The Music of the Spheres

Imagine being in the womb.

You are held in liquid weightless space in warmth and love. This is all you have ever known. You are merged with an all-encompassing experience of being and becoming. The archetypal mother is all around you. A warm, glowing presence — of life, and love.

Within this experience your first perception of rhythm arises. Something unknown and un-nameable causes you to occasionally contract. At other times you relax and expand. Contraction and expansion, folding and unfolding: the harmonious laws that nurture your growth. You exist in the space in between.

Harmony is all around you. It is a force of love that creates and nurtures. It holds a pattern, a supremely intelligent, formative power. This harmony has different qualities. Sometimes a harmony will dissolve, recalibrate and form something new. It will encourage you to grow in a different direction, like a sunflower reorienting to face the sun. The harmony is constantly changing, and so are you.

You are in a state of non-thinking. It is also a state where physical senses are not yet needed. It is a purely “astral” state, where something outside is forming an internal reference. You are constantly “listening” (without physical ears) to where this external harmony is guiding you. You follow it because it is feeding you. It is helping you to incarnate, to be one, a singular manifest reference within the all. You follow the harmony because your destiny is calling you to do so. You know, deep down, that the harmony you are hearing has been uniquely created for you: it is your music. One day you will be able to consciously embody that harmony, to fulfil its purpose.

And one day, you leave this womb-like experience behind.

And the Harmony becomes silent.

That is why you are reading this book. If you could hear that harmony, no explanation would be necessary. You do not need to read books about Mozart’s piano concerti or Bach’s cantatas; you simply listen to them — for all that they wished to convey is revealed through the music. But in this case the harmony is silent, so a book is necessary.

But the Music of the Spheres was not always silent.

The stars once spoke to the Magi more than 2000 years ago, heralding Christ’s birth. Picture for a moment the image of the Magi following the Star of Bethlehem. Try and remove the memory of any romanticised depictions and find the essence of this symbolic image. Are you not filled with both wonder and mystery? The image is pervaded by an ancient knowing and reverence that we can barely comprehend today, but deep down we may still feel we can intuit such knowledge. What faculties enabled the Magi to know? According to Rudolf Steiner it was a spiritual, instinctive, atavistic perception of the starry heavens.

Looking at the starry heavens in olden times men did not merely see points or surfaces of light but something spiritual, something that made them able to describe the constellations as they did, for to them the several planets of our system were ensouled by living beings. … They spoke of the stars as beings endowed with soul and also of the minerals and the plants as beings endowed with soul. Rudolf Steiner, Search for the New Isis, GA 202 (1920)

The stars are soul beings, subtly harmonising. To refute this is to condemn them to an eternal, silent void. To accept this is to openly invite them to reveal themselves. Do they have voices? Do they have “personalities”? Do they really sing?

Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are…

A child-like understanding of the stars will be more helpful than a typical “adult” understanding. Did the stars really sing to us as we journeyed down to Earth, as the Waldorf kindergarten birthday story tells? Where do we come from? Why is it that we were once so intimately soothed by the sound of our mother singing us to sleep? Do we have an unconscious memory of a celestial pre-birth music?

And when the pupils of the Magi developed this particular faculty they were able to say: ‘Before I came down to this earth I had definite experiences with Mercury, with Sun, with Moon, with Saturn, with Jupiter.’ And this cosmic memory enabled them to behold the spiritual in the whole external world as well, to see the destiny of man on earth. They saw it out of their memory of existence before birth within the world of stars. Rudolf Steiner, Search for the New Isis, GA 202 (1920)

The arrival of the Magi is intertwined with the exquisite image of the Christ child. A divine birth has been “sung” and the wise have followed the music. These images fill the soul with the purest of devotional love. These images fill the being with the most exquisite of subtle sound, sound that can be inwardly listened to, but not physically reproduced. This sound gives us “spirit strength” and wisdom that comes from a far distant past.

How does the human being “hear” a cosmic tone? Does hearing it mean to resonate, as the classicists believed, with the divine “logos” in this very human body, whilst the world, by comparison, seems filled with noise? What is it like when this unshakable faith in the cosmic tone leads to ostracism and persecution?

Let us perceive this cosmic tone as resonance with the divine will. Such a cosmic tone must be sought in freedom, with unwavering steadfastness. It cannot be heard in an environment of systemic scientific, societal or religious dogma — although, to the true esotericist, the tone is everywhere, even where there is rigidity.

