The Grand Scientific Musical Theatre is a metaphor for mind and memory. The concept behind the graphic novelette and CentralTrak event was the secret existence of a body of natural knowledge once known by the ancients but suppressed during the Middle Ages by the Roman Church. This knowledge concerned the role harmonics played in the formation of the cosmos and evolution of life.
In its anti-pagan campaign to stamp out religious competition in the early 13th century, the Roman Church used force to expunge all harmonic knowledge from Western society. Casting harmonic science as “forbidden” and “evil,” the physical properties of music were associated with witchcraft and pushed underground into the secret brotherhoods. With harmonic theory under the control of the Church, the unguided study of nature emerged in Western science and an unspoken “complicity of convenience” with the Church was founded in the “scientific method” to avoid any mention of harmonics. In time, this was institutionalized into every part of Western society and culture, creating the unnatural and unsustainable world civilization within which we now live.
The GSMT story describes a process by which this forbidden knowledge of natural harmony could be remembered and eventually applied to rebalance our social policies. The venue by which this might occur is virtual reality technology. It suggests that the forgotten ideals of natural harmony might even return in some updated avatar-like musical form – a new and more organic form of Guitar Hero perhaps – to reorient society toward harmonic principals.
In this way, the reemergence of harmony as a social modal could become something real and tangible. And, the idea could spread through something as simple as music visualization software via the World Wide Web and handheld communication devices. The only thing needed to make this happen would be a visual music composition system using an organic harmonic model. In this way, the technology taking people away from nature could well become the catalyst to bring us back. I call this the New Mythos.
The New Mythos
The New Mythos is the idea that a worldview is evolving around natural harmonic principles. It is largely based on an ancient path of knowledge that describes the universe and all life as a form of music. This musical “theory of everything,” known as Musica Universalis, became the message and passion behind my graphic novelette.
The setting is simultaneously set in the past, present and future of Western society. The past setting is in Rosslyn chapel, a 15th century Scottish chapel. This mysterious chapel contains a variety of musical symbols carved into its architecture, including 215 cubes displaying cymatic resonance patterns that, when decoded, represent a symbolic recording of an actual piece of music.
The present day setting is in a Dallas, Texas nightclub called the Liquid Lounge where a myth-rock band named Distant Lights is playing. This is modeled on an actual band of the same name from Austin, Texas who used to perform scientific cymatic experiments during their performances. In fact, they performed many times at an actual nightclub called the Liquid Lounge in the Deep Ellum district of Dallas. This fortuitous overlap of interest in mythology and science led to my suggestion to them that we develop a real Grand Scientific Musical Theatre and tour it in 2012. This book was a philosophical primer for that possibility.
The story's future is then set in a concert-sized version of Rosslyn chapel incorporating a holographic projector and custom music visualization software running over the Internet. This was located in an outdoor Dallas concert venue on the night before the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. Why Dallas? Because I live here and it best represents the modern American worldview blending fundamental Christianity, conservative capitalism, and the latest digital technologies - all isolated in the heartland of America away from global or historical context.
Each of these timeframes and locations is then woven together using the singer Gabe’s visions to tell the history and eventual rebirth of Musica Universalis as a guiding principle for society, which I identify as the New Atlantis. First penned by Francis Bacon in 1623 and derived from Plato’s description of the lost Atlantis, the original New Atlantis was a treatise meant to express the high ideals for what is now America. My use of the term embraces these ideals, but extends them to include the philosophy of Musica Universalis as the model of social order presumed for this new land.
Attaining elevated consciousness in the New Atlantis requires a change in thinking – a new system of beliefs that incorporates natural laws. This belief system is referred to in the story as the New Mythos and is presented as an updated analog to Greco-Roman mythologies, though by inference it refers to all ancient natural theosophies.
The New Mythos is introduced through Gabe’s visions as Greek gods, referred to in the story as “harmonic archetypes.” I used the term “archetype” instead of “god” in order to avoid any preconceived religious bias against paganism while simultaneously rehabilitating these gods as symbols of harmony for the New Mythos. My research strongly suggests the various pagan gods were originally intended as iconic symbols or archetypes for real harmonic properties in Nature rather than simply supernatural deities. One does not need to accept the existence of spirits in these archetypes in order to accept them as symbols of harmonic physics.
