Harmony
I love music. Music has always been an important part of my life. Growing up in the church of Christ I took pride in how loud I sang. We sang hymns without musical instruments, simply a cappella. That was our thing. But it was great because I learned to sing in harmony. Without musical instruments I had to listen to the other singers and learn the parts from them. I loved to sing the bass lines.
Later I learned to play instruments and read music. I learned some music theory as well as getting some idea of how wave forms work and harmonize.
Harmony is a construct of wave forms. It starts with the root note. It’s the lowest note played. The lowest note on a six-string guitar is an “E”. It forms the structure that the harmony is built upon. Every subsequent note is built mathematically upon the root. The wave itself is described as having frequency and amplitude. The frequency is the number of times per second that the wave repeats itself and amplitude is how big the wave gets within the cycle.
Harmony is dependent on the frequency. To create a harmonious sound you need to divide the root frequency into parts and make another sound that has a higher frequency. In the major scale, the root frequency would be multiplied by 3 for one note and by 5 for the next note. The sound will be more harmonious the more accurately the sound is generated that matches the multiple of the root frequency. When two wave forms are not in harmony, the stronger wave form will cause the energy of the weaker wave form to be dissipated and lost. However, if a weaker wave form is harmonized with the stronger wave form it will continue indefinitely.
So what is the point of this lesson? Well, I’ve been thinking about eternal life. Speculating on how it might function, how it might be possible. Now, I’m a rationalist, I have to have some kind of rational way of thinking it might be possible for me to actually accept the possibility that it is possible. If you read some uncertainty in that statement, you read it correctly.
So I’m speculating, considering possibilities and I think of harmony. Let us say that our consciousness is a wave form. It is a complex, three-dimensional wave form caused by the electro-magnetic impulses in our brains. All of the swirls of our gray matter forming a tightly woven electro-magnetic wave that we can see and measure with instruments of science.
Our wave form is energy, just as a note from an instrument is a wave of energy passing through air to create sound. It is a wave form that is dependent upon the brain and the body to sustain it. But if I play a note on an instrument, that note will continue until it is dissipated by other ambient sounds. The energy doesn’t disappear, energy cannot be destroyed, it is simply dissipated as heat. Energy can change form, but it cannot cease to exist.
I have speculated that God is the consciousness of the universe. A complex wave form sustained by the universe itself. I have further speculated that God’s consciousness must be unbiased due to his eternal nature. So it seems reasonable to me to speculate that the way to have eternal life is to harmonize my consciousness with the stronger, more powerful consciousness. If I train my consciousness to be unbiased in all its reasoning, I train it to be in harmony with God and the universe itself. A wave form that is harmonized with the stronger wave form maintains its coherence even after the instrument has stopped playing. A biased consciousness runs the risk of being dissipated as heat. I don’t think that would be pleasant, it might be hell…
Of course, this is just speculation, playing with ideas and seeing what kind of connections I can make. But if I make Pascal’s wager to the religious, those who are biased against others because of their faith, it could be that your bias against any group or individual or idea could get you dissipated as heat. Better to be safe and train your consciousness to an unbiased state of reason. I wonder if that’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Judge not that ye be not judged.”
Read MoreEvery artist needs a philosophy
When I was a kid everyone used to tell me what a great artist I was. I was very good at drawing and copying what I saw. My eye hand coordination was excellent. I worked at 6 Flags amusement park doing portraits and caricatures during the summer. I was pretty good. But I wasn’t really an artist.
Art is about the expression of truth as the artist sees it. When I was a kid I didn’t understand much of anything, I had a good childhood and I just went along with the flow. I had no great truth that I had discovered about myself that needed expressing.
Truth leads to understanding and understanding leads to the ability to live in harmony. That’s my point of view anyway. So I have set out to understand three truths. One, understanding the truth of nature. Two, understanding the truth of my fellow man. Three, understanding the truth of myself.
With the desire for these truths firmly entrenched as a part of me I can now follow my feelings about what I see to guide the camera. What I see is filtered through my emotions. I need both a philosophy to filter that emotion and the technical skill with the camera to capture it.
If you want your art to have more meaning, you need to have a deeper and more meaningful philosophy. Technical skills alone will not create great art. Your philosophy needs to be something that is unique to you for you to have a unique creative eye.
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