This sound will resolutely find a way to live in human souls — souls that are just as resolute. It will teach the soul humility, flexibility, reverence and strength, or it will remain elusive. It will strengthen the spirit, for its very nature is spirit. Materialistic egos will perceive this tone as a threat and will try and fight it. But it is not in the nature of the cosmic tone to fight, or to even have an ego. The cosmic tone purifies the ego. The cosmic tone is consummated in the “I am”, which is the ultimate mantra and the ultimate “music”.

Have you ever been ostracised or excluded because you dared to think freely? Was it because you heard an inner voice, a sound, a human tone that seemed much bigger than you, something you could not explain rationally but were compelled to follow?

In his 59-year life span, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) experienced ostracism, expulsion, excommunication, plague, witch trials, religious war, the death of a wife and three of his children; he also suffered from crippled hands and poor vision. Yet, the theme of his life was harmony. Harmony in adversity.

As a child, Kepler experienced the harmony of numbers. He astounded adults with his mathematical abilities. He was also in awe of the harmony of the starry realm and was fortunate enough to live in the most exciting time of astronomical discovery to date — the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe and the invention of the telescope.

Kepler is best known for his three laws of planetary motion. Because of this he appears to be a thoroughly “scientific man”, and indeed he was. But actually, Science prefers not to talk about his main interest — the harmony of the cosmos. By the 17th century, this theme had been relegated to the domain of Platonic philosophy, not science. Kepler, however, insisted on a scientific method — an Aristotelian approach to a Platonic theme, a marriage of earthly empirical knowledge with the intuited wisdom of the heavens.

Religion was just as important to Kepler as science. After graduating from the university of Tübingen, he wanted to become a minister, but was persuaded instead to become a teacher. Although a Lutheran, Kepler had his own unique views on God. He followed the heliocentric view of Copernicus, believing the sun to be the “principle source of motive power in the universe”.¹ For not wavering in his beliefs, he was refused the Eucharist in church and was eventually excommunicated. He heard how his colleague, Galileo, was forced to face the Roman Inquisition and he experienced religious persecution first hand when his own mother was arrested and accused of being a witch. For that, she spent 14 months in prison. In the last years of his life Kepler witnessed the horrific Würzburg witch trials in which 900 people were executed.

Yet he died, hopefully in peace, having proved (to those who would listen) that despite the apparent dissonance of life, there is indeed an underlying harmony in the world and beyond.

Kepler provided convincing proof of a harmonious musical-geometric universe. He empirically proved Plato’s vision. After him, the inevitable fragmentation of science, art and religion set in.

Kepler’s proof

Kepler’s first attempt at finding mathematical proof of the harmony of the spheres was a geometric construction using the Platonic solids. The cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron could be imagined as fitting between the spheres of the planets. This model, however, assumed that the planetary orbit was circular in shape. Kepler later disproved his own theory, and that of every astronomer since Ptolemy, with the first and second laws of planetary motion: the planets moved not in a circular orbit, but in an elliptical one!

An elliptical orbit, however, presented a philosophical problem: it did away with the divine perfection of a circle. Every culture, religion, and especially the Pythagoreans revered the circle and, in an age of severe religious intolerance, it would be difficult to convince anyone of a rather awkward “mistaken” shape such as that of an ellipse, even if supported by science. But with the publication of arguably his greatest work, Harmonices Mundi in 1619, Kepler had found a property of the ellipse that was even more perfect than that of a circle: the geometry of the planetary ellipse was musical! There was, after all, a divine plan behind the ellipse and it seemed harmonious proportions were the key. God was a Pythagorean, and a musician!

In simple terms, the great discovery was as follows: in an elliptical orbit, the path of each planet is punctuated by two points of perihelion, where it comes closest to the sun and two points of aphelion, where it is furthest from the sun. Kepler calculated the distance covered by a given planet in 24 hours at each of these points. Due to the gravitational pull of the sun, the planets moved faster at perihelion than at aphelion. The distance covered at perihelion and aphelion was expressed as a ratio. In every instance, he found a simple whole number ratio that could also be expressed as a concordant musical interval. He mainly found ratios that corresponded with the major chord. Furthermore, the aphelion or perihelion of one planet, e.g. Mercury, was in harmonious proportion with another, e.g. Venus. If all the ratios of the solar system were played together, let’s say in the key of C, a wonderful concordant sound arises.

