Baba had a special love for Vienna. He often pointed out that Vienna was at a crossroad of cultures and civilizations by its very geographic position. As it served as an important place of passage between countries of the former eastern and western blocks, as well as between Mediterranean and northern countries, it was the ideal place for his ashram, where he ceaselessly worked to bridge religions and bring harmony amongst all people. But there might have been some other mystical reasons why Baba, at age 89, chose Vienna to become, in time, the headquarters of his European mission. "Something in the air," so to speak...

Once, during one of his first visits to Vienna, Baba fell gravely ill and was taken to a clinic. While recovering there, he one day asked his dear disciple Swami Prajñanananda who had come to visit him, "Do you hear something different in this place?"

Baba, being always attuned to the Divine Sound emanating from the Aum or Word of God, seemed to be genuinely surprised to note that here, in Vienna, the Divine Sound sounded different than in all the other countries he had visited.

"Yes, Baba, it is true. Here the Sound has a different quality" responded his disciple.

"Ah, I felt it also, but was not sure whether it was due to fever or something else." said Baba with his unique way of always giving praise to others, while downplaying his own spiritual insights.

When Prajñananandaji related the incident to me, I reflected that Vienna indeed had had a long and unique relationship with sound, rarely seen in any other cities. After all, it had been the home of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Strauss, no less!

Was not Baba thus hinting that the reason why so much of the glorious orchestral music of the West had been written and flourished in this city was because a peculiar configuration of celestial sound pervaded the place?

This may appear as an odd concept at first, but if we turn to the scriptures, we see that all religions maintain that creation started with the Sound. "In the beginning was the Word" says the Bible (John 1:1), while Vedanta asserts that the universe came out of the shabda or Primordial Sound. Yoga describes this sound as anahata dwhani, "the sound of the unstruck bell," while Sufis talk of it as the Saut-i-sarmadi, "the music without a beginning or an end."

Indian mysticism sees the world, and our bodies, bathed in an eternal, holy sound-stream. Baba had once told me that all ancient musical instruments had been created in an effort to reproduce this Divine Sound heard by yogis in the depth of their meditation. The Upanishads and various yogic scriptures indeed describe many of the mystical sounds associated with the different chakras of the body in terms of musical instruments such as tabors, conches, bells, flutes, lyres, etc.

Maybe Vienna had inherited a special sound quality which a few artists, endowed with special sensitivity, were able to perceive and manifest through their musical compositions?