The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  Dante is remembered for having used harmonic haloes and symbolic crosses of light in arranging his blessed beings in a kind of rhythmic tick-tack-toe skeleton that formed what may be termed an ecclesiastical crystal. But a more perfect and more musical example is Bach's last work, The Art of the Fugue, which consists of a compound giant fugue elegantly fitted together from nineteen single ones, the core theme of which, after trimming all variations, bones down to a melodic, hexagonal skeleton of six symmetrical notes - the classic musical crystal.

  To Henry David Thoreau, living in his woodland cabin, a similar realization came in different guise with the erection of the first telegraph line past Walden Pond in 1851. For that August he heard the humming of the wire strung between the poles and wondered how much of it came from the wind and how much from the mysterious power of electricity to bind the world's thoughts together into a new and greater whole. "It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life," he wrote in his notebook, "a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the latticework of this life of ours ... every pore of the wood was filled with music ... How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit this melody!" And on an occasion he "heard" the humming wire whisper, "Bear in mind, Child, and never for an instant forget, that there are higher planes of life than this thou are travelling on. Know that the goal is distant, and is upward, and is worthy all your life's efforts to attain to."

  My thoughts return now to music, which seems to voice so perfectly the essence of the world I see below me. For your blue-swirled Earth down there is not merely a thing. It also lives through time. And in living, it is not so much an object, in three dimensions, as an event, in four. Its nature in fact resembles that of a melody which takes time to play and therefore exists not whole at any moment but rather strings itself out into a patterned sequence over a mortal span.

  Any such span naturally has a beginning and an end, for that is the way with mortality, and mortality obviously is as much an attribute of music as of worlds in this pretranscendent phase of life. Indeed were any earthly melody to play unceasingly, whatever beauty it possessed would inexorably degrade into monotony and its once graceful form would bloat like a body with cancer. This rule is broad enough to include at least the vegetables and animals of Earth, who also need their gracious finales - as don't we all?

  And in the larger view, beyond this nether finitude, we must ever remember that, as Buddha so succinctly put it, "It is not in the body of the lute that one finds the true abode of music." Almost any intuitive person who has had much experience riding a motorcycle, flying an airplane or handling some other sensitive vehicle knows that there comes a point where the driver begins to forget the mechanism and play it direct, as if the body of the machine were part of his own body and its limbs connected directly to his will. In music the great Arturo Toscanini was a supreme example of this transcendence of instrumentation when he bypassed all technique in exhorting his musicians to "Play not with your instruments but with your hearts!"

  A seer like Thoreau would have known exactly what was meant, for he had more than ears to listen with and was always tuning in on, or wondering about, something new and beautiful. "As I climbed the hill again toward my old beanfield," he wrote, "I listened to the ancient, familiar, immortal, dear cricket sound under all others, hearing at first some distinct chirps; but when these ceased I was aware of the general earth-song, which my hearing had not heard ... and I wondered if behind or beneath this there was not some other chant yet more universal ..."

  What chant, I wonder? Could it have been the forest air, whispering, "Breathe me and live." Or some gentle raindrops surrendering themselves with a sigh to the waters of the pond? Might it have been the Pythagorean octave, a withy consonance of small branches tossing among great trees to symbolize the man-woman, bass-soprano interval of life and harmony? Was it the moan of a blind planet groping for purpose in a boundless universe? Or a divine thought surging through the thresh of time?

  All of us beings here are cells of the unknown essence of our world, nodes of flesh that could as well be notes of melody. We are part of something infinite and eternal. There is no boundary between us and the world. In a profoundly relative sense, each of us, as Alan Watts has suggested, may simultaneously occupy "that particular focal point through which the entire universe is singing at this moment."

  Are we then God's dream set to music in the place where the sea and the wind have begun to awake and think? Grateful for our blessings, even when they hurt, we trust the world is not paining needlessly for our sweet incertitudes 'twixt desire and reason. We would wish to be wiser and more loving but, for good or ill, our memories are young in this ancient oasis. And we comprehend little. How indeed could a part hear the Whole, or a note the Melody?

  Yet the silence of space that, enwombs the earth is not totally void. Indeed it is now revealed to be latent, pregnant, mystic - even as it was in the beginning that had no beginning - even as it will be in the end that can have no end. For this is the secret of the spirit that is the life of the form that is the language of the spirit - the eternal spirit that somewhere, somehow, found its voice, took wing and came alive.