Saturn	Aphelion a Perihelion b	a:b = 4:5 a:d = 1:3 c:d = 5:6	c  e c  g e  g
Jupiter	Aphelion c Perihelion d	b:c = 1:2 c:f = 1:8 e:f = 2:3	c  c’ c  c’ c  g
Mars	Aphelion e Perihelion f	d:e = 5:24 e:h = 5:12	e  g e  g
Earth	Aphelion g Perihelion h	g:h = 15:16 f:g = 2:3 g:k = 3:5	b  c’ c  g e  g
Venus	Aphelion i Perihelion k	i:k = 24:25 h:i = 5:8 i:m = 1:4	g  g# e  c’ c  c’
Mercury	Aphelion l Perihelion m	l:m = 5:12 k:l = 3:5	e  g e  g

The above table displays Kepler’s measurements of planetary perihelions and aphelions, reduced to simple ratios. In the far right column, the ratios are expressed as notes in the key of C. It is striking how often a major chord (c–e–g) is sounded.

For those who may doubt the accuracy of early 17th century telescopes, or who suspect that Kepler was trying too hard to squeeze the numbers into a Platonic ideal, Kepler’s findings have since been proven to be “more than” accurate. Kepler himself noted some deviations from harmonic ideals, but these have actually been proven to be less deviant than Kepler thought. The real proof of Kepler’s discovery, however, lies in the fact that the “newer” planets — Neptune, Uranus and Pluto — unavailable to Kepler’s telescope, also obey the same basic harmonic principles.

Scientists may consider the harmonic ratios of perihelion and aphelion as having no real significance. To imagine there could be any “soulful” or “musical” properties inherent in a planetary orbit is certainly pushing the scientific paradigm. But, as we shall later see, similar musical laws appear not just in the orbits of the planets but in crystals, chemistry, biology, the human form and internal body rhythms. The proportions of the major chord appear regularly in these phenomena. Anyone who trivialises or overlooks such consistent musical evidence is in fact unscientific.

Kepler himself was convinced that musical harmony lies at the root of creation. In his worldview, geometry exists before creation, but geometry in turn is a product of a divinely ordained harmony.

Music, in the absolute sense, is the invisible geometry of the cosmos, a delicate tracery of frequencies that harmonize with each other and from which all matter manifests. Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi (1619)

Kepler’s discovery encourages us to think radically differently from the traditional scientific way, which is characterised by causal thinking and quantifying all material phenomena. Kepler does not have the cause, but the end point, harmony, underpinning his research. Being convinced of a universal law of harmony, he then finds a solution to prove it.

For the scientist, the musical intervals are maybe a “charming” result of the elliptical orbits. For Kepler, the orbits have been bent into an ellipse by the musically harmonious Will of the Creator. His spiritual conviction of a harmonious universe and relentless pursuit to prove it was a gift we are just beginning to unpack. A scientifically-provable universal harmony is something we could certainly do with right now. But, will anyone listen?

1. Kenneth S. Schmitz, Physical Chemistry: Multidisciplinary Applications in Society (2018)
2. from Joscelyn Godwin, Cosmic Music, Musical Keys to the Interpretation of Reality (1989)

On 8 July 1680, English polymath Robert Hooke sprinkled flour onto a glass plate, ran a violin bow along the edge of it and observed the intricate geometric patterns caused by the tonal vibration. A century later, in 1787, Ernst Chladni, a German physicist and musician, did the same thing. The mesmerising formations are now called “Chladni figures” or “Chladni patterns”.

In Hooke’s and Chladni’s experiments, a musical note becomes visible. In fact, we are not even talking of music as we know it yet: this is just one note, one frequency. When we behold a phenomena such as this, our rather cumbersome thought patterns scramble to make sense of it: does this mean sound is not just sound? Does it have a visible form as well?

Indeed, a regular frequency does not just have a sound quality to it, something that might affect us in a pleasing (or not so pleasing) way on a soul level; it also has an invisible, hidden aspect. It rearranges matter — not just arbitrarily, but in harmonious archetypal geometric patterns.¹ Furthermore, lurking away in the depths of our soul may be another revelation: for these vibrational alignments to become musical, an inherent wisdom that organises the tones must be present. Through images such as the Chladni patterns, the rational-logical mind that seeks to see proof for everything is finally able to observe the inherent, visually apparent wisdom of music. The forms and tones are indeed organised into a cosmic mathematical symphony. Harmony takes on a new level of meaning once it becomes visibly manifest.