All of these ideas materialize inside the virtual world of the Grand Scientific Musical Theatre. The theatre refers to Gabe’s mind, a microcosm of the entire universe, which is symbolized in two ways – the 15th century Rosslyn chapel (containing his memories) and the 21st century Rosslyn concert (containing his dreams). Rosslyn is then a simple metaphor for Gabe’s memories and dreams, creating a convenient venue for the return of the New Mythos.
The return of the New Mythos occurs in five stages:
Stage 1: Gabe remembers the Great Secret of Rosslyn, which is of course Musica Universalis. Through this memory he discovers that he is a messenger who must deliver the New Mythos to the people of Earth.
Stage 2: When he is about to lose hope of succeeding, the archetypes begin appearing to the audience in a hologram above the stage. Since we are inside Gabe’s dream at this point, the hologram is really a look inside his brain.
Stage 3: The band’s music then appears as cymatic patterns, crystalline geometries, and standing waves inside the holonomic projector of Gabe’s brain, illustrating how perception and even consciousness functions harmonically.
Stage 4: All of the archetypes return through The Cloud of cyberspace and are visible to the people, finally becoming the New Mythos and reawakening awareness of Musica Universalis in their minds.
Stage 5: The New Mythos is then distributed to the world through the New Technology, enabling anyone to create their own music in The Cloud with their mobile music devices. Musical fragments symbolized by visual harmonic archetypes are dragged and dropped from the Internet, transforming music into a new kind of virtual mythology in the digital realm. Through the New Technology, people would then begin to see similarities between harmonic archetypes in the real world (planets, planets and people) and harmonic archetypes in their 3D virtual theatre, thus ushering in the New Atlantis.
While it reads like a psychedelic fantasy, the technology and social impact is not that far fetched. It is technically possible for something like this to be developed and to gain widespread acceptance. An Internet application and mobile application like this really could enable people to create and share music using mix-and-match reusable music objects within a visual playback space. I describe in some detail how this can be done in my first book Interference using organic music perception models.
But even without such a do-it-yourself music factory, the information in this book already delivers the essential message of Musica Universalis to anyone who is ready to receive it.
These are the key points:
The Church worked for over a thousand years to suppress harmonic science as part of its anti-pagan Inquisition and Crusades,
Science then evolved to avoid harmonic principles in order to coexist with the Church,
Western society is increasingly unsustainable due to the absence of harmonic knowledge in contemporary education and culture.
Based on harmonic physics, we realize space is not a void but rather a structured lattice,
And within this lattice, solar systems self-organize harmonically by resonating into cymatic rings inside the Sun’s gravity field,
DNA is also interpreted as crystallized light resonating according to the same dodecahedral geometry as music harmony,
All life grows from the harmony of carbon-12 (a mesoscopic dodecahedron) and water (a mesoscopic icosahedron) inside a structured space,
Perception is a holographic process of focused thru the senses using harmonically evolved geometries in the body,
Consciousness is then identified to be a function of quantum resonance of information through the space lattice, suggesting we are each actually semi-autonomous biological robots under remote control by a non-physical self.
Everything in the universe can be described very simply in musical terms. Our modern worldview need not be incomplete and tentative. Anyone can understand the basics of how nature works harmonically; therein, bridging the gap between rationalism and spirituality. Music is a way to experience harmonic physics directly, which in turn is a way to experience the mythological archetypes behind the projection screen of reality.
In short, seeing the cosmos and yourself as music is both liberating and integrating. This is the meaning of the New Mythos and the path of knowledge to the New Atlantis.
The Harmonic Archetypes
Since the days of ancient Sumer, the geometry of the pentagram has been revered as the prime symbol of nature. This is due to its mathematical relationship to the geometry of golden spirals found approximated in such places as galaxies, hurricanes and the pentagonal orbit of Venus.
As I explain in my first book Interference and illustrate in this one, the natural damping of periodic harmonic oscillation is due to the formation of two complementary vortices that spiral by the golden ratio inside each cycle of a standing wave. These vortices, known as a golden spiral or Spira Mirabilis, bring coherence to all oscillation in Nature by suppressing the formation of fractional or enharmonic waves (approximated by Fibonacci or Lucas spirals), thereby enabling the emergence of “sympathetic” whole number harmonic waves. This one simple idea is proposed as the first harmonic principle behind ancient mythology.
