Harmonic Relationships

Harmony is the state recognized by a great philosophers as the immediate prerequisite of beauty. A compound is deemed beautiful only when it parts are in harmonious combination. The world is called beautiful because all must act in conformity with its true nature; and acting according to its own nature is that true harmony which resonates with our deepest heart. All beauty, therefore, is harmony manifesting its own intrinsic nature in the world of form.

The universe is made up of successive gradations of life, these gradations range from matter ( which is the least degree of beauty) to spirit (which is the greatest degree of beauty). In mankind, their superior nature is the ultimate. It therefore follows that our highest nature most readily recognizes beauty, a harmonic ratio with the presence of our soul. What mankind calls evil is therefore in common with matter, merely the least degree of good, presupposing likewise, the least degree of harmony and beauty. Thus evil is really the least harmonious combination of elements combined in the least harmonic way. Therefore harmony is the manifestation of the expression of the Will of creation.

One day while meditating upon harmony, Pythagoras chanced pass a shop were workmen pounding out a piece of metal upon an anvil. By noting the variances in pitch made by the sounds of the large hammers and those made by the smaller, he carefully estimated the harmonies and discords resulting from combinations of the sounds, and there he gained his first clue to the musical intervals of the diatonic scale.

To Pythagoras music was one of the dependencies of the divine, and its harmonies were inflexibly controlled by mathematical proportions. Through the study of harmony he discovered the mathematics of the universe. He divided the creation and it’s parts into a vast number of planes or spheres, to each of which he assigned time, a harmonic interval, a number, a name, a color, and form. He then proceeded to prove the accuracy of his deductions by demonstrating them upon all the different planes of intelligence. From the common agreement of these diversified methods of prove he established the indisputable existence of certain natural laws.
Having once established harmony as an exact science, Pythagoras applied his newly found law of harmonic intervals to all the phenomena of nature, even going so far as to demonstrate the harmonic relationship of the planets, constellations, and elements to each other. A notable example are the grouping of elements according to harmonic ratios. While making a list of the elements in the ascending order of their own atomic weights, John A Newlands discovered that within every eighth element there was a distinct repetition of properties. This discovery is known as the law of operatives in modern chemistry.

Pythagoras determines that the laws of harmony were determined not by the sense perceptions of the human body but by reason and mathematics. However, he recognized the profound effect of music upon the senses and emotions, he did not hesitate to influence the mind and the body with what he termed, "musical medicine"

There was a story of a young man in Pythagoras time who, with broken heart, decided to burn the house of his girlfriend. A flutist was playing nearby which, in Pythagoras eyes was exciting the young man is frenzy. Pythagoras asked the flutist to change the music to reflect harmonics, slow and rhythmic music and with this the young man abandoned his frenzy and returned home.
Many ancient Greeks were known to have used music, and therefore harmony, to cure disease. Pythagoras himself cured many ailments of the spirit, soul and body and mind. Having certain specially prepared musical compositions played in the presence of the sufferer or by personally reciting short selections from such early poets as Hesiod and Homer. In his university at Crotona it was customary for the Pythagoreans to open and close the day with songs – those in the morning calculated to clear the mind from sleep an inspired to the activities of the days; those in the evening of modes soothing, relaxing and conducive to rest.

It is highly probable that the Greek initiates of the mysteries, gained their knowledge of the philosophic and therapeutic aspects of music from the Egyptians, who, in turn, considered Hermes, the founder of the arts. According to one legend this God constructed the first lyre by stretching strings across the world. While the early Chinese, Hindus, Persians, the Egyptians, Israelites, and Greeks employed both vocal and instrumental music in religious ceremonies. Although it is said that Pythagoras was not a musician, he was a philosopher, and he knew from his work the correlation between harmony, the universe and humanity. He learned this divine theory music from the priests of various mystery schools into which he had been accepted.
Plato depreciated the notion that music was intended solely to create cheerful and agreeable emotions, maintaining rather “it should evoke a love of all that is noble, a rejection of all that is mean, and that nothing could be more strongly influence man's innermost feelings and melody, harmony and rhythm.”
The Greek initiates also recognized a fundamental relationship between the individual, the heavens, and harmony. They used the seven sacred vowels, and so words became sacred. Pythagoreans believed that “everything which existed had a voice and all creatures were eternally singing the praise of the creator. Man fails to hear these divine melodies because he is enmeshed in the illusion of material existence. When he liberates himself from the bondage of the lower world with its sense limitations, the music of the spheres, will again be audible as it was in the golden age. Harmony recognizes harmony, and when the human soul regains its true state it will not only hear the celestial choir but will also join with it in an everlasting anthem of praise to that eternal good.”

The Greek mysteries included in their doctrines the magnificent concept of the relationship existing between music and form applied to elements. Architecture, for example, was considered comparable to musical notes, or as having a musical counterpart. Consequently when a building was erected in which a number of these elements were combined, the structure was then likened to a musical chord, which was harmonic when it fully satisfied the mathematical requirements of harmonic intervals. The realization of this analogy between sound and form led Goethe to declare that “architecture is crystallized music.”

In constructing their temples of initiation, the early priests frequently demonstrated their superior knowledge of the principles underlying the phenomena known as vibration. A considerable part of the mystery rituals consisted of invocations and intonements, for which purpose special sound chambers were constructed. A word whispered in one of these compartments was so intensified that the reverberations made the entire building sway and be filled with a deafening roar. The very wood and stone used in the erection of the sacred buildings eventually became so thoroughly permeated with the sound vibrations of these religious ceremonies that when struck they would reproduce the same tones thus revealing that harmony becomes impressed into substances through ritual.