Music is a formative force. Musical tones are not just pleasing to the ear, they rearrange matter into beautiful geometric shapes. These are the archetypal shapes of creation: squares, circles, stars, curves and waves. The architecture of creation matches that of music, and this is no coincidence. When our eyes see the rearrangement of matter through tone, we have little doubt that tone, with its inherent geometry, precedes form.

Johannes Kepler stated:

Insofar as life takes precedence over the body, and form over material, the harmonious takes precedence over the simple geometrical ornament. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

And

Geometry existed before the creation. Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi (1619)

When Kepler proved that the planets were, in fact, singing in harmony, he was acutely aware that this song was also maintaining the geometry of the universe.

The Will force of nature

When we experience the formation of Chladni figures, there arises a feeling that an intelligent “Will force” is working through the tones. This Will force does not seem to lie in nature, but beyond it. Something sounds into nature from another realm.

If we were to describe this realm we would have to say it is a realm of harmony; harmony that manifests as both geometry and number.

The German polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) wrote that music is “an occult exercise of arithmetic on the part of the soul, acting unconsciously”.² This “unconscious arithmetic exercise” may give us great aesthetic pleasure, but there’s so much more to music than arithmetical pleasure. “Unconscious arithmetic” is merely a sign of something much greater underneath:

…the arithmetical proportions, to which it [music] may be reduced, are related, not as the thing signified, but merely as a sign. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818)

The arithmetic of music is a sign of a Higher Will. The crux, as expressed by Schopenhauer, is:

Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself. [It is] a copy of the will itself. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818)

The universe is manifest through God’s Will as tone-number-geometry. Such a grandiose vision of the “inner nature of music and the experience of tone”³ is, at first, too much for the modern ego to digest. As we have seen, the Music of the Spheres has not always been a popular theme. Since the great materialistic “triumphs” of the 19th and 20th centuries, any tonal-spiritual origin of the universe is met with great scepticism. We prefer a Big Bang to a God that sings the universe into existence. Even amongst musicians, music’s definition is usually one pertaining to soul (emotion and feeling). Rarely do we find a musician bold enough to state that their music is a reflection of God’s creative Will — that it is helping to maintain and nurture material existence.

Men have practiced music in all ages without being able to account for this [the Will force in music]; content to understand it directly, they renounce all claim to an abstract conception of this direct understanding itself. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818)

Music is said to ultimately merge us with spirit, with the divine Will itself; but in this age it is more connected to the soul (emotions, feelings) (See Part Three: Physical, Soul and Spirit Sound). In the hands of many a composer, it becomes a mere tool with which to manipulate a particular feeling. The listener is so consumed by the volume of emotional experience that they cannot recognise any objective arithmetic, let alone the formative geometry of creation.

But what is the modern composer or musician to make of the Chladni patterns? Is it merely a fascinating occurrence in nature? An inexplicable anomaly?

If you take a thin sheet of brass and cover it with uniformly graded sand and then draw a violin bow across the edge, the sand arranges itself in quite clear lines… The sound effects a distribution of physical substance; such figures are called Chladni sound patterns. When the spiritual sound of the Music of the Spheres resounded through the universe, it arranged the planets and their relationships this way. What you see in the universe, that was arranged by this creative sound of the Godhead. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Symbols and Signs, GA 101 (1907)

From patterns in the sand to the arrangement of planets… how do we begin to grasp this so-called “spiritual sound”?

1. There are many online examples of “Cymatics”, the study of visible effects of sound and vibration.
2. G.W. von Leibnitz, Letters
3. the book title of an important series of lectures by Rudolf Steiner

The ear is so strongly formed from the music of the spheres that it remains protected from gravity. The ear is also so disposed in the fluid that gravity cannot reach it; this ear is really not a citizen of the earth, in its whole organisation it is a citizen of the highest spiritual worlds. Rudolf Steiner, The Ear, GA 218 (1922)

We require help in order to listen. We have seen that immense forces of will must be summoned. Inner will and outer will. There comes a point in our listening where we realize we cannot do it alone. Nature listens, the cosmos listens. As we surrender to this universal listening we come to acknowledge the higher members of our organism and beyond. The hierarchies beyond the human realm are involved in human listening. When we truly listen we become citizens of the higher worlds, and it is through the act of listening that we obtain knowledge of these worlds.

