Transcription
[Music] Um. [Music] [Music] In the beginning was the word, and God said, "Let there be light." Most in the West are familiar with the Christian concept: "In the beginning was the word." God spoke the word and the world into existence. What most don't realize is that, for example, in ancient Egypt, they taught the same thing. There was Pata, the god of technology, who went into his heart and felt the world, and then spoke it into existence.
Almost universally, ancient texts and traditions have always placed sound at the core of not only our existence but the existence of the entire universe. And it begins with the powerful seed syllable, the ancient Om, which originally was never spoken, but it was felt in the body. And this is where the relationship between sound and vibration becomes very important, because ultimately, sound is only a vibration brought into an audible range. In the Hindu tradition, "the word was with Brahman, and the word was Brahman." The very first Hebrew letter, Aleph, which starts the whole process, it's also like an out-breath. It's like, you know, it's a sound. The sound is like the expression of the thought from that universal mind or that divine source. The thoughts being expressed out through the sound, which then manifests the material universe, the material world.
When we come over into the Americas, the Pueblo Indians talk about the spider, how she sang the world into existence. [Music] In Aztec mythology, the god Quetzalcoatl used a conch shell to create the vibration that formed the first wave of life. The Inuits say the raven made the world and the waters with the beat of his wings. So it seems that no matter where we go or what time period, there's a belief that sound was fundamental to creation. And equally remarkable, our own genesis as human beings may well have started in a similar way.
When that embryo becomes less than a millimeter in size, right, very close to a millimeter, but not quite a millimeter, the embryo already starts to develop the first aspects of the inner ear. So the very first sense organ that is developed within the embryo is the inner ear. But then at 16 to 24 weeks, that neural development has taken place to a point where all my five senses come online, except my eyes are closed, and I'm in the dark, and my nose and mouth are filled with fluids. So those aren't active. But sound travels through water five times better than through air. So my total experience when I'm in the womb is hearing and vibration. Sense that sound coming in to the fetus, to the embryo, is essential for the development of the fetus. The mother's voice, as well as voices and sounds from the environment outside, the language that is spoken by the mother, by the father, those things are being heard by that developing fetus. And as they're coming in through its own ears, it's wiring its nervous system. There are three times as many connections from the ears to the brain as there are from the eyes to the brain. So the sounds coming in through the ears feed the neurological system. The auditory nerve directly connects to every organ in the body. It's like we're baptized in sound and vibration in water, and we all have our own mini evolution that takes place. [Music] We all have our own big bang. "In the beginning was the void, and all of a sudden there's an explosion of me." [Music] Those sounds that it continues to hear and learn, develop its perceptions, it develops personality, develops the way the mind thinks based on the language they speak and so forth. [Music]
The Gnostics believed that it was our soul that manifests our physical body. Our physical body is made in the image of God, and its purpose ultimately is a vehicle for the soul as it moves its way through this matrix. Sound is the first sense to develop in the womb and the last sense to go when we die. Many ancient cultures had practices for midwiving birth and death using sound, music, spoken or sung prayers, knowing the importance of these critical thresholds. That's very powerful because then that means that hearing and sound must be coming directly from source. And that perhaps sound, as the first sense, is the way that we can most directly connect with source.
Many traditions around the world use symbols, instruments, and songs to express their origins. In the Gnostic tradition, existence is represented as a circle with a dot in the center. Countless lines radiate from the dot. The periphery is considered to be the underworld, actually our waking life, also known as the dream of separation. The lines connecting to the center represent a state closer to who we really are. The center point represents our core existence, which we can connect to in deep sleep. [Music] [Music]
The Aboriginals, whose name means essentially "in the beginning," are the oldest living culture on Earth. They've been playing the didgeridoo for at least 150,000 years. And what they do is they take this root and they hollow it out, and they make it into almost like a bugle. The tones and the frequencies that come out of it are spaced out in a way that actually encode information. And they say that the sound of the didgeridoo connects us to the dream time, where the ancestors reside, and where we come from before birth, and where we go after we die. Australian Aborigines speak of song lines or song paths that were sung by their primordial ancestor spirits who walked across the landscape, singing its landforms into being. For the Aborigines, these songs are ongoing and need to keep being sung. Song lines are vibratory paths that exist in a kind of parallel dimension that the Aboriginals used to navigate over vast territories and to gain knowledge.
