HARMONIC WAVES OF ENERGY

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Is the world sound? If so, to what extent is it sound? To what extent is the world a vast, unimaginable cosmic musical instrument? And is the structure of the microcosm, with its electrons and photons, primarily sound? Could the shapes of leaves and crystals, the bodies of humans and animals, also be sound? Are words and language, in some privileged sense, also sound? Are we sound?

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Many ancient cultures chose to examine reality through the metaphors of Music and Geometry—Music as the study of the laws governing the proportions of sound frequencies. Geometry is the study of the relationships between the elements that constitute shapes. Behind the angles of a triangle, there is a universal law that says a triangle always has three sides. This is the purpose of Geometry: to understand the Universe through the analysis of figures as simple as a triangle. Geometry, Astronomy, the Science of “temporal order” through the observation of cyclic movements, and the study of Harmony and Music were the principal intellectual disciplines of classical education in Ancient Greece. In his famous dialogue, Timaeus, Plato tells us that the creator made the soul of the world—which, for Plato, meant the idea of the cosmos—according to musical intervals and proportions. With his music, the divine singer Orpheus was able to give shape to formless matter (for the Greeks, this meant: beauty personified).

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Geometric diagrams can be contemplated as movements of stillness that reveal a continuous and timeless universal action, generally hidden from our sensory perception. For ancient astronomers, it was the angle that specified the influences of the celestial configurations on Earthly events (we can see here the common root between the English words "angle" and "angel"). This was the so-called Sacred Geometry, which has nothing to do with religion but rather with language, the code of creation.

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The architecture of bodily existence is determined by an invisible, immaterial world of pure and geometric forms. A DNA molecule is composed of genes, formed by atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which have a helical shape. It is this helical shape that contains the genetic code. There are millions of perfect geometric relationships. If even one is out of place, a person is born with some defect. Thus, the important thing is the geometric relationship between atoms, not just in DNA, but in everything. What determines the nature of things is this relationship between the atoms.

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Both our organs of perception and the world of phenomena we perceive seem to be better understood as geometric structures of form and proportion. The specialization of cells in bodily tissue is partly determined by the specific position of each cell in relation to the others in its area. All our sensory organs function in response to geometric or proportional differences—not quantitative ones—intrinsic to the stimuli they receive. For example, when we smell the fragrance of a rose, we are not responding to the chemical substances of its scent, but to the geometry of its molecular construction. Similarly, we do not hear mere quantitative differences in sound wave frequencies but rather the proportional and logarithmic differences between frequencies, with logarithmic expansion being the basis of geometric spirals. Our different perceptual faculties, such as vision, hearing, touch, and smell, are the result of different proportional reductions, like a kind of geometry of perception.

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Human consciousness has the unique ability to perceive the transparency between the absolute and permanent relationships contained in the insubstantial forms of a geometric order and the transient and mutable forms of our real world. The content of our experience stems from an immaterial and abstract geometric architecture composed of harmonic waves of energy, nodes of relationships, and melodic forms that emerge from the eternal realm in geometric proportion. All dissonances tend to become harmony.

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Recognizing harmonic relationships is not a uniquely musical objective. It is the goal of atoms and molecules, planetary orbits, cells and hearts, brain waves and movements, schools of fish and flocks of birds, and, above all, of humans. The ultimate goal of the cosmos, of creation, is harmony.

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The entire structure of the microcosm is filled with harmonic concordances. The long filaments of nucleic acid in DNA are structured according to the Pythagorean tetractys—one of the most important numbers in Pythagorean cosmogony was 10, which the Pythagoreans considered triangular. This number was called by them the Tetractys, or in English, the "tetrad." The Tetractys is a kind of pyramid or triangle where the first numbers are inscribed, the basis of all ordinal numbering, resulting in a mystical number representing the four basic elements of nature: fire, water, air, and earth: or numerically: 10 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4, a series that serves as a representation of the totality of the universe. Thus, the series 1, 2, 3, 4 individually represents the monad, the dyad, the triad, and the solid:

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The Pythagoreans attributed magical power to the tetractys; thus, they considered it sacred. This same structure is almost always present in those mysterious processes in which inorganic structures are transformed into organic life. The four oxygen atoms, for example, that surround a phosphorus atom, vibrate in the tetractys! One must literally accept what Lama Govinda said: “Every atom is constantly singing a song, and, at every moment, that song creates dense and subtle forms, consisting of greater or lesser materiality.”

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Professor Amstutz, from the Institute of Mineralogy at the University of Heidelberg, stated: “The intertwined waves of matter are separated by intervals that correspond to the frets of a harp or a guitar, with sequences analogous to harmonic chords based on a fundamental tone. The science of musical harmony is, in these terms, practically identical to the science of the symmetry of crystals.”

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In the 12th century, the architecture of the Cistercian order achieved its visual beauty through designs that fit the proportional system of musical harmony. Many of the abbeys of that period were acoustic shells that transformed a human choir into celestial music. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired this architecture, said of its conception: “There should be no decoration, only proportion.” Geometry deals with pure form. It is a way of making the essential creative mystery visible. Seeking truth has always meant seeking the immutable, whether called ideas, forms, archetypes, numbers, or gods. Entering a temple built entirely according to the invariant geometric proportions is to enter the realm of eternal truth.