the power of the gong
The elemental nature of the gong makes it one of the most powerful instruments, as Nigel Photon found out when he met gongmaster Don Conreaux at the MindBodySpirit festival

“You are what you divine yourself to be
To be divine or not to be is your
freedom of choice
The gift of co-creation, sayeth the gong, is Synergy
I am a Gong, you are a Gong
When we gong together
We are the gong of life”

Don Conreaux

The power of the gong didn’t mean much to me, until through another happy coincidence I met gong-master (my description), Don Conreaux at the 23rd Mind body spirit festival.
I entered his workshop touched by negativity, I left enthused with a new confidence, my chakras re-balanced after a few brief hours within his calming aura.
A flower-child of the first psychedelic revolution, he learnt the gong from the 3HO and the yogi Bhajan, who he first heard playing a gong in 1969, in California.
“I immediately got one, I played the gong every day for thirty years”, he enthusiastically remembers.
The first gong appeared in 3500 BC in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq/Iran, at the end of the agricultural era, when the huge wheat-ovens got so hot that the copper and tin melted out of the rocks to form a bronze alloy gong.
“It was the first synthesizer, all of our synthesizers today are simply grand-children of that,” he tells me.
It is the elemental nature of the gong, which renders its importance on both the material and spiritual plane. Having come from the same furnace as our being, our life-blood, the gong activates our Third ear in much the same way that visual stimulus is intrepreted by our Third eye.
“Holistic Gong music is drunk by the Third ear, the spiritual one that encompasses your entire being of mind, body and spirit. The gong’s purpose is to give you safe passage, interdimensionally and to give you better access to the creative power of Om, which is the power to decondition and recondition the mental, emotional, material vehicle of your soul,” explains Don.
“The workshop helps you to develop your intuition. The left brain, academic musical education tells us allows us to memorize rhythms, melodies, harmonics etc. We can by-pass that and allow our instincts, our love and care to be inducted from us in life.”
During his workshop Don demonstrates the healing qualities of 3 gongs played simultaneously, their sonorous frequencies resonating a deep chord within you.
Each gong supposedly represents the sound of a planet, maybe the sound they make, the vibration they produce as they plough through the cosmos.
“Scientifically you can transpose them octave by octave so they fit into our hearing range. When we do this, those planets carry the same qualities acoustically as they do astrologically. The gong bouquet (any mixture of three planet gongs) of Sun, Mercury and Mars, when played together with their tones layered over each other begin to mix and match their tones and produce progeny which we call resultant tones.”
“Two tones of equal amplitude seem to create children called over and under tones. These extra tones are called unstruck sounds and they’re really heavenly sounds. They’re the result of exterior sounds coming together.”
Don tells the workshop group to make an intention to do something and to affirm that it will come into being whilst they meditate with the vibrating gong ringing in their ears.
“You can use that power of sound to support your intention, your affirmation or your meditation.”
“When you mix the three planet gongs simultaneously, out of that selection comes certain powers carried by the flow of sound. They operate the same way as the astrological influences in life.”
“The Sun in our charts, gives us the lifeforce - it comes from the solar plexus. The prana is what lives on.”
“Mercury is the communication process, the artistic part of us. We’re mixing the life-force with the power of the voice chakra. “Mars is the iniatator. It’s where we get our will-power, our strength. It activates everything.”
“Your intention, your purpose will go into that sound and it’s going to nourish that pod and make it grow into the light.”
“This happens because of synaesthesia, a mixing of the senses. It causes you to make an alteration, a shift from here to there, so a creative force can enter our lives which we can use.”
“The magic of the gong doesn’t complete itself. The dissonant harmony within the gong causes it to go on and never ends. Not on the physical plane.”
“That forces the consciousness to resolve itself on the spiritual plane and therefore everyone makes the shift into their 4th dimensional bodies when they’re listening to it, whether they’ve taken drugs or not. Whether they’ve meditated or not.”
“Everybody, even animals make that shift in consciousness when they’ve listened to it”
“Supposedly the gong takes you to your next level of meditation. Gurus, saints and masters all bow to the gong because it has a transpersonal entity within it and this entity is the highest.”
“The development of holiopathic resonance, the Buddhists call it the Maitreyan factor. Right now 2,500 years after his death it’s come back through the gong, bells, its this type of tone. One tone layered on another causes unstruck sound, which brings you into a telepathic resonance with people.”
“It seems as if they’re not going to become enlightened, yet the quantum shift is going to happen to make people feel united as one human being.”

If you’d like to find out more about Don’s work or the healing qualities of the gong, then check his web-site at www.holistic-resonance.com where you can also order his CD “Mysterious tremundum at the Crossing grounds”. It is a live recording of an aborginal sacred ceremony connecting with the other side, given for a friend called Laughing Crow who’d just died.
This article, originally dedicated to Mike of the Welsh party possee who I met in Hungary ’99 and who died in a car crash on the way home, also serves to remember those of our scene who have died/passed over last year. Especially after the recent sad news of the passing of Kim Bernard who ran the legendary psy-trance pub in London, the Cock tavern back in ’98 & ’99, this is dedicated to her memory.

Dance on girl, we think of you