It was until I took a trip to Tibet and went into a number of the monasteries high in the Himalayas, I began to understand the mystical secret of sound in its relationship to creation. What I saw were series of mandalas that were placed on the walls, and the monks told me, "This is the secret." And I said, "Well, what does that mean? How does it work?" And he said, "A long time ago, we have no way to record sound, but we know that if we project sound into matter, it will create a pattern." So what you see on the temple walls are the patterns that are reminding the monks and the nuns that if they create a very specific sound to match that pattern, then they are reproducing the sound of their ancestors.
Many ancient cultures put a sacred or special value on song and the spoken word. [Music] We're talking about words, we're talking about spelling, and so we're talking about casting spells. That's why they call it spell-ing. And so words have power. The ancients really knew this, so they chose their words very, very carefully. Words were really hand-picked because they understood the power of words. There was a time, not long ago, where humans could say, "My word is as good as gold," and it was as good as a signed contract. The power to create with language comes from absolute coherence, alignment, and integrity between what we think, say, and do. By the words that we speak, we are influencing that field and that manifestation process. But there's certain words, certain power words, certain ancient divine words that were often held very secret because of the power they possess, that were often used in ceremony, magical operations, and so forth.
Even in modern times, scholars and inventors such as Nikola Tesla have pondered the many deep and mysterious roles that sound plays in the creation process. Tesla had a quote, and I'm paraphrasing, that "If you want to understand the secrets of the universe, that you have to think of it in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration." I really think he was touching on something really important, really fundamental. That matter is not a thing. There's actually no thing in what we call things, matter. There is actually just energy, vibration, frequency, oscillations. When you look at an atom really, really close, you don't see little billiard balls. The atom is made out of 99.9999999% space. And the part that's not space, there's a little electromagnetic field that's fluctuating. And to think of that as something solid, it is incorrect.
Can we be fooled by what we think we see? A pivotal figure in ancient Greece warned of the dangers of believing what we perceive with our eyes. Plato is considered the father of Western philosophy, and he believed that we don't live in the real world. That we live in the shadow of the real world. And he conceived an allegory called the cave. And in this allegory, he described a group of prisoners who were shackled together. Behind the prisoners was a fire, and in between the fire and the prisoners were other people who were playing with puppets that were casting shadows on the wall. The prisoners all believed that the shadows that they were seeing represented the real world. And then, in his allegory, Plato allowed one of the prisoners to escape. He went out into the real world and then returned and was actually blinded by the light of the real world. Seeing this, the prisoner said, "Whoa, we, we want to stay in the shadow world. We don't want to be blinded by the light." And this became a a way of describing our relationship to to reality. Is it possible that our sense of hearing is more dependable than our sense of sight?
In Eastern cultures, the ear is considered to be more receptive, yin, and feminine, while the eyes are considered to be more active, yang, and masculine. The current age we live in has placed more emphasis on yang or visual information than on information we receive from being receptive and listening. [Music]
If we hear two tones that are one hertz apart, we can hear the difference as a kind of pulsing binaural beat. But if we look at two colors that are one nanometer apart, we cannot discern the difference visually. So this implies that the ears are a more accurate sense perception than the eyes. [Music]
American British scientist David Bohm said, "The world we see is like a holographic image, a kind of external tapestry of impressions composed of interference patterns of waves." What he did was he recognized that patterns tended to show up repeatedly. And why would that be? Why would there be patterns? [Music] After pondering that for many years, he came up with a beautiful description of the way he viewed the world, which involved something that he called the implicate order. But what it means, essentially, is that there is something there that already exists. It's pre-existing, and it needs to be activated. So that's where the sound comes in as a creative essence. If you take a tuning fork and you hit it up against a crystal, you are going to resonate the fork and the crystal, and they're both going to be oscillating in a phase of coherency and incoherency. But at some point, they're going to come into coherency. They're going to be in sympathetic resonance. [Music] There's something implicit in that crystal that will respond to that tuning fork. So that's what the implicate order means.