As explained in the story, the planet Venus traces out a pentagram over a period of eight Earth years. This is due to the approximated Spira Mirabilis spacing of the planets, especially between Earth and Venus. One of the two golden ratios in the spherical standing wave of our solar system is located in the space between Venus and Earth (the other is between Uranus and Neptune) and represent the greatest points of stability in our solar system. This intrinsic order is visible in the geometry of a pentagram as the two planets orbits relative to one another. This orbital star of Venus is irrefutable proof of the central role harmonic resonance in the solar system and, more importantly, the role damping plays at all scales of nature.
Philosophers like Pythagoras knew this and found the same thing in everything they examined. They saw it in the seed pattern of an apple, the petals of a rose and even the geometry of the human body. They explained this omnipresent phenomenon as a balance between a circle and a spiral; the finite and the infinite. In quantum mechanics and modern wave theory this is known simply as “resonance” and “damping.”
In mathematical terms, the balance between a circle and a spiral is represented as π, the proportion in a resonating standing wave, and Φ, a non-reflective damping spiral proportioned by the golden ratio. The two balance by “squaring the circle,” as Leonardo da Vinci did in his famous Vitruvian Man drawing. You can find this idea hidden in plain sight at the bottom of page 33 as the proportion π : Φ^2. This simple proportion really does represent the universal harmonic geometry of life and seems to have been known thousands of years ago as the central organizing principle in the human body. This is probably the secret wisdom of the ancients and real forbidden fruit of Roman Catholicism.
It is easy to see how the ancients would want to celebrate this discovery and incorporate it into their worldview. Who would not want to include harmonic physics and ideals into their belief systems, since they help us understand our selves and how we connect to Nature. Why not use this knowledge to foster a sense of responsibility to one another and all life, since it would help bring order and purpose to society? And why not build a religion around these harmonic properties, since after all these must be the great wisdom of hypothetical intelligence that created the Cosmos?
In my view, mythology was more a physics lesson than a religion. The ancients knew that all life on Earth was born from sunlight and that they really had no idea who might have created the cosmos. The only thing they did know was that harmonics were present everywhere and that the people should know about it. Such order and predictability could bring hope and a sense of spirituality to humanity.
The fables and harmonic archetypes must have been created to share the principles of Musica Universalis with an uneducated populace. If someone did not understand the physics behind the archetypes, they could still celebrate their balancing properties and seek to incorporate that balance in their own lives. Unfortunately, over time fewer and fewer came to study and understand the physics of harmonics and eventually demonized and suppressed by the Church. This left Western society devoid of harmonic principles in its educational processes and elsewhere. Nowhere will you find a school with classes on harmonic science or even a class on mythology that will explain harmonics as a central theme behind religion and the rise of ancient civilizations.
Consider for a minute the other harmonic archetypes in the story. Harmonia and Eris are a complementary pair as are Hercules and Atlas. I chose them for the New Mythos because they represent the musical qualities of consonance and dissonance and harmonic qualities of resonance and damping. The Romans renamed Harmonia and Eris to Concordia and Discordia.
Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite (Romanized to Venus) in one account and Zeus and Electra in another, was the archetype for consonance. In fact, Harmonia wore a necklace to represent her circularity, her concordance. However, her necklace was fabled to bring bad luck and even death to anyone who wore it, suggesting that the circle was not perfect. This represents the truth that everything must be a balance between a circle and a spiral, thus there are no perfect circles. Indeed, even the planets spiral through space as ellipses. Still, Harmonia represented the ideal of a perfect circle – a closed standing wave resonating harmonically forever.
Eris or Discordia, on the other hand, was the archetype for strife, war and chaos, thus the damping spiral found in Nature. She was the daughter of Zeus and Hera (whose son was Heracles / Hercules) and represented an intrinsic “error” in Nature that upset harmony. The philosophers used Eris to represent infinity and thus death because a spiral alone does not create structure and life – it must close into a circle for this to happen. Thus, without closure we have no concordance and no harmony. We need a balance between Concordia and Discordia for this reality to exist.
