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Welcome to Attunement.

Attunement is an exploration of coming to Harmony with the Cosmos in a way completely native and unique to each and every human being. We explore inner landscapes that are rarely visited: the Land of Being. The only really valid map is the one you make for yourself, from your own immediate, personal experience. Come meet yourself where you had only imagined.

Please read further only when you have time…and welcome back!

Archetypal Architecture

I spend my days attending to, playing with, and creating invisible architecture. It cannot be seen in the normal sense, but this architecture can be heard. And it isn't listened to much, out of the total of the day. Yet this architecture, this tensioned architecture, influences the environment. Sound attunes and entrains as far as it penetrates. Through volumes, and solids, and imaginations.

And there is a psychic music. That penetrates into the walls, the floor, the furniture, the human body. Emanates from the human body, as an archetypal heterodyne within a hologram.

Everything absorbs it and is affected by it. And there is an interaction.

With tuning, tension is managed. The function of a well tuned instrument is generative, and obtains far beyond normal expectation.

Transparency is possible.

What is it that is tuned? Attitude would be too limiting a word. The soul, or perhaps the portal of being that might be tuned, through tempering of archetypes.

I listened to a radio show on emergence a couple of days ago, and this property of emergence seemed to catch an essential point. That of immediacy and emergence. Emerg-ency. Without the urgency. Completely attending in this moment. Death is here, and life after death. Where you are not you, anymore.

Attuning to the moment. An old story. And yet to attend to the criteria of the portal that is you. Being true to self. And yet what is the conscious self?

This brings us to personal metaphysics. How have you decided to be you? What filters and investments are you carrying around with your identity? I'm continually discovering them, mine, and ours. Part of the tuning discipline. Keeping track of transactions. The hysteresis of the system. The archetypal sonances.

One of the ways I discover what needs attention, are the threads of sonance I happen to trip over. So I follow them back, to where some original decision I made left the thread hanging out. Made a sort of topography. Sometimes it takes a while to climb, or to chisel through. Choices at those levels, for focus, commit, release, and wonder.

I suppose a more accurate way to put it is finding 'myself' traveling through a hologram. Molecularly, if not in a photonic fashion.

And it is in the attending to the sonances of the hologram, and the tempering of archetypes, that facilitates transparency, to the level to which one attends. And the attending in fluidity of emergence itself, facilitates the tuning and play with the archetypal temperament. Choice after choice after choice.

I'm continually discovering new resonances. Momentums. Ways to attend. Configuring awareness to simultaneously penetrate and embrace a way of knowing. Perhaps this is the Tantra. What does the moment want?

So I suppose you could say that I'm making love when I (at)tune. Making love in building invisible architecture. Making love sound.

I like to explore. To investigate. To attend. Which means to track. To make love by tracking and attending. As a theoretician, to track the patterns that emerge from the infinite. To modulate and be modulated by these patterns, through simultaneous and synchronous participation. The glowing architecture in emergence. Falling in love with emergence itself. Finding Infinite Love here. The vital moment.

This glowing topography, where conscious awareness meets an infinity- a fractal boundary (being that you don't know where you leave off and infinity begins). A curious notion, that. For that very fact, of not knowing where you leave off and the other begins, is a direct multidimensional clue, of a deeper awareness. Individual resonances in the same media. Radio friends are like that. Sound acquaintances.

But back to the glowing topography. The edge of consciousness. That you, as an individuation happen to know. And yet, how do we know?

You may attempt to identify with something external, only. Without realizing how that externality itself, can lead you into something much deeper. Skin on a body. A most important organ. An interface. What is the skin of your mind? Is there such a thing?

An integument. A series of decisions, actually, that serve to contain; and yet in containing they limit.

How they are a fractal interface. Of awareness. Scintillating fractal awareness. Between 'you' and infinity. The gateless gate. Where do 'you' begin? How have you decided? And more importantly, how will you decide?

I'd like to invite you to return to that interface of the decision series, and take a good look at, really hear out, get in touch with the process, the how of your interface.

