The Meaning of the Musical Tree

INTRODUCTIONWHAT DOES IT MEAN?We had the experience but missed the meaningT. S. Eliot, The Four QuartetsWhat does it mean? How many times we ask ourselves that question!Frankl wrote that to find meaning in onefs life was the primarymotivational force in man. Gurdjieff fs fundamental question was gWhatis the meaning and purpose of manfs life on earthh? Without meaning,life becomes only a dreary disillusionment, a mere stop-gap between birthand death. Since our human nature abhors a vacuum, our common searchturns towards filling the ever-present inner void. Our humanity urges usto fill in the empty space between the two points. What urges us is thewill to meaning: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?The Mysteries not only address these wrenching human questions, butafford them objective, mathematically-provable answers. The Mysteryteachings are all about the science of mediation. Mediation means thegmean between the extremes.h Without the calculable knowledge ofthe mean, we are the halt leading the blind; and all fall into the ditch ofignorance and discord.From ancient times, the keynote of the special training into the Mysteriesconcerned the vibratory laws of harmonics. Harmonics is the language ofinitiates. Even today, our scientists, peering into the ineluctable mysteries10 MITZI DEWHITTof Nature, recognize how the knowledge harmonics unveils the hidden,mysterious, underlying substructure of the visible material world inwhich we live. They call it string theory. However, they see only the tipof the iceberg, and fail to comprehend the vastness of the structure lyingbelow the surface. Consequently, their results give no real meaning totheir discoveries. As ancient cultures well knew, unless understood witha special cast of mind, the arid and secular ( Ital. secco, dry) knowledgeof mathematical harmonic ratios lead only to pedantic factual data that noone, except perhaps the pedants themselves, care to peruse. The sacredmeaning is lost.Meaning, one might say, is the value computed by dividing the sum oftwo extremes of a range of values by 2. Both means and meaning arevaluable as the connectors that join together the proverbial two ends of theoctave stick. Means are what come in between. As the ancient musicianswere at pains to point out, means provide the middle position. As thereconciling force, they represent the distinctive and valuable aspects ofour human nature.In the Timaeus, Plato expresses the importance of the mean that mediatesbetween the two incommensurable things: mind and body, allegorizedas fire and earth. However, the universal frame was not simply a surfaceplane (for which a single mean would have sufficed). Rather, it was asolid, gand solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but bytwo.h Therefore,God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth,and made them to have the same proportion so far as waspossible(as fire is to air, so is water to earth); and thus he boundand put together a visible and tangible heaven.