(In order to celebrate the today cosmic alignment between Sun-Earth and the Regal Stars Aldebaran (Taurus) and Antares (Scorpio)*, we publish some extracts from the article “Music and Color in Nature” in the Theosophical Downunder Library website – the pictures and linked words are by TPS editor staff)
Artwork Siska Tovey
“In our previous lecture we talked about the holographic nature of life, where every its manifestation appears out of Light. In this lecture we are talking about music and colour, and look at the participation of music and colour in the manifestation of Nature, and at the ways how we perceive Nature’s music and colour through our senses.
Why Music and Colour? How are they connected? Music and Colour both are made of energy waves, vibrations that originate in the primeval Fire (Fohat). Some of these vibrations we perceive as light and some of them as sound. They reverberate in human Fiery, Fine and Solid bodies.
As in the Bible, “At the beginning was the Word”. And this Word, which in Theosophy we call “Logos”, is on the one hand the first Thought– form of the Creator – Spirit, and on the other hand – the Sound (soundless sound for us humans because our physical senses don’t hear it). However, our energy bodies have the ability to perceive the vibrations that are inaccessible to the physical senses through their sensors. For example, prominent yogi Paramahansa Yogananda depicts how human chakras perceive astral sounds (see http://www.yogananda.com.au/g/g_astral_sounds.html).
Our solid bodies use sensors different from the sensors of astral bodies and in the earthly atmospheric conditions the perception of sound changes. Light that we perceive through our eyes is still an electromagnetic wave, and it travels with the speed of light. Sound, however, is perceived by our ears from a mechanic pressure (acoustic) wave. This wave affects our ear drums through the medium of air.
An example of a unified source of light and sound can be a powerful electric discharge in the atmosphere simultaneously causing a lightning bolt and a thunder. We can see the lightning bolt practically immediately, and hear the thunder after some time because the pressure wave has to travel through the air, and its velocity is lower than the velocity of Light.
According to physics, Light is a spatial electromagnetic wave. Our physical eyes can see frequencies approximately between 1017 to 1011 Hz, which corresponds to wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers (nm). (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter).
L= c/v, where L is wavelength (m), c – light velocity (m/s), and v – frequency (Hz or 1/s)
Light velocity in air is equal 299702547 m/s.
The visible light, from one end of the spectrum to the other, as in a rainbow, consists of violet (400 nm), which contains the most energy, then indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and finally red (700 nm), which has the least energy. Natural light is produced by a mixture of all these wavelengths.
Human ears can hear sounds at frequencies from about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, though we hear sounds best from 1,000 Hz to 5,000 Hz, where human speech is centred.
Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish philosopher (born 1795) once said: “If you look deeply enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music”.
Russian scientist Chigevsky while measuring Solar radiations discovered that the Sun is “singing”. Recent discoveries show that the whole universe is alive with melody. “In 2003, NASA studied the Perseus Cluster black hole and found it has murmured a B-flat for the past 2.5 billion years. In 2006, Professor Adam Burrows of the University of Arizona found the stars sing a “death knell” in middle C before they explode as supernovae. Even Earth has its own song. In 2008, Discovery News reported on a subtle and mysterious global hum detected by seismologists. Earth’s hum is deep and rhythmic, like the sound of heavy drums or the didgeridoo.” (Rebecca Cavalot, All you need is la, Wellbeing magazine,2015, relaunch issue).
We can say that at the beginning of the universe there was music because universe began from rhythm, and rhythm creates music. Percussion music, for example, is based only on rhythm.
Katherine Tingley stated in The Theosophical Path: “The secret of music is rhythm, and rhythm is the manifestation of the spiritual principle in all art.”
So, “the secret of music is rhythm”. As we understand, rhythm is in existence always. Even throughout the Pralaya, when everything including Time disappears, rhythm doesn’t disappear. It is Rhythm that “awakens Brahma” to start the new Manvantara – the period of Manifestation. The drum-like rhythmic “humming” of the Earth may be the sound of the beating of its heart. Human and other life organisms’ hearts also start beating in response to the cosmic pulse. We are manifested out of Light. The electromagnetic wave of Light which creates us also has its rhythm.
Our ear perceives different frequencies of the vibrating wave as higher or lower sounds. In music, it defines the pitch of the tone. With the changes of the pitch of the tone, melody became possible. The “shape” of music, its order, is represented by a musical scale. The seven notes of the diatonic scale correspond to the seven layers of the human Monad.
The spectrum of seven basic colours also corresponds with the seven bodies of the human Monad: “The Human Spirit has seven its bodies – envelopes of the Monad, within which the Source of the Spiritual Life – the Spirit – comes into being” (Kalagia, 1.15.14).
from the “Secret Instructions” by H.P.Blavatsky
M.S.Schneider writes in his book, A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe, about the sacred philosophy of the ancient people and their notion of music’s order: “The seven note music scale is meant to model the hidden side of a macrocosmic design, the universe ruled by mathematical harmonies of music. The scale structure implies that the universe emerges from absolute divinity, descends through a seven-stage celestial hierarchy, and returns to absolute divinity.” (p.234).
