Bells in Hallgrimskirkja, a church in IcelandI often find it interesting how different civilizations, without communicating with each other in their early stages, came up with more or less the same concepts - for example, marriage as an institution, family as a unit of society; fairy tales, ghost stories; kings, slaves...
But it was only until recently that I realized how bells enjoy a similar sort of universal existence. Bells, I have discovered, are found in churches in the West as much as they appear in temples in the East. Indeed, bells are often connected with religion in different cultures. I find that rather intriguing.
Perhaps a common use of bells is to summon the congregation at the hours of worship. They therefore also serve as reminders of the time, like in clock towers. However, I have also read that chimes from bells are also supposed to make us mindful of the moment as we hear them - to pause, and perhaps to think, but more importantly just to pause - so often are we carried away by our troubles, our desires and the quick pace of life that we are not mindful of our own existence or of the moment.
The purity and simplicity of chimes help us crystallize our thoughts and feel for an instant of inner peace. These days, "mindful living" is becoming chic. There are even "mindfulness bells", downloadable from the web - essentially an audio clock that can be set to chime at regular intervals or randomly, and can be used in the office or at home. It is used to aid meditation and the practice of mindful living by reminding us to pause on the chime.
2 comments:
this reminds me of the calls for prayers in morocco, which occur 5 times a day. a speaker would chant something in arabic (we didn't know what it meant, but mf jokingly said it should mean "喂，快D來祈禱啦!!")
the calls were audible everywhere, thanks to the hidden speakers, which were ubiquitous throughout the cities.
the calls did remind us of the time (eg. 5 a.m.!) and gave us an instant of inner peace.
perhaps this is what Carl Jung called "the collective unconscious" of human. basically he said due to our common ancestral experence our minds are all hardwired in a certain way, so some concepts and institutions keep emerging in different cultures though they're miles apart.
btw, Carl Jung was a psychologist who was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud (or might even have been Freud's student, i forgot. pardon my psychology history).
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