The ear is a mystery. Its outer form is a spiral. Its inner most form — the cochlea — is another spiral. How does a spiral help us to listen? In between the spirals, we have the three tiniest bones of the body. Why do we need bones in order to hear? And why are they so oddly shaped? And in between the two spirals, we also have the gravity-free liquid atmosphere of the semi-circular canals. Again, why?

As a “citizen of the highest spiritual worlds”, the ear is a fascinating mystery that we can only begin to unpack here. Rudolf Steiner describes the whole ear organism as a mini human being within the skull.¹ And the skull itself is another human being within the whole.² Clearly we also have the elements of earth (bones), water (the semi-circular canals), and air (filtered by the ear drum) in dynamic exchange within the ear, tempered by the fire of our will. The ear is a microcosm of the macrocosm.

Let us also look at the ear’s location. The jawbone is the only moving part of the skull. The ear rests on the other side of the jaw’s hinge joint. Imaginatively, we can sense that the movement of the jaw is transferred to the non-movement of the ear. The job of the ear is the opposite of that of the jaw. The jaw moves whilst the ear is moved. It is entirely selfless in that it allows itself to be entirely taken over by an outer vibration. The act of listening is not so much a “doing will” as a “yielding will”. In true listening, we learn to yield to another Will.

Separating the etheric experience

We have seen how closely the Will is connected to the etheric body. When we yield to another Will, we yield to their etheric essence. The task of the ear is to separate the air element of a vibration and synthesise its etheric essence.

It is the ear’s task—if I may express it in this way—actually to overcome the tone’s resounding in the air and to hurl the pure etheric experience of tone back into our inner being. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, GA 283 (1923)

The ear perceives the etheric nature of the sound. It transfers the living nature of sound to the whole organism.

Living sound organism converses with living sound organism. And let us add to this picture a witness to this whole process: the cosmos is listening too. All parties are transformed by this etheric conversation.

A musician may relate to this listening way-of-being. A musician seeks life in the tones, melodies and harmonies. She plays with the astral archetypes of music, witnessed by a participating subtle listening of the earth. The moment intellectual understanding interferes, the flow is blocked, the language is lost. A deadening occurs. When musicians play together, the ethers dance. The air becomes thick with life. We can almost touch this alive space.

This kind of listening activity is prayer-like. With the help of the hierarchies, we keep the spirits dancing, we listen for and potentize the etheric. As soon as mentalizing occurs, we freeze the life force into something that cannot live. True listening, therefore cannot happen from the head. It must descend to the etheric heart. We will explore heart listening in later chapters. And we will explore the subtle layers of the etheric.

True listening requires separating out the etheric essence. It requires our conscious will. Yet we can also surrender our listening to a greater Will. We do this every night.

In the activity of sleep, our etheric body is refreshed. Our whole being becomes an unconscious listening organ that harnesses healing etheric life force.

Steiner tells us that each night in deep sleep, we ascend to the realm of subtle music and form, know as Devachan.³ There, our souls dance in the Music of the Spheres. We are invigorated, healed and refreshed by this nightly homecoming experience. Is it possible to retain this experience in waking life? When we awaken does the pain of our sentient body remind us of the hardening and decaying forces of the physical world? Or can we strive for our souls to win over the pain of gravity?

It is possible for one who returns from sleep with the inner vibrations to intensify these tones and to perceive the victory of the sentient soul over the sentient body, so that the soul feels itself stronger than the body. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, GA 283 (1923)

If we awaken to a mood of prayer, of heart listening and wilful surrender to the subtle sounds, we will build a connection with the etherised cosmos. In the next chapters we will consolidate this heightened form of listening.

1. In The Ear, GA 218 (1922), Steiner describes the three ear bones as a transformed leg (hip, knee and shin) and the cochlea as a transformed abdomen. The head of this mini human being is immersed in the brain.
2. The skull has a rounded, closed thinking aspect in the upper third; a semi-open feeling, breathing/exchanging aspect in the middle part (nose and ears); and a willing/digestive aspect in the mouth, the most open part of the skull, and jaw, the only moving part of the skull. The skull is a mini version of the three-fold human form.
3. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, Lecture II, GA 283 (1923)

There is a locus, where the Imagination of the Mother and the Inspiration of the Father commune in ecstatic willed harmony.

That locus is the conscious Human Being, who stands between heaven and earth, the human who is both physical and spiritual.