According to Schneider, in ancient days “the earthly music was seen as a mirror image of the heavenly ideal descending from above” (A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe,p.241). And in conformity with such understanding, a musical scale on the lyre was played starting from the highest note, the shortest string at the bottom of the Greek lyre.
Not only the great cosmic Essences like stars and planets “sing” their tones. People also have their own tones – frequencies to which we resonate. […]
Colour and music provide us with powerful ways and tools for healing. The most effective methods of healing are now based on the application of lasers. Lasers are usually monochromatic and give a very precise wavelength of light. “The frequency most used for laser healing is red light, at a wavelength of 660 nanometers. But infrared light is also used typically at highly specific wavelengths of 840 or 830 nanometers.” (Norman Doidge, The Brain’s Way of Healing). Healing with lasers mostly helps sick cells to energize and heal themselves.
Kinesiology – another method of healing of human body – which is alike tuning a pianoforte – uses tuning forks to check the resonant tones of the chakras and tune them up where they are out of tune.
Daniel Levitin in his book This is your Brain on Music, shows how music affects human emotions. As we know, the emotional body (or principle) is one of the human energy bodies, and its energy fluctuations affect all the other bodies which are made of lower vibrations, including the brain in the physical body. Because it is so, music can be used for healing.
With its ability to influence the work of the brain, music is now becoming often successfully applied for the treatment of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Researchers and practitioners noticed that the most effective therapy is coming from singing. Singing turns human body, through its vocal chords, into an instrument for the tuning of nervous system.
As Rebecca Cavalot from the Wellbeing magazine (2015, relaunch issue) informs us, a Melbourne based speech pathologist Nina George, together with a music therapist, uses Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT), a style of singing designed to stimulate activity in the right hemisphere of the brain to eventually reactivate the left brain function, if it has been weakened by a neurological disorder. Some other practitioners, such as Garth Stone, play didgeridoo to promote a sense of wellbeing. Nowadays, an interested person can find a multitude of technics and information on the healing properties of music and their applications on the internet.
“Colour which like music is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power,” once said the famous impressionist artist Paul Gaugin.
The primordial Light is White. It contains the potential of the full spectrum of Light frequencies reflected in a basic seven colour spectrum of a rainbow and additional countless tints and shades. In other words, all the colour vibrations, or the colour radiations, are in the colour white.
Referring to the experience of Russian prisoners in a Siberian salt mine calling themselves collectively “X7”, we can say that nature receives its inner power from the Rays of Light of different colours. The incarcerated underground anonymous Russian prisoners X7 described their direct spiritual experience in the book The Mysterious Story of X7. Exploring the Spiritual Nature of Matter. From them we learn that Rays of Light create holograms in conformity with the qualities of the Rays – colour and tone.
Why colour and tone? Supposedly when we develop our currently latent sensory abilities, light and sound merge into colour-tone radiation as they did for the X7 in their underground cave: “All is light, light is radiation, radiation becomes colour and/or tone. The two are equivalent.”
X7 achieved the ability of seeing and working with the colours as aspects of Light. They describe the shades of indigo and blue as a sustaining colour. When we are looking at the shining blue of a summer sky, we are feeling good because we receive the sustaining energy of the colour blue. With this colour we receive our strength – the most prominent quality of the colour blue.
Mother of pearl, with irradiations of rose-pink, is the colour of love, the foundation of life. Therefore this colour could best reach human consciousness. The quality of peace has a perpetually harmonious, strong multi-coloured beam.
The colour Yellow, according to the X7, means freedom, joy, and relief from tension. We all know the green colour of chlorophyll which enables plants to absorb energy from light through the process of photosynthesis. We also know that looking at something green relaxes us and promotes healing.
While explaining the way in which nature created holograms of different objects by using the rays of light and the archetypal idea of the object, the X7 give us an example of a tree, which reflects the quality of “tree-ness” – something like strength, endurance and stability. And so on – endless types of holograms of living beings can appear in Spirit’s Memory thanks to the colour-tone qualities of the creating Rays. “The whole body of a man – physical, emotional and mental – is composed of very fine radiations.” (The Mysterious Story of X7. Exploring the Spiritual Nature of Matter).
[…] Creative people of all times, composers, artists and scientists, wouldn’t be able to come to their best and highest achievements without tapping into the mystical inner power of nature. And they would often become especially sensitive to the colour-tone association.
Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin, realized this colour–tone correspondence and showed us an example of colour-tone creativity in his symphonic masterpiece Prometheus: The Poem of Light, op.60 (1910), composed in music and light. This was a symphonic work for piano, orchestra, optional choir, and colour organ, where the part for the colour organ added an extra dimension of light to this already transcendent masterpiece of sound.
Besides music and colour, Scriabin’s score for Prometheus included associations of notes with a spiritual (cosmic) phenomenon. For example, C is associated with “Human Will”, D with “Joy”, E with “Dreams”, and so on.
Scriabin also associated each note in an octave with a specific colour. Other composers such as Berlioz, Debussy, Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov also had their ideas about the music-colour association. And the mathematician Charles Fourier in his Theorie de l’Unité Universelle (1846) stated connection between colours, notes and metals. […]”
