THE TRUTH OF PHYSICS AND THE TRUTH OF MUSIC
GLOBAL HEART OR GLOBAL BRAIN
by Victor Greentree
In my dream the earth wasn't a solid mass, but a mass of sounds held together through resonance. Everything: atoms, cells, the Earth's core, oceans, plants, animals and humans created a complex orchestration that kept unfolding on itself. The Earth was a being of sound. The sounds were of all times, its past life was mixed with sounds yet to be heard. I heard billions of voices and all the music ever created all at once.
Michael Stearns, electronic composer
I would like to say something extremely profound. There are two truths about the nature of reality (universe, earth and our relationship): the truth of Physics and the truth of Music.
Now, some of you, when you read that last sentence may have been jarred a bit by the association of Music with truth. It's much easier to associate Physics with truth. Music seems too imprecise and pleasant. Truth we think of as being cold, hard and rational. But "truth" is just a description of everything that exists. And the fact that we tend to think that Physics is the truth, but Music isn't, explains a good deal about the limitations of western culture and its beliefs about what exists.
These two truths are not totally exclusive. New Physics tells us that all is energy and all is rhythm. Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics) calls it "a continual cosmic dance of energy." And many books have been written recently comparing the concepts of Physics with the energy principles of Eastern religions and the music that they would call the "cosmic sound."
We can begin to know the earth and universe in a different way through "making contact" with its music. Let's describe a common SEEING situation. You are watching a sunset--an important event in the earth's life history. In order to SEE the sunset, you must be able to SEE the earth and its energy. And that can be stimulated by a thought. For example, this fairly well known thought might work:
If the history of the earth--4.6 billion years--were condensed into one year, 365 days, then the human species does not appear until the last half of the 365th day. And all of our eight thousand year recorded history, everything, that rush of events from the settling of the Tigris-Euphrates valley to yesterday's freeway jam in the L.A. morning--all that's etched in our human consciousness identity--occupies the final 32 seconds.
This thought can cause a shift in our awareness: from our human alliance to an alliance with the earth's time. Things in their truthful perspective. And that is SEEING; that is the Other Reality. But it is much more. For, as we watch that sunset, we realize that we are really watching the slow re-enactment of a ritual death that has been carried out, each and every day, for millions and millions of years. And thus just watching is a ceremony. It is not a Reality, objective, but that with which we are unified--by being there and witnessing, once again.
Everyone, I would like to assume, who has ever looked at a sunset unconsciously knows this. Thinking it makes it a part of our awareness. And aware, we may SEE that 4.6 billion years; we fuse with that time and then we HEAR the music of the earth and its energy. Our awareness is no longer a thought thing but a knowing thing that is void of thoughts--and the place inside our heads and bodies we usually recognize as being filled with "thought" is now filled instead with the sound to which we have melded. As an individual, we cease to exist. All is music. And all events, all human history, are but a smudge in that sound.
"Somewhere, way out in the universe, there is a faucet dripping. And I can hear it. Now isn't that a funny description of the universe? A dripping faucet. But let's face it, the universe is a funny place."
The "dripping faucet" is the creative urge continuously pouring into existence that feeds and nourishes us: as planets and stars and universes are made and crumple and new ones are born. And I think this today, here, now, even as our own universe speeds away from itself in all directions back into energy and nothingness--and of which I am a part. The truth of Music is the Natural Rhythm of the Universe--a sound that is not a sound but a Reality--a transformative state that allows us to understand things, not with our minds, our plans, our fears and concerns, but with our passion. It is a matter of trust. Physics is truth known through the mind. Music is truth known through passion.
And why would anyone call the universe "a funny place?" I don't know. I just know that it is a funny place. It makes me want to laugh so hard that I have to cry. After all, once upon a time, there wasn't anything, just this void, just this immense silence. And God, or somebody, is sitting there with this immense gong and a big club. And for some reason, at some point, he strikes the gong with the club, and it goes: BOINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. And this BOINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG travels out through the void and, as it spreads, the singular tone transforms and mutates into overtones and harmonies and progressions that get more and more and more complex. And then, gradually, it all just fades out, back into silence. And that's all our universe is. Now isn't that funny: the joy and sorrow of being?
Physics is a rational explanation of the truth of Music. On the other hand, we could say that the truth of Music is the experience of Physics' rational explanation. Thus the truth of Music is the primary truth, and the truth of Physics is secondary to it. Without Music, there would be no Physics.
Someday, one or two hundred years from now, if we're still around, the present primariness of the truth of Physics will seem as a dinosaur. People will remember it the way we now remember astronomers before Copernicus, and we will give Nobel laureates to impeccable doctors of sound.
The truth of Music and the truth of Physics do not always seem to concur. Everyone knows the earth rotates on its axis around the sun. That the sun does not set. And most especially, that the sun does not die each night to be reborn the next day. Still, sunsets are very important to our self-understanding because, without sunsets, we would not have a daily reminding of the seasons, and without seasons, we would not have a yearly reminding of the passage of our lives. This non-concurrence is true for many aspects of earth spirituality: the sun does not really leave the earth at the Winter Solstice; the moon does not really disappear and reappear to delineate months; the birch tree is not really a tree of rebirth and the aspen a tree of dying.
Also, while Physics is a description of the Music, each of these uses a different language to talk about what exists. Different metaphors. In Physics, groups of numbers, formulas, will stand for reality. In Music, a story or myth often is the metaphor for reality.
And Physics is constantly changing through new discoveries and research. While Music is non-changing, as long as the internal consciousness of human beings remains the same.
For example, New Physics is known in its largest sense as the model of the universe that supplanted the old Newtonian one. Yet, despite their vast differences, what we can take from both models is a sense of harmony, an attempt to explain a spiritual basis for the material world: In the beginning, Newton said, God created fundamental particles and the forces between them and set them in motion. And they have been running ever since like a perfectly oiled machine. The idea of a holy clock, even before Newton, had been called "the Music of the Spheres." There's music, in other words--the cosmic dance of quantum mechanics or the classic harmony of planetary resonance--yet, what we actually hear is impossible to reveal and always "bent" in our fumbling attempts to tell by the moment at which we happen to live in history. In other words, the music hasn't changed–it's always been the same universe. And two hundred years from now, or so, New Physics will be old.
On the other hand, Mozart, who lived shortly after Newton, wrote his 21st Piano Concerto, and Terry Riley and Steve Reich now write "In C" and "Drumming." But both are equally powerful and one is not "new" and the other "old" in the sense that "new" means better.
So what's the answer? This is like the old Alchemist's problem of squaring the circle: Finding the relationship between a square and its inscribed circle is mathematically impossible although the relationship obviously exists. Alchemy had to do with coming to know that the relationship required an irrational, higher, intuitive understanding.
This is true also of the relationship between music and stories. The story is a metaphor–it stands for the music. So when you are telling, or hearing, a story, you must always keep in mind that "it's really talking about something else." A sunset is "really talking about something else."
Without metaphors we, and poets, have no ways of talking to each other about the wordless experience that is passion and Music. And the key here is the phrase "wordless experience" because that brings Music and Physics back together. The metaphors of the Earth stand for an intuitive knowing "that all is energy and all is rhythm." That we in our cycles of life here on earth are a part of a larger energy. It's all the same Music.