There is also a locus where the physical and spiritual aspects of the Human Being commune even more intensely in ecstatic willed harmony.

That locus is the heart.

The organs of the abdomen and thorax are sensing organs, closely aligned with cosmic Will. They are linked with the planets and hierarchies. Below the diaphragm, the Spleen is connected with Saturn, the liver with Jupiter and the gall with Mars. Above the diaphragm, the lungs are connected with Mercury and the heart with the Sun. Balancing the two sides of the diaphragm are the kidneys, connected with Venus.¹

These organs listen to the cosmic Will and transform physical and etheric substance. It is wrong to believe, as I did for many years, that they can do their work independently of the cosmic Will. We may have been told that consciousness can never shine a light “down there”. Yet we know people who “listen with their liver”, feel things “in their waters”, have a “gut feeling”. It is a dreamy consciousness that feels into the organs below the diaphragm. The listening may not be as awake as with the ear, but it is nevertheless real. We can learn to listen here as well. It is a vastly different type of listening compared to that of the ear.

Somewhere in between, mediating between the poles of above and below, physical and spiritual, is the heart.

We have seen how the ear transforms sound into an etheric essence. This essence is then digested and made meaningful to the living human soul. The ear seems to specialise in converting sound that travels through the air. The heart, with no direct access to air waves, listens more subtly.

Traditionally, biologists speak of the heart as a mechanical pump. Wise ones, however, speak of the heart as a hub of intuitive wisdom. The vision we choose has enormous consequences.

The heart is a listening organ, vastly different from the ear, and the polar opposite from being a mechanical object.

The heart is capable of listening to the world Will, akin to our description of Father Sky. It is a resonance organ. It resonates with the supreme architect in the present moment. It listens above and below, physical and spiritual. It synthesises the music, then sends its resonance to that liquid part of ourselves, our blood, so that world Will resounds in our body.

A further purification of the blood takes place in the choroid plexus in the brain. Here, the blood becomes the cerebrospinal fluid. This incredibly fine liquid, the symbolic “water of life”, pulses with its own rhythm that is intricately aligned with the cosmos. Of this pulsing liquid, Steiner says:

we carry this Apollo’s lyre within us, upon which the cosmos plays in us… Rudolf Steiner, Art and its Appreciation, GA 271 (1909)

When spirit consciously unites with physical in our blood and cerebrospinal fluid, we awaken to Intuition. This alchemical process can only happen through two things: self effort and grace.

By self effort, we mean the kind of effortless effort that we have been learning about in the listening process: a surrender, a willed allowing. By grace, we mean the Will of the Supreme that wills to fulfil itself in the physical realm.

Intuitive listening is more subtle than any form of listening we have discussed until now. It enters a new realm of listening where the word “listening” itself needs redefinition.

Redefining Listening

All forms of listening until now have been received from an outward source, then internalised and integrated into the human soul. We have tried to lead the soul gently to spirit. We have discovered the wall of prejudice and emotion that has prevented us from listening deeply; the wall has been challenged and allowed to crumble. A key point to this listening, and one we have not needed to spell out until now, is that the source of sound, energy, wisdom or vibration has been external. We, of course, experience separation from that which is “external”. It is true that our sense of separation has diminished greatly: we could not have discussed Mother Earth and Father Sky without surrendering this sense of separation.

But now we come to a place where “surrendering separation” is not so much an act of personal will, but a much greater Will. We are now conscious that Supreme Will is working within us. We have exercised this “surrendering separation” to the point where it becomes being. “Surrendering separation” has not become “automatic”, it has become intertwined with our conscious being. We are connected to a higher surrendering-willing that happens through us.

The heart knows no separation. The mind is ready to call separation an illusion, but the heart simply exists permanently in non-separation. Even, saying “permanently” and “non-separation” implies there is such a thing as “non-permanence” or “separation”; the heart simply exists in the permanent now. It is entirely connected to time, in that all time is now-time. It cannot relate to segregated time as in seconds, minutes, days and years. We are still listening to our prejudices and beliefs if we are attached to past and future, separation, external, internal.

The mind must necessarily conceive of the heart as receiving external sound, but this very attachment to “external” takes away from the heart’s intense feeling of vast interiority. For the heart, external is perceived as internal, and internal is perceived as external. The heart unites the poles. When we listen to the heart’s intense knowing we are pulled into an expansive outer and inner world simultaneously. We travel far and wide, whilst remaining so very intimately within our bodies. The experience of being, “here and there”, “far and close”, “external and internal”, is ecstatic heart experience; it can never be fully comprehended by the mind. We come to live in timeless paradox, a place of great nourishment for the heart.

