Peace Resolution

[Heidi and Dan Chay]

Hi,

>From seers, dream interpreters, magicians, mystery cults, and oracle
priestesses, we learn that the Vision is incapable of being set forth by
"tongue of flesh" since it transcends consciousness.

Yet we find ourselves drawn to the ecstatic utterances of ancient and
modern prophets as if the harmony of the spheres pervaded their being,
making their whole nature vibrate in a higher octave with new
interpretation and intensity.

Harmony of the spheres: the capacity of nature to recover its balance
after another act of human aggression?  As I understood Julie, it is
akin to "the irresistible hum of love, hope, and kindness." Eh?

A Zen saying reminds me of the metaphor, "Harrison is a tuning fork,"
holding space:

"Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by
itself."

Julie wrote:

"Little by little, the collective hum reaches a higher state of
consciousness and harmony than it had before it was tuned with the
tuning fork (aka Harrison Owen). And then, you let go and let the
musicians co-create the music they came to play. The music is better
than usual because the musicians begin more closely attuned than usual.
The attunement is to our natural state, to peace.. and OST is thus a
practice of peace."

Einstein increasingly appears to me like another ancient God.  I find it
more and more difficult to distinguish with confidence what he may
"really" have said, and what simply is attributed to him.

At any rate, I read that these were "Einstein's three rules of work:
'Out of clutter, find simplicity; from discord, find harmony; and, in
the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.'"

"From discord, find harmony."  Among ancient Greeks, Discord was another
goddess along with Fate and Wisdom.  Was Peace a goddess, as well?

It is a curious phenomenon, the unity of a God, and the unity of
metaphor. Some will recognize John 10:9 from the New Testament where
Jesus is quoted to have said, "I am the door."

The literary scholar, Northrop Frye wrote with metaphor partly in mind,
"Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain
point...[it means] literally just what it says, but it can mean it only
without primary reference to a correspondence of what it says to
something outside what it says."

We can read about Peace in the Holy Qur'an (Surah 16:30):

30. To the righteous
(When) it is said, "What
Is it that your Lord
Has revealed?" they say,
"All that is good, there is good
In this world, and the Home
Of the Hereafter is even better
And excellent indeed is the Home
Of the righteous--

31.  Gardens of Eternity which they
Will enter: beneath them
Flow (pleasant) rivers: they
Will have therein all
That they wish: thus doth
Allah reward the righteous--

32. (Namely) those whose lives
The angels take in a state
Of purity, saying (to them),
"Peace be on you; enter ye
The Garden, because of (the good)
Which ye did (in the world)."

What is this peace?  An afterlife reward for a good life? Our "natural
state?"  Tuned "Harmony of the Spheres?"

Frye also has written, "Once a verbal structure is read, and reread
often enough to be possessed, it "freezes."  It turns into a unity in
which all parts exist at once...without regard to the specific movement
of the narrative. We may compare it to the study of a musical score..."


Isn't this one intent also of millions of Muslims and Christians
memorizing by rote their holy scriptures? Achieving a higher order of
crystallized understanding much as ice exists at a higher order of
organization than gas?

On this list, Bernhard Weber has commented, "Our social/human potential
seems to freeze during all the organizational/societal attempts to make
it manageable. Ice is more solid than water than gas, but ... Anyway:
for me it is 'unfreezing our self-organization-potential', what OST
helps to do."

Glory Resslar wrote, "Un-freezing (I think of it as exciting the energy
or 'un-blocking') is the key, I think."

How do we come to associate Peace with the order and equilibrium
implicit in "Harmony of the Spheres"?

>From the writings of Aristotle:

"It seems to some [ie: Pythagoreans] that bodies so great [as the
planets] must inevitably produce a sound by their movement: even bodies
on earth do so, although they are neither so great in bulk nor moving at
so high a speed, and as for the sun and moon, and the stars, it is
incredible that they should fail to produce a noise of surpassing
loudness. Taking this as their hypothesis, and also that the speeds of
the stars, judged by their distances, are in the ratio of the musical
consonances, they affirm that the sound of the stars as they revolve is
concordant.

