They’re watching. All the time. I may be a quasi-paranoid neo-Luddite, but I have proof! Who’s the “they”? Technology nameless here forevermore. So my wife and I attend Tibetan singing bowls once a month when we can. It’s the night I get to stay up late even though it’s a “school night” and get bathed in sound. Our facilitator is a kundalini yoga instructor. To those of you with experience, you know what that means. At the end of each session we sing the “Longtime Sun” song. Each and every month the next morning I groggily look it up. I know it’s a recent song (hey, I’m in my sixties) but I can never remember by whom. So for the record it was written by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band and it’s part of a piece called “A Very Cellular Song” on the 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. (Now I remember!) Okay, so I’ve got that out of my system. (I must add that this is disputed, with some claiming it’s an old Irish blessing. But note, AI only complicates the issue because it doesn’t do actual research.)
Engelse popgroep Incredible Stringband in Amsterdam
*25 september 1970
So how’s that proof? Well, there’s an unconventional website I check daily. Are you surprised? Really? To get headlines I have to reload it daily and the ads sometimes refresh. I checked this site a mere five minutes after searching “Longtime Sun” for maybe the fifth time and the ads in the refreshed page were for singing bowls. Just five minutes earlier I’d been searching a hippie tune and already they were preparing ads for me. You see, “Longtime Sun” is a standard of many (I gather from the interwebs) kundalini yoga classes. So much so that it’s commonly said that this is a traditional Tibetan song. Well, I suppose to call it “Very Cellular,” or even “Hangman’s Daughter,” might harsh the experience a bit.
Kundalini yoga is very esoteric stuff if you read a little more deeply. For me such reading is an occupational hazard, so I’ve read enough to know that many respectable people might be a bit shy upon hearing the details. That’s not to say that it’s ineffectual on the level of singing bowls. I have great respect for esotericism, although Hinduism isn’t in my background. But if “they” know what kundalini teaches, what kinds of ads might begin to show up on the websites I visit? What’s truly amazing is that a web search for a specific song brought up an ad for something that would be puzzling, were a reader innocently wanting to find out about “A Very Cellular Song.” For academic purposes, for instance. Of course, they know, you can merch anything. You can trust the internet only so far. And they are watching.