The mind will naturally want to name the experience of the Heart, to categorise it, remember it, associate it, understand it. There is no need to stop the mind from “doing its thing”, but the wisdom of the heart, once raised to consciousness, will look on, amused, without the need to pass comment. It is what it is. Heart awareness does not need to dissolve anything, or create anything.

Heart awareness does not “need to do” anything. Yet it is an organ of strength, similar to will. Its will is in its receptivity. It cannot “do” receptivity. Yet the intensity of this receptivity becomes very strong, like non-doing doing. It sweeps up “things” that are in its way. It releases these “things” from their grip on our soul, things like automatic habits of thinking, reactive emotions, mental wanderings and judgements.² Such “things” bind us to the past or future. They also bind us to unconscious beliefs that live in our etheric bodies. Heart awareness brings new life to our etheric bodies. It brings the universal now, the dance of creation into our bloodstream, purifying it.

Alchemy

The heart “etherises” the blood. In an alchemical process, it transforms anything maintaining the illusion of “physical” and “fixed” (base metal) into spiritual light (gold).

If we want to begin to understand this alchemical process, a process that ultimately cannot be grasped with the mind alone but perhaps through a living picture, we may look at the geometry of the heart. The particular geometry of the heart creates a vortex. The heart “spins” the blood. If we imagine water flowing through a funnel, a vortex is created, revolving around a vacuum of intense energy. The funnel acts as an amplifier of energy. In simple terms, we can imagine our heart as a funnel receiving the harmony of the cosmos, and imprinting this harmony into the blood. This image, although most probably imperfect, is at least more true than the image of a pump.

A mechanical pump is programmed to pump volumes of liquid in precise amounts at regular intervals. The “music” of a mechanical pump is without nuance, subtlety and creativity. As such it can only bring static, predictable, rather soulless sound, that we would hesitate to call “music”. At least this sound-image, if held to be true, may bring a sense of security to a chaotic world. Some would rather have a mechanistic world view, no matter how flimsy the evidence.³

Perceiving the heart as a cosmic receiver, amplifier and imprinter presents us with a paradigm shift. If held to be true, one must ask oneself “what is it that the heart listens to?” Perceiving the inaudible music of the heart is an act of faith. But just as when we first receive “imaginations” that correspond, and then “inspiration” that connects, intuition reveals itself in the body with utter certainty, an inner knowing. If we are not willing to hear this music, we are not ready to transform. Vulnerability, faith, an attitude of wonder and reverence, crystal clear thinking, heightened sensitivity to feeling and dedication to growth are prerequisites on the path to intuitive listening.

Turning inside out

So what is the heart listening to? That with which the heart resonates, is also resonating, is also listening. The heart receives the sound of an earth and cosmos that in themselves are listening. The universal language is one of listening, listening in resonance. The heart is the perfect organ for this.

We have raised the possibility of listening to a source that is not felt as external. We are so programmed to see and hear the world as something “around” us or “in front of us”, as a separate object or multiple objects. But at this stage, we require another paradigm shift. Yes, this phrase “paradigm shift” is in danger of becoming a cliché.

It seems absurd to question the validity of our physical senses, without which we would never have a reference for the world, no knowledge of the external world, no science. We must state the obvious: they are focused on outer phenomena, convincing us so thoroughly of an outer reality. But the heart too is a sense organ, not so much a physical one. With awareness, it can be raised to the level of legitimising a different reality than that which the physical senses illumine. Compared with the reality the physical senses give us, heart reality will seem unfamiliar, dreamlike and unreal at first. But it will work it’s magic, until we are ready to receive it in all its legitimacy and perfection. At that point, the world may turn inside out…

1. Rudolf Steiner, Man’s Inner Cosmic System, GA 128 (1911)
2. Robert Sardello’s book, Heartfulness, expounds this beautifully
3. According to Thomas Cowan, in The Heart is Not a Pump (2020), the mechanical heart pump is a physical impossibility. If the blood vessels of one person were laid end to end, it would encircle the world approximately three times. The force required to send so much sticky liquid through so many vessels and capillaries would require a machine about 10,000 times stronger than what the human heart, a small muscle with thin walls, could possibly do. (Cowan draws on research by Ralph Marinelli, et al.)