Awakening to the Music Within

I like to tell the story of how I came to be here, a new member of a spiritualist church, and thankful that I get to tell this some-what interesting tale. I may still need a lot more evolution, but one thing I have proven able to do by now is to write about it and tell some of the insights I have found along the way.

I was brought up in a science-oriented household, and astronomy was my obsession at 6 years old. My science teacher said in 1966 that if only I applied myself more I could really go places. But by then I was finding I didn’t have the answers I wanted, and I got intensely curious. Most of all, I felt math and science could not explain beauty. And I had always felt not only a kinship with Nature, but that being alive was too strange to explain by science. I have always been musical too. The best discovery from my beginning piano lessons was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. But I was now a teenager attached to the pop music of the sixties too. I kept a list of my favorites. But in June 1966, I worried that favorite songs had not come along in a while.

But then suddenly in late June 1966 they came. I was swept away by Petula Clark’s song I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love so grand and uplifting, like another Ode to Joy. "So when people want to stare, I know I don’t really care, just as long as you are there..." And the Byrds’ 5D Fifth Dimension had a beautiful sound and strange lyrics that I slowly began to figure out. I was so happy that these new favorite songs had come along that I was in bliss. This Byrds’ song said "I opened my heart to the whole universe, and I found it was loving". That’s exactly what I did. I raised my consciousness to the sky and love flowed into me. I was catching the vibes of the cultural revolution going on that Summer of 1966. And to my question "what is beauty", I found that love is the answer. Suddenly I began to experience beauty as never before. I didn’t need to take LSD to become open to the richness and subtlety of the world.

I had just seen the movie The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. I felt a new lightness as I walked home from the theater. Something had shifted in me, but I didn’t know it until that night when the Petula song arrived. Soon I discovered that the vivid, frantic images in this kaleidescopic movie stuck with me, and that its beauty and its message coincided with the music. It had been filmed in scenic Mendocino on the north coast of California which my Mom and my family really liked when we went there 5 years before. We decided in August 1966 to go there again and see the locations shown in the movie. We crept up upon the church in town and visited the harbor. I walked under the scenic water tower, and just as I did Petula Clark came on a radio nearby with her previous hit from a few months before, It’s the Sign of the Times. Synchronicities began to appear that I really treasured. The Beatles had just come out with "Revolver" with their great psychedelic song Tomorrow Never Knows and the mesmerizing Here, There and Everywhere, and the hit record from the album was We All Live in a Yellow Submarine. The story of The Russians Are Coming was also about how a Russian submarine got stuck on the American coast and the resulting panic and eventual merry resolution with the Russians. After our Mendocino visit we went to Clear Lake for a boat ride. Then to my Dad’s great displeasure I took a rowboat tied to the dock out on the lake all by myself that night. It was transcendentally peaceful.

This spiritual awakening opened me to ideas I had not known. My worldview was shifting 180 degrees. My first new obsession was ghosts. Then I started reading the books my parents brought home from their own religious exploration group, but which they didn’t agree with. By Spring 1967 the ghosts of illusion melted from me and I knew I was not just myself in a body but one with all. I wrote a paper on Zen for English class which my teacher knocked.

I had not believed in astrology before but now I started reading about the circle of 12 zodiac signs and the planets and what they mean. Because of my new mystical bent I thought Neptune the mystical planet must be closely lined up or in conjunction with my Sun, and to my astonishment when I looked up its position it was there right where I thought. I picked out what the rest of my chart would be too. Then I turned my attention to all the upheavals and cultural revolutions going on in the sixties and I thought a conjunction or alignment must be going on among the three outer planets that represent transcendent experiences, awakenings and revolutions. I looked up their places and discovered that Uranus and Pluto were in conjunction. Then I asked myself when the new energy was at its peak and discovered the conjunction was exact in late June 1966, the exact time of my own awakening. This discovery inspired me to eventually publish a book on the cycles of the outer planets and how they describe history and the future, entitled Horoscope for the New Millennium. This planetary conjunction truly was the sign of the times, just as the Lady who awakened me, Petula Clark, had said. The water tower itself was like the symbol for Aquarius, and the myth of the dawning of The Age of Aquarius was spreading and was soon also celebrated in song.

