In the cosmological portraiture that is music, the music of the spheres, the basic laws true in every octave of the creation, a sphere of forces, places and relationships come into being and can be perceived, like a cell, a flock of birds, a setting in nature. This state of being that you perceive resonates with you and interacts energetically with your consciousness. It is like a lens you look through. At a very high level, the universe is the lens and the looking or listening, the awareness, is infinite. At every point, the looking and the universe have a relationship.
This ultimate, divine play, like Purusha and Prakriti, the Indian personification of spirit/masculinity and nature/femininity, respectively, is what is taking place, and our work with lenses, purification, spiritual practices, concentration, attention, meditation, more conscious living and loving, brings our consciousness more and more into the dance, both microscopically in our cell-universes and macroscopically in our heart-felt sense of belonging to the creation as a whole.
Harmonic Worlds is seven portraits in sound, seven modal harmonic worlds. They are seven-seeded gardens: each world is a seven-noted scale, completed at the top by the octave, the capstone or crown note, the symbolic top of the building, which in the octave vision of reality, is simply the next floor of the temple of sound on our way up. Each of the 7 note-seeds brings their own garden of harmonic multiples into the ever-evolving chords, listening lenses, DNA spiraling ever higher and deeper, like a never-ending staircase.
A word about the octave vision, as above, so below. As in the body, so in the creation. A harmonic overtone up there is a note down here. A note here is also a harmonic. A low note is also a harmonic. A planetary or galactic orbit time is as periodic a frequency as a sound. Light and time, perhaps time is also both wave and particle, the entire spectrum of universal experience, a scale of vibrations from highest spirit to deepest matter, the axis of listening and vibration interwoven, the secret embrace of Purusha and Prakriti, entwined in each other’s arms like the strands of a weaving, like the voices of a harmony.
Each of the worlds is a meeting of seven presences or aspects, the seven notes of the mode. Like the seven visible planets, and their source note, they are a solar system of relationships, weights, and mutual interactions. Each note has its atmosphere or corona, crown, of harmonics, and so like an interwoven tapestry of flowers each note’s blossoms sand colors blend in arcs and arches with the other note’s blossoms and colors. The seven notes are vibrational beings or qualities, like virtues, or colors, specific sounds, like the specific voices of different individuals, at a specific distance, interval, from the center.
Each note is like an aerodynamic vessel that can constantly change color or direction, an essential energetic movement that takes on, moment by moment, a sequence of aerodynamic forms, timbre, the harmonic spectra of the note. The singer is the note, and serves the aerodynamic challenge of the ongoing creation, the note’s own movement, and its relationship to the other notes, how the harmonics meet. From these meetings, the worlds appear.
Music by HARMONIC WORLDS by David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir
Photo of Shiva with Parvati. The right half of this image depicts Shiva in a tiger skin skirt. The left half shows Parvati holding a lotus.
Photo by Hans Braxmeier, Germany