The male equivalents to these feminine harmonic archetypes are then Hercules and Atlas. In the story, the fable of Hercules cleaving Atlas in half is recounted. The two halves of Atlas then become the twin Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar corresponding to the Rock of Gibraltar (in Spain) and either Monte Hacho (in Ceuta) or Jebel Musa (“Mountain of Moses” or the Biblical Mount Sinai in Morocco). These mountains have played a central role in ancient religions as a harmonic archetype for resonance and damping.
In my first book Interference, I explain how the two mountains either side of the Strait could have symbolized the two damping spirals in a cycle of a musical tone or standing wave (discussed above). The physics of a standing wave finds the golden spirals or pillars just inside the most resonant locations at the anti-nodes. Thus, the water between the mountains represents the damping spiral and the mountains themselves the resonant structure. All of this together would then represent the harmony between resonance and damping, Hercules and Atlas respectively. They were named the Pillars of Hercules because they represent resonance while the ocean on the other side was named the Atlantic after Atlas. The Strait of Gibraltar was then the archetypal portal to an ideal harmonic civilization – Atlantis.
The question is what could have caused ancient philosophers to interpret such a vast landscape using harmonic archetypes?
The simple answer to this is to take a typical tree leaf, tear it in half down the step and hold both halves up flat against the horizon next to one another. What do you see? You see an organic model for two mountains achieving maximum resonance at the widest point of the leaf tapering off to the ends under pressure of damping. The mathematical model for this is approximated by a first derivative Gaussian distribution, which I refer to as a Reflective Interference Model in Harmonic Interference Theory. This curve results when harmonic waves reflect and cross one another in a container.
The less simple answer, but one that I think could explain the importance of these mountains and the Strait in religion, has to do with the particular geographic location of the Strait of Gibraltar in the world.
The Rock of Gibraltar is located at exactly 36 degrees latitude. Since there are 360 degrees in a full arc of the globe, it is located precisely one-tenth of the circumference of the Earth measuring from the equator and running through the poles. If we imagine a giant pentagram superimposed over the Earth with one of its five points aligned at the tip of the Rock of Gibraltar, something quite amazing can be found.
The other four points align with the equator, the Bering Strait (between Alaska and Russia), the Cape of Good Hope (southern tip of Africa) and not too far away from Cape Horn (southern tip of South America). Since the Earth continues to resonate like a spherical bell, does it form a pentagonal cymatic pattern that damps down resonance, carving out Straits and separating continents in the Earths crust?
Indeed, the entire Mediterranean Sea runs along this 36-degree latitude, running north along the Atlas mountain range of northern Africa, passing through the island of Malta and finally up to a small town in Turkey at the eastern end. In North America, the Grand Canyon and Hoover dam are also located on the 36-degree line, as is Big Sur.
But, in order for the ancients to realize Gibraltar as an important proportion for the Earth, all they would have had to do was calculate the circumference of the Earth and know the distance to the Equator. They could have calculated the circumference by measuring the difference between two identical shadows separated east to west by a distance. The location of the equator could be determined by sending expeditions to central Africa to find exactly where a shadow will balance between north and south during the summer equinox. This they could have done.
Knowing this and understanding the importance of the pentagram and its golden ratio in damping down resonance, they could have deduced the Strait of Gibraltar represented a key harmonic proportion in the Earth. The fable of Hercules and Atlas could have been created to celebrate and preserve this important knowledge of harmony at work inside the Earth itself. Likewise, the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai could correspond to the fact that it is located about one-tenth of the way around the Earth. Even human laws themselves – a system of social control – could have once been seen as an extension of the damping law contained in pentagram form, identifying Venus and its orbit as a primordial law and ordering principle of the cosmos.
In this way, the Pillars of Hercules (made by splitting Atlas in half) are directly linked to the Venus. In the story, Hercules and Venus appear in love with Hercules symbolizing the resonance of Earth and Venus symbolizing damping and stability.
The New Technology
During this writing, I began to notice how the explosion of alternative information over the Internet was triggering a dramatic increase in the awareness of ancient natural philosophies, including such things as sacred geometry, non-standard physics models and the history of secret societies. This information is increasingly calling into question the materialistic worldview in favor of a less random, more consciously intent cosmos.