I later discovered that the music of the spheres is real, and it’s inside of us as what we call the chakras or conscious energy centers along our backbone. And to my amazement, some interest in numbers came back too. You could even say I was coming full circle. The number 54 became my favorite because it is basic to all music. What we call the solfeggio scale is based on the notes called sol and fa, or G and F in the C major scale. You may remember how Julie Andrews, a close colleague of Petula Clark, taught this scale to the Von Trapp Family singers in The Sound of Music in 1965. You may know it as Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti and back again to Do. It is called the Sol-Fa scale because of what is known as the circle of fifths. If you jump up 5 tones from the tonal note Do up to the 5th tone in the scale Sol, you can make Sol the new Do, and if you do this 12 times from the bottom of the keyboard to the top, you return to the same note where you started, though much higher on the keyboard. The Do tones of all these 12 keys together give you all the possible notes of the scale, or all the white and black keys on the piano. And if you go downward 12 times from the top starting from high Do to Fa, the 4th note of the scale, you end up back down through all the keys to where you started at the bottom. So the first, fifth and fourth tones are basic to all music. Notice that there are 12 keys in the circle, like the zodiac, and 7 levels through which the keys move.

Looking through the web for articles on the Sol-Fa scale, I just discovered to my amazement that it was super-materialist scientist (and alchemist) Isaac Newton who linked the 7 notes of this scale to the 7 colors of the rainbow that he defined. And in the new age culture psychics report that these are the tones and colors of the 7 chakras. So this means the music of the spheres is within us, because the chakras in turn are linked to the 7 visible planets and lights of the solar system. Now these correlations get amazing because of how important the 5th and 4th chakras are to us, and how they are linked to the planets, tones and colors that awaken us to how the chakras feel within us and how they function in our lives.

Most people when they hear the word "heart" in our scientific materialist society think it means only the organ that pumps our blood. Now, that is very important to being alive, but new age spiritualists know as the ancients did that the heart is the very center of our being. When we can be aware of the heart center, located near the heart organ, we are guided to right relationships with others, and also to what is authentic within ourselves. Following your heart is more than a cliché; to be in contact with our soul we need to listen to it. Venus, planet of love, is correlated to the heart chakra, which is also known as the 4th chakra up from the base 1st tonic chakra ruled by Saturn, and is linked to Fa the 4th tone, and when healthy it radiates green to our spiritual sight. Remember that when we move through the circle of fifths downward, we move from the high tonic tone Do down to the 4th tone Fa 12 times. In the C Major scale this is F. This downward movement represents how we need to be receptive and open to feel the heart chakra. It is always there to guide us, but we need to ask.

The relationship of the orbits of Venus and the Earth create a beautiful pattern of 5-petal flowers in 4 sizes within a circle.

The "music within" proclaims this. While writing this essay, I discovered that The Beatles had put the " awakening" song "Here, There and Everywhere" (created in June 1966) in a video showing Earth and Venus within a spiraling circle.

And J.S. Bach put it into his great Toccata in F, BWV 540
Chakra Four Section of Toccata in F BWV 540

The divine proportion or fibonacci numbers are found in the pattern of these orbits, and when Leonardo DaVinci created his famous Vitruvian Man drawing of the human body, the heart was located at the divine proportion point along the backbone axis of the circle occupied by the Man.

Above: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth

I also want to mention Mercury the Messenger planet. It represents the 5th chakra at the throat, the center from which we speak and sing. It’s also the fifth tone Sol, or G in the C Major scale. In the circle of fifths we move upward through the circle from the base tone Do to Sol, so this is a more assertive function. When healthy it radiates a sky-blue color. The G tone is produced by a fraction of 3 over 2. It so happens that Mercury makes 3 rotations on itself within 2 of its orbits.

We need all 7 chakras, all 7 tones, and all 7 colors to awaken the music within us. They connect our body with our spiritual body. But with our 5th and our 4th chakras together we sing all the songs of our soul, as Norma Tanega and Norma Kutzer wrote in their song in 1966. " I’m the Sky ‘cause I’m singing my song in the wind. It’s love, it’s mine, it’s yours, it’s life, it’s free"

* ruling and exalted planets of the signs to the left