. As the reed can be made into a flute, so the human heart can be turned into an instrument of the God of Love. No earthly instrument can produce that music which the heart produces, raising the mortal soul to immortality."