Today, people understand that we live in a matrix, and they understand that sometimes that matrix is not a very comfortable place, and they're looking for ways to go beyond the matrix. And what we're discovering is that sound is perhaps the key, literally, of life. It's the key to opening the door to higher realities. It's the key to opening doors within ourselves. So intimately, we know that the way through the matrix is to raise our vibration. How do we raise our vibration? The universe offers many hidden clues, some of which have to do with sound and mathematics.
Spiritual teacher and philosopher George Gurdjieff traveled the globe uncovering some of these ancient puzzle pieces. Gurdjieff was a Russian mystic and composer who devised what he called the Law of Threes, which essentially states that for any phenomena to come into existence, you have to have what he described as a holy affirming, a holy denying, and then a holy reconciling force. And unless all three forces are present, a phenomena is not going to manifest in reality. Every number in creation is part of a sequence in which another aspect of divine power becomes expressed into the world. So there's a particular power of one, power of two, and three is the next in the sequence. After we go from the unity to the division into polarity, polarity allows movement to take place. It allows attraction and repulsion. It allows evolution to take place. An ordinary or mundane example of the Law of Three is your car. Your car has three gears. It has a forward gear, it has a reverse gear, and a neutral gear. All three are essential. The third element between the two opposite polarities could simply be neutral between positive and negative. It could also be understood, though, as the particular union of the positive and negative, like a masculine and feminine, to then create a child. That's what you would see in something like the Egyptian tradition, where you would see that the two components would be met on one side as the feminine component, Pata, on the other is the masculine component, and when they unite, they create Nefertum, the beauty or fullness of creation, as their child. [Music]
The second ancient law that Gurdjieff references is the Law of Octaves. This says that all vibrations moving through matter and through man ascend, descend, grow stronger or weaker, precisely as a musical octave develops. Gurdjieff says the whole universe is structured in octaves. I think he's actually accurate because the whole universe is vibrational, therefore octaves are a fundamental part, a doubling of vibration, infinitely perhaps, basically the structure of the universe. The human cell is one such example. If we just look at the cell, as that cell becomes fertilized with that seed of life, the cell starts to take on a kind of a resonance of frequency, we could say a sound even. And then as it starts to multiply itself, the one divides through the cell mitosis, it becomes two. That's that one to two ratio is the same that we could relate to the octave. There's a harmonic ratio that's starting to happen there. We have the one to the two, the two to the four, the four to the eight, the eight to the sixteen, the sixteen to 32. So it keeps doubling. So it's following this harmonic sequence. You can also see a lot of correlations between the cell division and the Flower of Life, which is a sacred geometry. So you have the one, and then it divides, and it becomes two, and you have the two kind of overlapping, you have the Vesica Piscis, and then you have the four, and then as you get seven and eight, you start to form that seed of life from the center of the Flower of Life. The same rules that govern harmony and sound and music are the same rules that apply to sacred geometry and what becomes beautiful and harmonic and life-enhancing within the geometric forms. [Music]
We've got seven notes in an octave: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti. And when you look at the mathematics, you see certain things show up there that we see reflected in how the universe is constructed. For instance, when you look at a piano, and you see there's two black keys and three black keys, and two black keys and three black keys, and there's two white keys with a missing black key, right? Why is that? Why aren't there black keys in between each one? That's what Gurdjieff called the Mi-Fa bridge. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Mi, and Fa is a half step, instead of a full step. Full step, full step, full step, half step, full step, full step, full step, at the octave. Half step. Two links where we have half steps. It's why there's no straight lines in nature. When the branch is growing, it's going through its Do, Re, Mi. The the seed is splitting open, Do. A little shoot comes up, pushes through the soil, that's Re. Then a stalk, source of foam, that's Mi. It can't bridge the Mi-Fa gap, and so it just starts another Do. And that's why when it gets up to this point, it forks, and each of those forks forks, and these are those forks forks, and that forms a fractal pattern. [Music]
Gurdjieff's Mi-Fa bridge could be compared to what ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras referred to as the diatonic comma. In Egyptian times, they understood that there was a particular gap between the archetypal blueprint for creation that exists on a higher plane level, and it's actually manifesting down through multiple planes until it crystallizes that pattern into a physical structure. And there's often at least a slight incongruence between the perfect ideal form and how it manifests on the physical plane. The idea, Pythagorean comma, was then used to illustrate the idea that everything to manifest in the physical world is just a little bit off its actual perfect archetype. But in the Egyptian tradition, it was understood that that slight imperfection is what made it completely unique and beautiful. And that if things were 100% the pattern of the true ideal higher archetype, it may simply disappear from physical creation to begin with. Like in the creation of a pearl, or in the seeding of a crystal, these slight imperfections allow the formation of fractals, a pattern you see again and again throughout the universe.
