The Three Note Symphony

I remember way back before the internet...

Wait. I actually don't. I mean, I do, but I don't recall how I filled the spacetime -- or rather, what spacetime was filled with.

Instead of having instant access to millions of books via amazon, I had to make the physical trek to a metaphysical bookstore in West Hollywood called The Bodhi Tree. It was the only way to forage for vertical supplies, i.e., coon chow. The store was even organized into eastern and western wings, oriental religions and philosophies to one side, occidental to the other.

I even bumped into George Harrison there one time. Of course, I didn't bother him, but there he was, just like me, scrounging around for information about the unnameable. 

One obscure book that made an impact on me at the time was called Nature, Man, and Society. It's actually a compendium of essays from an interdisciplinary journal called Main Currents in Modern Thought. As for why it made an impact, check out its mission statement: 

A cooperative journal to promote the free association of those working toward the integration of knowledge through study of the whole of things, Nature, Man, and Society, assuming the universe to be one, intelligible, harmonious.

The journal was founded by F.L. Kunz in 1940. If I recall correctly, its editorship was taken over by Ken Wilber at some point, and presumably went downhill from there, into Chopraville, Franklin Jonestown, and Andrew Coheny Island. But it was once a seriously wacky forum for the sorts of things we discuss here.

I can't imagine how difficult it must have been back then, in the days long before the internet, for scattered members of vertical diaspora to connect. How did these goddballs find each other?

Probably in the usual way, via nonlocal attractors synchronistically drawing them together into the same vertical phase space, only much less efficiently.

Before Amazon opened the floodgates and put every kookbook at our fingertips, the Bodhi Tree was the only place in town for all types of spiritual weirdness, high, low, and in between. Whereas the typical chain store might have a couple of books on such matters, the Bodhi Tree had whole sections devoted to obscure subjects from UFOlogy to Tibetan Buddhism to Wicca. They also had entire sections devoted to Christian mysticism, Vedanta, the occult, weird and wacky science, etc.

In an essay from Nature, Man, and Society called The New Dimensions of Nature and Man, a Donald Andrews writes that the behavior of the fundamental entities of the world "is characterized less by a particle-like and more by a wave-like nature."

Of course, particles and waves are irreducibly complementary, analogous to notes and melodies. He concludes that "both the universe as a whole and we in particular are not matter but music." Because music is "pure dynamic form, I think that it is both suggestive and meaningful to say that the atom now appears to be music."

Now, music has the interesting property of being simultaneously continuous and discontinuous: a flowing melody is composed of discrete notes. And outside the context of the melody, the notes have no meaning, but without the notes the melody cannot be composed or played. 

The Buddhist monk-scholar Lama Govinda writes of how past, present, and future are equally present in music. Although we hear it in the present moment, we are implicitly aware of the notes leading up to this moment, while the moment anticipates what is to come, i.e., its fulfillment in the future.

This complementarity of notes and melody implies that it isn't a question of being or becoming, but rather, being as becoming, and vice versa. "Both are ever united, and those who try to build a philosophy upon only one of them, to the exclusion of the other, lose themselves in verbal play" (ibid.).

Which I can't help thinking relates to the Trinity, which, in its eternal perichoretic dance, is like three notes in a single endless melody, or something.