Gurdjieff, String Theory, Music

By Mitzi DeWhitt

As the third in a musicological trilogy that seeks objective answers to physical and metaphysical questions by way of musical ratios and proportions, this book may start with the acoustical properties of vibrating strings, but it certainly does not stop there. Rather, it goes on to attack some of the thorniest issues facing quantum physics today, including why string theory, as it is presently conceived, doesnt work; what is missing in the physicists understanding of missing information; and how the real cause underlying the perceived inflation of the universe is, in fact, due to the power laws inherent in vibrating strings. The surprising answers are neither wholly mathematical nor totally philosophical, but result from the reconciling perspective of music theory, the real M-theory. Moving beyond the sterile and secular world-view of the physicists, the author introduces into the equation the sacred metaphysical soul principle, now viewed as the holographic membrane whose sole function is to gather and store information and thus serve as the anti-entropic force within the universe. The properties of the soul, being movement and expansion, have long been associated with the figure called the lambdoma, and with the ancient diatonic scale that naturally forms within it, known as The Scale of the Soul of the World and Nature. With uncanny insight, the author shows how there is not one, but three musical scalesdiatonic, chromatic, and enharmonicwhich form of their own accord within the expanding lambdoma. These informing musical scales become the obvious links to the three branes of the quantum physicists, at the same time providing substantive evidence for why a three brain system is absolutely essential for the completion of the soul of manan idea that students of the Gurdjieff Work will find very familiar, and perhaps very intriguing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 8, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465332073

Mitzi DeWhitt

Mitzi DeWhitt is a music theorist, piano teacher, composer, and the author of the landmark books, Aristoxenus’s Ghost, Nearly All and Almost Everything, Gurdjieff, String Theory, Music and The Meaning of the Musical Tree. She resides in the Philadelphia area.

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Copyright © 2006 by Mitzi DeWhitt.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

Gurdjieff, String Theory, and Music

CHAPTER ONE

Rings, Strings, and Holograms

CHAPTER TWO

The Real Lambdoma

CHAPTER THREE

Roads, Crossroads, and Wormholes

CHAPTER FOUR

Inflation Theory

CHAPTER FIVE

Branes and Brains

PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

To Ravi and Shimon,

and fees and pies and promises,

and time to finish living.

INTRODUCTION

Gurdjieff, String Theory, and Music

This book is the third of a three-part trilogy that explains the Gurdjieff Work in musicological terms. Specifically, the three books address the three totally separate systems working in the common presence of a man. Each system has its own predispositions inherent to it alone. To put it in Gurdjieff’s words, which are found in From the Author in the last few pages of Beelzebub’s Tales, "a special corresponding correct education is indispensably necessary for each of these three parts, and not such a treatment as is given nowadays and also called ‘education.’ Only then can the ‘I’ which should be in a man, be his own ‘I.’"1

As a (then young) musicologist, reading these words made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, because they were practically identical with the words written by the ancient Pythagorean Greeks. (The Foundation librarian, when I told her this quite a few years ago, said, But of course, the Work is a Pythagorean mystery school.) Both the ancient Pythagoreans and Gurdjieff were unequivocal about the fact that (1) finding the I required study in the proper way; (2) its discovery proceeded by way of objective reason, by a mind properly prepared; (3) this mental preparation demanded the special education that takes into account all three parts—body, mind, and soul; and (4) each part must be considered in its own right, its fundamental principles carefully studied and understood by the mind. The deeper I delved into the Work ideas, the more I was struck by the similarities between Gurdjieff’s words and those of the ancient Greek musical scientists who were vexed by the question of how to study objectively, with reason, the three parts in order to come to the true self. The Greek solution, down to a man, was musical mathematics, the study of ratio and proportion. In other words, to know the self required the great objective knowledge of vibration.

More and more, I saw how Gurdjieff placed huge importance upon the laws of vibration which, he claimed, give the possibility, though approximately, of recognizing reality. Experiments into this, according to him, most important branch of scientific knowledge, were made by his fictional but most highly favored personages. These included Gornahoor Harharkh, great scientist and essence friend of Beelzebub himself; King-Too-Toz, a genuine learned being who, for his very detailed theory of vibrations, made the experimental musical instrument called the Lav-Merz-Nokh; and Hadji-Asvatz-Troov, the Bokharan dervish, perhaps the last great sage of the earth who by his knowledge of cosmic vibrations was the sole and unique being who recognized the true nature of the extraterrestrial Beelzebub.

The laws of vibration were shown comprehensive treatment in the discussion of the music theory of the ancient Chinese. Gurdjieff called this ancient Chinese musical science Shat-Chai-Mernis. With great care, he elucidated theories of vibration discovered in ancient China in the distant past. These theories—especially the Chinese seven-toned subdivision of sound and the special branch of knowledge called the law of ninefoldness—related true information about the first two fundamental cosmic laws: the law of Heptaparaparshinokh and the law of Triamazikamno. From this treatment of the material and from the hint given about the twin brothers Choon-Kil-Tez and Choon-Tro-Pel, great terrestrial learned beings, I realized that this ancient musical science, Shat-Chai-Mernis, concerned information about the two different tuning systems—the perfect cyclic and the just divisive.