Every element in nature has its individual keynote. If these elements are combined in a composite structure the result is a chord that, if sounded, will disintegrate the compound back into its integral parts. Likewise each individual has a keynote that, if sounded, will destroy him or her. The story of the walls of Jericho falling when the “trumpets of Israel” was sounded is undoubtedly intended to set forth the significance of individual keynote or vibration.
Since light is the basic physical manifestation of life, bathing all creation in its radiance, it is highly important to realize, in part at least, the nature of these divine substance. That which is called White is actually a rate of vibration causing certain reactions upon the optic nerve. Few realize how they are imprisoned by the limitations of the sense perceptions. Not only is a very great deal more to light than anyone has ever seen but there are also unknown forms of light which no optical equipment will ever register. There are unnumbered colors which cannot be seen, as well as sounds which cannot be heard, odors which cannot be smelt, flavors which cannot be tasted, and substances which cannot be felt. Man is thus surrounded by a supersensible universe of which he knows nothing because the centers of sense perceptions within himself have not been developed sufficiently to respond to the cycle a rates of vibration of which that universe is composed.

Color has been the accepted natural language of which nations have couched there religions and philosophical doctrines. Each has subscribed to the ideology of the number 7. The number of primary colors as seven, corresponding to the seven realms, corresponding intern to the concepts of the seven candlesticks. Chakras are also numbered and colored to 7, and reveal the vibration of the thoughts which create them from highest down to lowest. Although in the West this has been interpreted as most spiritual to least spiritual, it is not really so. White is the pure form of spirit, red is the pure form of matter. Both contained the exact same subatomic particles the difference is only in the degree of vibration. The higher colors contain the rational the lower colors contain the irrational.

The correspondence of color and musical scales has been confirmed for centuries. As “C” is the bottom of the musical scale is made with courses waves of air, so is red at the bottom of the chromatic scale and made with the courses waves of luminous ether. But as one musical octave is finished another one commences and progresses with just twice as many vibrations as we used in the first optic, and so the same notes are repeated on a finer, and finer scale. In the same way when the scale of colors visible to the ordinary eye is completed at the violet, another octave of finer invisible colors, with just twice as many vibrations, will commence and progress on precisely the same law.

Thoughts are vibrations. Just as music and color correspond to a law of sacred mathematics so too does thought. Thoughts determine the reflective nature of the human heart, the personality. Within each human being there is the full-scale of thought possibility, both visible in the lower octaves and invisible in the higher. From the darkest and smallest vibration to the highest. What separates mankind from other forms is the freedom to translate vibrations of thought from one frequency to another at will. To move from darkness to light, to consider the effect and cause of vibration and therefore determine it’s frequency.

The diverse range of colors of the human condition give rise to the emotions. The lower vibration thoughts produce emotion is of the grossest form. Infatuation and resentment, attraction and repulsion, extremes of violence and peacefulness. All illnesses in the physical body is a consequence of vibrations of low frequency. Therefore, in contrast to the Western ideal of an antagonism between right and wrong as being a sure path to create a better world, the idealism of vibration will always suggest that good and evil are diametrically opposite positions on the one wave front, vibrating at a very low level of consciousness. The violence we see on the streets is just one side of a way if one which the opposite sits antiviolence protest. In other words, if the wave has peaks and troughs, and we try to polarize ourselves to a peak, we must by the sacred laws produce a corresponding trough. We are in this form, imprisoned because all we are doing is decorating the cell, we remain unconscious of the infinite possibility of a different way of reason.
Our society has taken to using drugs to induce a change in the State or condition of the human thought process, or vibration. But a violent person is a person whose thought process is not permanently held in one mode. They would automatically have it’s opposite, a diametrically opposite mode of behavior or thought, expressed in another form. Thus, the most violent amongst us is also the most peaceful. We wish to deny this fact, but on examination of even the most evil person there is the expression of that character in it’s opposite. The more we try to be one thing, one character, the more we must express it’s opposite.

Takes to it’s extreme, if the opposite behavior to the righteous peak of the wave is a trough of violence, and there is enough religious fanaticism or fear about that lower behavior, then schizophrenia will exist. It is a way of isolating the trough from the consciousness, to discard an expressed opposite and sustain the holy adherence to some extreme aspiration of character. A child confused between parents who do not collude in their understanding of each other will become split in this way, having the desire to be liked by both parents the child will split into two individuals –a peak and a trough, one liked by one parent, one by the other. It is, in this instance, a game of mirrors, reflecting the parents own judgments and aspirations.

No drug on earth which has the ambition of moving a person from one side of a counterpoint to the other can succeed because it is just moving everything from the left across to the right and breeds and renews itself by creating a new counterpoint between the extremes which all now exist on the right. This is the major criticism of philosophies religions, and psychologies which are fundamentally flawed in the attempt to create a world in which right exists in the absence of wrong. I have seen so many youth suicide because of this type of psychological treatment.
The more righteous a society or community becomes the more evil and dark will be its underbelly. Research can reveal that in times in history of the greatest scientific discovery there also existed at the exact same time the most persecution and condemnation of human rights. Consequently in our modern time we do not solve community or social problems through the condemnation of evil. The more righteous we become the more violence we breed. And so it becomes our mission to find a way to be in the world that does not create problems but sets about solving them. We seek harmony within ourselves, in our relationships and on a global level; between humanity the environment and resources so that life on earth becomes natural and sustainable. It is not a matter of economics; so many people think that those with the most money have the most power. This is not so. Those with the most love have the most power.
Harmony should become the greatest of human aspirations for the spiritual seeker. Harmony means the music of the soul. It means a healthy dynamic between people, a freedom of expression, the appreciation of beauty, art and music and it is the solace of inner tranquility, sustainable though all of the worst circumstances, it is called love.

By Chris Walker