To meet this difficulty that none of us is aware of this sound, they
account for it by saying that the sound is with us right from birth and
has thus no contrasting silence to show it up; for voice and silence are
perceived by contrast to each other, and so all mankind is undergoing an
experience like that of a coppersmith, who becomes by long habit
indifferent to the din around him."

Heraclitus seems to allude (typologically thinking) to our "natural
state":
"The cosmic system (works) by the law of music, the law of harmony; and
whenever that harmony in the cosmic system is lacking in any way, then
in proportion disaster comes to the world, and its influence is seen in
the many destructive forces which are manifest there."

Here is an explanation of Tantric scriptures that seems "in tune" with
harmony of the spheres:

"Unlike the sounds we can hear with our ears, the cosmic sound is
uncaused. It is an infinite vibration (spanda) that is coextensive with
the universe itself and is realizable only in deep meditation when the
senses and the mind have been deactivated. The primordial sound is
symbolically represented by the sacred syllable om. Although not
mentioned directly in the Rig-Veda, the om-sound —- also called pranava
and udgîtha -— is hinted at in various hymns. It is first mentioned by
name in the Shukla-Yajur-Veda (1.1).

What the various models describing the evolution of sound or vibration
have in common is the idea that there are at least three levels at which
sound exists. The Tantric scriptures distinguish between:

1. madhyamâ-vâc ("intermediate speech")—sound at the subtle level of
existence, which is the voice of thought;

2. vaikharî-vâc ("manifest speech")—audible sound transmitted through
vibration of the air;

3. pashyantî-vâc ("visible speech")—the most subtle form of sound
visible only to intuition;

Beyond these three is the transcendental level called parâ-vâc or
"supreme speech," which is Shakti in perfect union with Shiva. It is
soundless sound, hinted at in the Rig-Veda (10.129) in the phrase "the
One breathed breathlessly."

>From Plato:

"The virtue of temperance (sophrosyne) is said to be the virtue of the
soul as a whole, the result of the smooth working of its parts together
... the man who possesses it is "well tuned" (the Greek translation has
nothing to do with the state of his health), and this is achieved by
bringing three parts into accord, just like the fixed three intervals in
the scale - highest, lowest and middle - that is, a musical harmony is
achieved. In the case of the soul, the three parts that have to be
brought into accord are of course reason, passion and desire."

Heraclitus linked harmony with god Logos in the "order of all things":
"Listening not to me but Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are
one."

The Three Basic Statements of the Logos:

{1} Harmony is always a product of opposites.
(a) Everything is made of opposites and therefore subject to internal
tension.
(b) Opposites are identical .... polarity - Qualities are conceived with
their contraries.
(c) War is the ruling and creative force and a right and proper state of
affairs.

"War is father of all and king of all, and some he reveals as gods,
others as men, some he makes slaves, others free."

Nearly 2000 years after the early Greek philosophers, the Ptolemaic
earth-centered model of the universe was becoming increasingly
cumbersome, offending Kepler's Pythagorean sense of harmony and
proportion. He could get no peace, thank goodness. Too many epicycles
grafted on circles to reconcile observational discrepancies.  He
recognized that a Copernican sun-centered planetary model gave better
predictions of the celestial dance and that this dance could be
expressed through more elegant geometry -- to the greater glory of God
the Creator.

Still, the necessity of rejecting circular orbits came as something of a
shock. The circle is an archetypal symbol of harmony and perfection. Yet
the elliptical orbits that he began drawing while charting Mars
eventually revealed a scheme of celestial harmony more subtle and
profound than any that had gone before.

Nearly 2500 years after Pythagoras, Harrison has written:

"If conflict is a loaded word, even more so is peace.  It seems that
many people understand peace mostly in terms of absence of its
opposites. Such things as conflict, confusion, and chaos.  Yet in my
experience each of these "unholy trinity" have essential contributions
to make to the process of living."

>From what I understand of complexity theory, our modern-day
philosopher-gods are pointing with finer-grained resolution to an even
more subtle and profound scheme of celestial harmony and "peace."  Like
a paradoxical intervention, at first it seems counter-intuitive.

In Gestalt and biology, we could say that perfect peace = death.  What
could this mean for our thinking?

Today I have gotten a chuckle from this apparent cacophony of paradigms,
peace resolution, and the idea of becoming a constructive conflict-maker
as a good thing to do.

Grins,

Dan

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