In the Guide and Index to Gurdjieff’s All and Everything, no fewer than four pages of referrals were shown for this topic of vibrations. And it was not just vibration per se that concerned Gurdjieff but the quality of vibration that mattered—a value concept. His writings clearly harked back to a tradition which adhered to quality in tone, which imbued number with meaning, which listened to the music of the spheres. In the Western world, we call this tradition Pythagorean. Sure enough, in Gurdjieff’s writings, one of the cofounders of the Club of Adherents of Legominism was none other than Pythagoras himself. It seemed obvious to me that Gurdjieff was pointing in the direction of ancient Greece, that at least some of what was being transmitted through Beelzebub’s Tales came from Pythagorean number theory.

As study groups trying to understand Beelzebub’s Tales formed and disbanded, and as the members of these groups left, disheartened by their lack of comprehension, I was becoming ever more convinced that even though on the surface Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson seemed to be a ponderous book of subjective imponderables, deep in its depths it hid the secret and sacred objective science of antiquity. In fact, I was sure of it. If there was to be found a primary thread guiding the reader through Gurdjieff’s labyrinthine teachings, the study of vibrations was that thread. Now I knew why I had spent years in musty, dusty university libraries studying decaying Greek manuscripts and why my graduate work had veered off in the direction of music theory and musicology rather than performance. Suddenly my life had a purpose. In religious terms, one could say that I felt called.

At this time in my life, I was fortunate to have moved to Philadelphia and to have been put in Thomas Forman’s group. Since Mr. Forman himself had done quite a lot of study into music and its laws, he well understood my enthusiasm and strongly encouraged me to pursue my musicological study of Work ideas. (I became so prolific that he joked that he would soon have to move out of his New York apartment and into a large house in order to store all my stacks of papers and drawings.) When Forman died, James George (who did the foreword to the first book, Aristoxenus’s Ghost) inherited me, and he also encouraged my theoretical studies. (In fact, he said they are the real reason why I was put here on earth and told me that my responsibility is to bring these truths out into the open—a formidable and daunting task.)

Returning to the books themselves, I would be the first to admit that Aristoxenus’s Ghost is a very hard read, and Nearly All and Everything is not much better. While some of that is my fault, and can be blamed on my inability as a writer, I doubt that others, even seasoned authors, could have put it much clearer. At any rate, none have tried to do what I have done, which is to take two monumentally difficult subjects—the Work ideas and ancient music theory—and show not only their fundamental relationships but even their common derivation. The third book is even more daring (some might say audacious) and attempts to show the commonality between music, physics, and the Gurdjieffian ideas. Most of the material is brand-new and does not come from any book. It is my own. Not only that, I am not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination. These facts notwithstanding, those skeptics who will wish to dismiss me as an upstart cannot, on principle, dismiss what has been discovered, for the musical information brought forth is pristine. It is my hope that physicists will see how the correlations with music theory can edify for them some thorny questions concerning string theory.

As already stated, my books comprise a three-part trilogy. Each book represents one whole and complete system. All three systems are sometimes represented by the square, the triangle, and the circle. (The reader may recall the Zen drawing Circle, Triangle, Square by Sengai, which was used as the motif for Tracol’s book The Taste for Things That Are True. Tracol said that the drawing was a koan and that it contained a riddle that we should try to understand.)

In my books, the three systems are representative of what Gurdjieff termed the three lower centers: instinctive, moving, and sex. From a slightly different perspective, they may be viewed as the unconscious, subconscious, and conscious minds. What I published first pertained to the instinctive center (square). The second publication dealt with the sex center (circle). This third book concerns the moving center (triangle), which is the reconciling third part, and, although according to Ouspensky it was the one that Gurdjieff began with first, it is the last one published in my trilogy. Each book affords the code that reveals the workings of that particular center. Thus, all three of my books (although they may not seem to be so on the surface) are intimately and fundamentally Gurdjieffian in content and provide the special corresponding correct education indispensably necessary for each of the three parts.

Having said all that, I’ll try to outline for the reader the most basic general ideas set forth within the first two books, reviewing how they relate specifically to the two centers, the instinctive and the sex centers, and introduce the gist of the gravity center ideas that will be uncovered in the third book, the one that concerns the moving center. I’ll begin with the first published book, Aristoxenus’s Ghost (which, as everyone tells me, is written in a secret code and is totally incomprehensible. Anyone who has ever studied ancient Greek music theory will immediately feel right at home).

Aristoxenus’s Ghost

This first book corresponds to the Zen figure of the square. The square is the representative not only of the instinctive center but also of the unconscious mind. Musically, it describes the perfect system. In terms of the Work, one might call it the foundation. The