  SUMMARY

  The Seven Mysteries of Life

  ABSTRACTION

  What's in an egg? A song is there, in chemical notation, Invisibly packed into the genes; Also detailed instructions for nest building, A menu or two, and a map of stars - All in the one cell that multiplies into many, All put at the disposal Of the little feathered passenger So, once hatched and fledged, He will have more than a wishbone To launch his life. What's an ocean wave made of? At first glance nothing but saltwater; But keep your eyes on it ten seconds ... twenty seconds ... You'll notice the water is roused Only momentarily by the wave Which passes it by, That the wave leaves the molecules and bubbles behind, That the wave in essence is a kind of ghost Freed from materiality by the dimension of time. Made not of substance But energy. And likewise with living bodies And rocks, and all metabolizing matter From atoms to stars, Which all flow through space-time Uttering the abstract nature Of the Universe.

  INTERRELATION

  What relation is a white man To a black man? A yellow man to a red or brown? Closer maybe than you'd think, For all family trees meet and merge Within fifty generations, more or less - In round numbers a thousand years - Which makes all men cousins, Brothers in spirit, if you will, Or, to be genetically precise, Within the range of fiftieth cousin. But relations don't stop here: Man also has ancestors in common With the chimpanzee and other apes, Back twenty million years or so, Plus all the mammals further back - His ten millionth cousins If you'll abide my candor. Still farther, the billionth cousin span Takes in the whole animal kingdom, And many vegetables, and trees; The trillionth must include rocks and worlds. There is no line, you see, between these cousin kingdoms, No real boundary between you and the universe - For all things are related, Through identical elements in world and world, Even out to the farthest reaches Of space.

  OMNIPRESENCE

  Where did life begin? In the festering ooze of a primeval swamp? In a submicroscopic virus? In a stone? A star? Strictly speaking, in none of these. For, truthfully, the question is wrong. Life did not literally begin. Life is. Life is everywhere everywhen, At least in essence, And of course It depends on your definition. Did you ever meet a living stone, A stone that stirs, that travels, That eats, grows, heals its wounds, A stone that breeds its kind? Yes, all stones are alive Essentially, potentially; At least they move around When weather and circumstances permit, Going mostly downhill, Sometimes waiting centuries In a deep pool in some stream For a torrent wild enough to drive them on. And stones are crystals, Rock crystals that grow, molecule by molecule, Filling their own cracks or wounds, Reproducing themselves slowly But perfectly. One kind is even magnetic and attracts iron. The ancient Chinese called it The stone that loves." Larger mineral-like organisms also live In their patient, plodding way: Dunes drift and glacier
s creep, As do mountains, islands, volcanoes and rivers - That are born in the clouds and die in the sea - And lakes and storms, All moving as is their wont, Even fires on Earth And whirling spots on the sun. In fact there is compelling evidence That the earth lives as a superorganism, Along with moons, planets, comets, stars, galaxies And other celestial bodies, And that, most of all, The Universe itself Is a growing, metabolizing supersuperBeing, In very truth alive.

  POLARITY

  Do you think matter is made of particles? Waves? Or what? Where is the line between body and mind? How could God, Presumably the epitome of goodness, If He exists, Create a world harboring as much evil, pain, ugliness, Disease and war as we find in this world? How could He?

  These are enigmas, paradoxes, Seemingly unsolvable; Yet somehow, if one relaxes one's heart And opens one's mind, And wonders the right wonders, They become resolvable. Take Saint George and his dragon. If Earth is a good world, one asks oneself, Why the dragon? Obviously because he was needed. Can you, in fact, imagine Any way George could have made it to sainthood Without him?

  There is a polarity about good and evil, you see. To a baby, getting spanked for trying to climb out of his cradle Is a dreadful experience: an "evil." But to his anxious mother, trying to tell him NO In sign language, it is a constructive deed and "good." The same act thus has two poles Expressing opposite aspects of good and ill. Similarly to mankind as a whole, war is evil, A spanking of civilization, Something to be outlawed at all costs. Yet, for all we know, in the perspective Of spiritual or cosmic forces far beyond man's understanding, War could possibly serve some useful Maternal purpose as a sign language, A challenge to try our souls - Even perhaps, relatively speaking, A constructive, spiritual purpose That is good.

  For polarity is part of the symmetry of nature That brings a relativity, a complementarity To many qualities in this life, To cause and effect, to predator and prey, Male and female, Creator and creature, Concrete and abstract, science and religion, Mortality and immortality, yin and yang, And other seeming opposites. Free will, one of the most puzzling of these, Has for its counterpart predestination, Which turns out to be really its expanded aspect, A sort of bird's~eye view of the familiar scene Beheld from one dimension more. And so it goes With body and mind, The first enmeshed in space, in time, The second free of both, Like poles of Earth and other paradoxes Which are, in a sense, Really just diffrrent sides Of the same thing.

