A Legacy of Spiritual Experience

Anonymous

I still feel very new to the teachings of ECK. I live in the middle of Nebraska, and the nearest ECKANKAR center is two hours away, so we don’t have many opportunities to attend ECK events. I talk about the teachings with my kids. They have their own dream experiences and past-life recalls, but their understanding comes from their own experiences and from singing HU.

My twelve-year-old attends a country kindergarten-through-sixth-grade school. There are a hundred and thirty students in his school. The music teacher travels to the four schools that make up our school district, and every year she holds a competition in preparation for the spring concert. She has the students sing a tone, on pitch, for as long as they can. Every week, for several weeks, she travels to each school, and because they are rehearsing for the concert, all the grades come together for one large music class. The competition comes at the end of the class, when students attempt to break the singing record. The top winner from all the schools is awarded an enormous bag of gummy bears as a prize.

It appeared that a student in one of the other schools was winning, but the teacher gave the students who hadn’t tried yet at my son’s school one last chance to break the record.

This is how my son explained the story to me after school that day:

“All the kids tried singing, and no one was able to break the record. I noticed they were all singing Ahh, and I didn’t remember there being a rule that we can only sing Ahh. For weeks I had watched people sing Ahh. I knew I could sing HU longer than they were singing Ahh, but I wasn’t brave enough to try. But when the teacher asked for any more volunteers, something told me to raise my hand. I went to the platform, in front of a hundred and thirty students, and, oh my gosh, my knees were knocking!

“Instead of singing Ahh, I sang HU. The whole school cheered and jumped to their feet! They went nuts when I broke the record, and that broke my concentration. The teacher asked if I wanted to try to sing even longer, and she quieted down the class. I sang way over the record, and then they really went nuts.

“Now I have to wait to see if someone in one of the other schools will break my record.”

I started to suggest to my son that using HU to win a contest was probably not a good idea, but then he said,

“People asked me how I did it. I told them to sing HU instead of Ahh. Try it, Mom. HU is much easier than Ahh. Everyone sang Ahh because everyone else sang Ahh. No one thought to sing HU. You should see them! Everyone at recess was singing HU. The whole lunchroom was practicing singing HU!”

Two lessons my son and I received from this experience:

1. Everyone did what everyone else did, trying to accomplish a goal without ever considering a creative and different way.
2. A twelve-year-old introduced his whole school to the HU, and I am sure a few of those young hearts were opened. Maybe one day they will learn about the HU and remember that school-contest experience.

My son doesn’t like gummy bears, so when it turned out he had won the contest, he shared the enormous bag with his classmates. Not only did he break this year’s record, he holds the all-time district record! That is until next year, because now there is a whole school practicing the HU.