In the 1970s, mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot was working with the newly developing personal computers, and especially working with graphics. They started plugging equations into the computer, and out popped these graphics that are called fractals. And what they noticed is that no matter how many times they repeated this equation, that the fractal was a mirror image at every level of magnification. What's interesting about this is that if they wanted to change any aspect of the fractal, they had to go back to the original equation and change it. Now, when they were working with the Mandelbrot set, they noticed that the Mandelbrot set resembled a meditating Buddha. So they went back in and changed the equation and came up with what they call the Buddha-Brah. Now, this is really extraordinary because it tells us that if we're made in the image of God, that perhaps we are fractals of our creator. And this aligns perfectly with Buddhism, that we're all trying to return to our original and divine nature. [Music]
Author and scientist Michael Hayes said that the resonance between biology and cosmology shows that life is music, complete with overtones, and it's no more strikingly present than in the helical structure of life itself, DNA. Hayes called this finding the Hermetic Code. Hermes is the Greek name for the Egyptian god Thoth. He's the god of magic and alchemy, and also is connected with the concept of passing through portals and gateways. When the Greeks talked about Hermes, they were referring to this ultimate ancient knowledge, which is called the Emerald Tablet. Most famous in the Emerald Tablet is the second verse that says, "As above, so below." What it means is that everything is in correspondence. That what happens on Earth has a counterpart in the heavenly realms. In the Bible, this is part of the Lord's Prayer: "On earth as it is in heaven." That's a hermetic expression of an expression of his law of correspondences. And essentially, it says that you and I are a fractal of all of creation. We're essentially a printout of the cosmos. That what happens within us also happens in the greater cosmos, and vice versa.
The Jewish Kabbalistic Tree offers a similar message. The Kabbalistic Tree is typically described not just as one tree, but a set of four trees that are tied at the root. In the Kabbalistic tradition, it was described as a mirroring, "as above, so below," type of relationship between these four trees that were tied to the same Sephirot at the center. What we found was that the center of each one of those trees at the root that connected them was this first analytical solution to gravity. So that gravity is the hub, is the force that holds all of the knowledge together, right? All of the information together. Without gravity, nothing would coalesce, nothing would become one thing. It would all fly apart, and nothing would be able to like make a star, make a galaxy, make a planet, or even a proton. And so, "as above, so below" has this aspect that all of the higher aspects of creation are mirrored into the physical world in which we live. And once we understand that core pattern through the use of sacred geometry, then we can see how both of these are going to be connected, and how our actions on the physical world can connect to and affect the higher worlds, and how the higher worlds create and sustain and affect us here on this level. [Music]
Another way to look at it is that a drop of water contains the ocean, and the ocean contains a drop of water. Everything in the universe is entangled. The information of all the protons in the universe is present in one proton because they are all entangled to each other. We know in the laboratory that two particles can be entangled in such a way that even if the other one is on the other side of the universe, if you modify this one, if you tickle this one, the other one will laugh. It's instantaneous. Cause and effect is one of the many principles of the universe. Is sound the cause of creation, or is it the effect of creation? If you want to look at it from the quantum physics idea, is sound a particle or a wave? Well, the answer is, of course, it is. It is both. It is causal, it is effectual, and it affects us as well as effects us. Ancient cultures use the metaphor that the universe is actually a cosmic symphony, singing a song to the creator. As ancient wisdom aligns with modern science, this concept is supported by quantum theory, which also proposes that the cosmos is a kind of symphony of vibrations. Many ancient cultures believed our unique role was to play our particular note as perfectly as possible to make the creation complete. [Music] This translates as, "Be who you are." [Music] Up next on Sound of Creation, we explore the mathematics behind music. Join us as we uncover the sonic secrets behind sacred geometry. [Music]