  TRANSCENDENCE

  Have you ever wondered Why each year you live Seems to pass faster than the year before? There's a law at work here Called Transcendence, Influencing time and space and consciousness of self For each year lived has to be a smaller portion Of one's experience to date. To the year-old baby a year is a lifetime, To the ten-year-old a tenth as much, To the centenarian bat one percent of his experience While people he knows appear, bloom and die Like flowers in a garden.

  The same is as true of space as time. The baby learns the inch and foot Before he knows the yard, Then, as his horizon expands, The mile, the acre ... the light-year... Progression from the finite Toward the Infinite, you see. Yet, as you gain the mile, you do not lose the inch, Nor, as you gain the year, do you lose the minute or the hour, For finitude is a tool of learning, Learning the little before the big, The simple before the complex.

  Transcendence affects the self too, For one begins as a fertile egg, The seed soul, stirring, seeking, Becoming a pupil in the Soul School of Earth, Growing in consciousness, In awareness of other beings, Using the tools of finitude, The self in space and time, The while developing spiritually Through life, through death Death, which evolved only later in evolution because it had Survival value for the multicelled organisms - Death that we cannot live without.

  GERMINATION

  A nova is an exploding star, Climax in the life of a blazing world, An example of the cyclic vitality of all worlds That grow and mature, ferment, germinate.

  Germination happens only once per world, A crucial event amid the unfolding phases of life That develop mind, speech and spirituality In ways still scarcely known to history, To science, to philosophy.

  Earth, for example, third planet Of a modest star called Sun, Is germinating right now. After five billion years of slow, quiet evolvement Plus a few quick centuries of writing, printing, Industrial revolution, technological bloom And improved communication, Enabling her emerging mind for the first time To pool its knowledge, Suddenly in the twentieth century Earth, with her human population, Is practically exploding! Man has won the planetary tournament of evolution By dominating all competing forms of life, Speed of travel has climbed a thousandfold From the gallop of the horse To the whoosh of the space rocket, Revolutions have occurred in nearly every branch of learning, Man has explored not only his planet's entire surface But penetrated from the atom to the sky And into outer space.

  He is now seriously trying to unite his home world Politically and culturally, through standardization, Liberalization, free compulsory education for all. Even spiritual unity must soon loom as an attainable goal, An aspect of Earth 's flowering into a mature superorganism - All this in fulfillment of the natural, The inevitable, evolutionary process Of planetary germination.

  DIVINITY

  Who or What runs the Universe? Is there a plan behind the daisy, the hummingbird, The whale, the world? Who conceived the eye back in the primeval darkness Of early evolution? Who designed the fish's air bladder in the ancient deep As if foreseeing its future as a breathing lung Upon the dry land? And out of what beginning evolved the mind? By any stretch could mind have been mindlessly created? Does science have an answer To the Voice out of the Whirlwind Which asked Job "Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts?" Is the world really drifting along without pilot, Steering itself automatically, Running its own affairs at random? Could the Universe, just conceivably, Have created Itse if?

  Surely there is Mystery in this Universe, Not only somewhere and somewhen but everywhere everywhen And far; far beyond the scope of man's feeble Capacity to comprehend. For man, puny, mortal and finite, As he is in this nether phase, Is permitted to visualize neither an end to space Nor space without end; Nor can he even grasp a start or a finish of time, Nor any sort of beginning that has no beginning Nor any end that has no end. Hence the Mystery, The abiding, pervasive, universal Unknowability

  That many call by the name of God. But what matters it what you call It? It is abstruse, bewilderingly abstruse, and remains so Whether or no we accept that somehow by Its agency Out of utter nothingness has arisen Everything in the Universe.

  Its station plainly implies intelligence, Indeed Intelligence so far beyond the human As to justif' the adjective "Divine," And this seems to be relative. If a human adult represents divinity to a baby or an animal, So must the animal be divine to a vegetable, The vegetable to a mineral... Likewise, as wrote Paul to the Corinthians, "The foolishness of God is wiser than men, And there is presumably a hierarchy in Divinity above As well as below us - Even as the doings and thoughts of humanity and of Earth Are but a negligible jot In the eternal consciousness of God, Even as the horizon of knowledge expands outward from our planet Accompanied by the inexorable horizon of Mystery Which expands even faster and farther than knowledge, Leading man's consciousness To new dimensions.

  Thus doth Divinity Embrace all the other six mysteries of life Even though callow man comprehendeth it not, Even though the Mystery remaineth So far beyond earthly finitude That no eye but God's own Eye Hath the capacity to see GOD.

  -- End --

 

 

 
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