Harmony

My morning meditation is becoming a bit of a routine, though one can hardly say that after only a handful of sessions. It is more of a journey, a path, or an exploration. Much like hiking in the mountains: with the summit in view, hiking through paths, along ridges, through valleys and rivers, past rock faces, through scree and stones, meadows and forests, and beyond the tree line on glaciers in the snow, the mountains become a metaphor for the inner search. Climbing a mountain is a spiritual event. Nevertheless, meditation itself can be like a hike through the mountains, through the valleys of thoughts, the rivers of life, the images of memory on the rocks, the narrow ridges of logical thinking, the textures of language. The paths in meditation lead past thoughts and memories. And then suddenly, as if pausing in a clearing, the mind becomes still, and I realize that I am by no means hiking. Instead, in silence and concentration, focused on the here and now, on the point that unlocks infinity, precisely here, from here, all these thoughts and images actually pass by. I am the enjoyer, the observer; I do not exist, the thoughts do not exist; everything is present at once in synchronicity. A great vision opens up, a vista from the mountain summit onto the world, down into the valleys and up into the sky between the cosmos and the world.

Within the sublimity of this experience, the sublime, which allows me to experience that the cosmos is structured, composed, in change and transformation, but bound by rules, abstract points of reference become visible: geometry, harmony, composition. I think of mathematical constants or functions, of musical harmonies or color theories, of mineral constructions or biological structures. Flowers that form a point of attraction in their colorfulness, geometry, structure, composition, unfolding and smell.

Where do these constants come from? Are they the building blocks of Brahman, from which the world is derived as a process?

Those constants in the cosmos can be found in art. In more traditional theories of art, the search for these laws is the core of aesthetics, divine inspiration, genius, the sublime or the transcendental. The pre-stabilized harmonies are manifested in architectural principles and can be found in sacred buildings, public buildings or private buildings, depending on the function and orientation of the client. Buckminster Fuller used the hexagon from the bee world as a blueprint for social construction. In sacred art, we often find the golden ratio as a reference for harmony; in social space, we find Fibonacci sequences as a model for organic organization. As someone who has studied Western critical theory for decades, this discovery is a revelation.

In an attempt to free myself from the shackles of enlightenment and critical theory, I wandered into postmodernism and learned: music becomes a landscape of emotions, of the soul, of structure, of time consciousness, of anticipation. The image becomes a surface on which the eyes wander, the senses connect, new connections arise and sensations are constituted. The sculpture becomes a counterpart that refers to something that stands in abstract space and is only a placeholder in real space. The juxtaposition of the sculpture in relation to its surroundings creates a dialog that I can enter into. In these aesthetic experiences, I experience the world as a possible, expanded world, enriched by levels of reality, which suggests a different consciousness, that of the artist or other viewers, and allows for dialog, communication, language. Within art there is a reflection of the cosmos. A creativity is kindled here that creates and produces, expresses what has always been there. Connecting with that which has always been there, immersing oneself in an encounter, enables a deep contemplation of central principles of the cosmos as we can experience it. Reading the firmament is a beautiful image for this.

The natural sciences, the hard sciences, find some constants that capture the beauty of the universe - fractals of ice flowers, for example. Some of these constants seem to be central to the architecture of the universe, as if the universe would collapse if you changed a number after the decimal point at pi. At these points, physicists become spiritual. "God does not play dice," said Einstein.