But while some people have been rediscovering natural philosophy, many more have been moving toward the artificial models of reality found digital computers, wireless communications and the Internet. Fueled by the rapid emergence of interactive digital media and wireless communications, most people now find themselves living their lives in some sort of virtual reality, disconnected from the physical world. As I ended my involvement with the computer industry and began to delve deeper into the mystery of human perception, I began to wonder what effect this technological disruption could have on society and how it might somehow be related to a shift in social consciousness.
Then it became clear. Physical reality and virtual reality were already beginning to merge. We were already becoming more tribal and more mythological in our thinking as digital media continued to blur the line between real and imaginary. In many ways, the virtual world of computers and the Internet were becoming more real than physical reality.
Consider the fact that the virtual realm is our only escape from the artificial world of huge government, corporations and mass media, taking us back to small tribes in cyberspace. No longer limited by physical factors like geography, country, race or economic standing, our tribes are made almost entirely out of thought. And these thoughts are carried as electrical signals around the world, arriving to us as electromagnetic waves right out of the aether. The Internet has actually become a physical extension to human consciousness and what we might rightly call a digital Akashic record.
As the real estate of the physical world comes under greater surveillance and control by our governments and institutions, the unreal estate of the virtual world grows increasingly mythological. New gods are already appearing inside people minds through role-playing games and avatar chat rooms while the old gods of consensus struggle to survive, propped up by their artificial institutions. Even our 'enemies' have become virtual - fearsome web-surfing cavemen available to the institutions to enforce geopolitical control - all while vast populations slip further and further away into non-physicality.
Soon it will be like the sci-fi movies The Matrix or Avatar where we sit plugged into a virtual world our favorite tribe creates, playing out whatever fantasies we like. In the future, the physical institutions will become increasingly irrelevant as people simply enter their personal holodecks to commune with like minds. Gathering around the central fire of the Internet, a new mythology is being born within The Cloud of cyberspace.
There in The Cloud, the people will work and play, creating virtual products to earn virtual money. Here they will adore virtual gods and assume virtual personalities. Here all their wishes will come true, fulfilled in every way by electronic thoughts projected into their minds from space.
Happiness and fear are virtual here, too. People huddle around a hot idea instead of a warm fire. Sex becomes virtual and on-demand, assisted no doubt by one-size-fits-all Thunderbolt peripherals. As holographic images project memes into our collective cortex, feeling and emotions become virtual as well.
It was at this point in my survey of modern life that I began to see what was really going on. The artificial institutions of Western civilization were forcing us to become MORE virtual and MORE imaginary while the virtual reality of The Cloud was actually taking us back to a kind of new kind of spiritual realm where we might become LESS virtual and LESS artificial. But how, exactly, was this going to play out, I wondered?
What if the rapid march toward the virtual is really just a natural outcome of evolution? What if “living virtual” helps us learn faster, redefine ourselves and create social models that are more sustainable? What if the ancient archetypes of harmonic physics somehow return to us through The Cloud, designed by the new philosophers and social architects to teach the real world how to fix itself? What if this virtual world is the medicine we really need to help us create a more harmonious future, one ready for the next stage of psycho-spiritual evolution? If so, how could that occur?
This is where music comes in.
In the story, I blend the opposing streams of natural philosophy and virtual reality into one possible outcome where harmonic knowledge returns as a visual music composition system. The idea is that music could become more visual, more personal and more mythological within The Cloud of cyberspace, thereby triggering a grassroots movement back toward Musica Universalis and a harmonic worldview. The effect could be an unexpected (and much needed) injection of harmonic philosophy and symbolisms into a society that currently eschews such integrative ideas.
Under this hypothesis, people would begin to visualize the world and themselves as a form of music – something beautiful and natural. This musical worldview would reconnect self-image with nature by making it possible to compose music visually using music fragments appearing as harmonic archetypes – virtual characters composed of musical harmonies – that could be combined, played and shared. It would illustrate through a object-oriented music composition system exactly how harmonic physics plays a central role in everything from solar systems and the human body to human perception and social behavior.
However, this would only work if the visual harmonic archetypes were based on a truly organic perceptual model of music, like my Harmonic Interference Theory. Only in this way would the harmonic laws of the physical world be translated properly into the virtual world. Only through the New Technology of organic harmonic archetypes can self-identity be elevated and individual responsibility restored to society.
