This might help. Like the author, I have concerns about our ability to understand such things, because our materialistic language and thinking has blinded us, and hinders us from having a consciousness of forces and the ancient understanding of sacred math. I think we need to change our consciousness, to incorporate the consciousness of forces, such as Mayan, ancient Chinese, or Druids consciousness. That is to think in terms of forces/action, rather then in terms of things.
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Stephen Phillips - Pythagorean Aspects of Music
1. Introduction
I shall explore in this article how the ‘harmonies of heaven’ manifest here on earth in our acoustic responses to different tunings. We are aware that Pythagoras was supposed to have discovered the mathematical basis of music, although the various legends surrounding his discovery of its laws probably contain little truth. But we are, perhaps, not aware that the Pythagorean theory of music was but one application of the principles of his holistic philosophy, which was not only a modus vivendi but a system of understanding the immanence of God in nature through the study of number. As part of a continuing programme of research into the connection between Pythagorean number philosophy and contemporary particle physics, I would like to set out here what I believe are some fruits of this work.
For some this may be a journey into an unfamiliar and abstract world, and I would fully understand if some readers lost their way as they followed my route. However, my analysis has to be mathematical because number is the ultimate language of logic. That said, I shall avoid using technical terms familiar only to a professional mathematician.
My initial discussion will centre on the geometrical figure called the tetrahedron. This solid shape has four corners and four equilateral triangles as its faces. It symbolized for the Pythagoreans the number 4, which will appear regularly in my analysis: we find it in the tetrachord and in the two ‘perfect fourths’ into which the ancient Greeks divided their musical scales. Most importantly, we find it in the tetractys, the sacred symbol of Divine Wholeness at the heart of the number philosophy of Pythagoras. We shall discover that it expresses the mathematical character of the various musical ‘modes’ that the Church adopted from ancient Greece. My research indicates that this is an example of a universal principle at work, prescribing the nature of physical and superphysical reality.
As most people’s hearing has been blunted by life-long exposure to equal-temperament, it is difficult for us now to recreate with ‘innocent ears’ the original musical experience of the Greek musical modes. My article will show, however, that they have far more significance than historians of music have considered. They exhibit a certain mathematical completeness and a beautiful symmetry and proportion that has its remarkable counterpart in a certain class of numbers that some physicists believe may describe the basic units of matter. In other words, vibration – whether it is of violin strings or string-like subatomic particles – may be governed by mathematically analogous laws: studying the proper (ie Pythagorean) mathematical basis of music may therefore give one insight into the ‘holy grail’ of physics, namely, the so-called ‘theory of everything’ that explains all the forces of nature. More important still, it may help us to understand our spiritual origins.
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