I wonder if you've ever thought about your being, this way; as an attuned resonance.

You may say, 'the decisions of my interface process are other than mine to make'. Yet is that really true? What will it be like, when you take back the authority to re-decide about your own inter-face?

Pretty interesting. Lots of things you can re-decide. And other than in a way that is ignor-ant of the natural unfolding of, the emergence of being. In the most synchronous way. For isn't it all actually synchronous? Maybe its that we happen to notice sometimes what is happening actually all the time? At the point of iterating, of unfolding, of emerging.

There isn't any time there. Hear we all are. Auditioning. In emergence. And what is it, and how is it that hearing happens? Curiouser and curiouser.

I wonder, sometimes, how some of the classical writers will invite an idea to show itself, but only on it's own terms. And what the writer has to do is to make a lake, make an ocean, in which the idea will swim to the surface when it happens to feel like it. All the writer can do is to continue to attend to the ocean. Sometimes the ideas will swirl towards the surface, and sometimes they will stay submerged; but you know that they're there, only taking their time in making their way to the upper reaches where they can be seen, before diving to the depths, some never to be seen again, and some to return repeatedly to the surface, to become known. Yet all a living resonance, in which all are present, whether at the surface or dissolved.

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Overture

Prelude

As I walk up to the door, I never know what I'll find, inside. Even though I might have called to confirm the appointment the night before and arrived on time, sometimes it seems a little strange that it is my job to go right into people's homes. Sometimes I've already removed my shoes and am standing there on the concrete of the front step in my socks. Out of respect, most of the time I do remove my shoes and leave them in the front foyer. The door opens, and I go inside.

Most of the time its the lady of the house who greets me. Other times, the husband or the grandmother who speaks no English. I follow as they lead me to where the client is. At times my customers will stay to watch through the whole procedure. Usually though, they just leave me after I tell them what I've found and we've come to an agreement as to what is to be done, to do my work.

Allegro: Opening the instrument

I open the piano and with a long screwdriver begin to insert the thick felt strips and wedge-shaped rubber mutes that are to mute two-thirds of the strings in the piano, leaving one string for each note to sound. I take out my tuning fork and tuning hammer (wrench) and place the tuning hammer on the middle string for note C#3. I strike the tuning fork on my knee, and bite the handle of the still-vibrating fork to allow the vibrations of the fork to vibrate my whole head by bone conduction. I can hear the tuning fork, and have both hands free to play the note and move the tuning hammer to change the pitch of the string, while I compare the pitch in my head with the pitch of the tuning fork.

I listen to the beats between the piano and my skull until they slowly disappear. When I'm satisfied with the stability of the beginning reference note, I take the fork out of my mouth and begin to set the reference octave of the piano, the temperament. As each note of the circle of fifths comes into its correct placement with regard to the others, I begin to slowly disappear as my third eye and ear open (Godwyn, 1987) .

Andante: Mytho-Poeisis

The mists slowly begin to clear away as I find myself standing on the bank of a black river. I hear a regular watery sound behind me, and turn to see a withered old man, working his way back across the stream who looks at me with what seem to be eyes of infinite depth. It seems that he's just carried me over to this bank of the river. I forget the name already. I hear a low growling, and with the hair on the back my neck prickling, I turn slowly to face a large, fierce dog with three heads and a dragon's tail. It comes to me suddenly that I must capture this fierce guardian using my hands only- or somehow get past it.

Of all the trials in my life, I know this is the twelfth and final trial (Bullfinch, 1959) (Hamilton, 1940) , the twelfth tone and most difficult before the temperament is complete. If it isn't right, I may have to go back and rework the others. Sometimes I've had to go back to the beginning, if the system, the piano, was far enough into chaos and out of tune. Small consolation and a little relief to know just what I have to do, with all that is to come.

My job is to bring harmony out of cacophony, order out of chaos. I can't just 'muscle' the piano to do what I want as I'm only a human, working with a system that holds up to twenty-five tons of tension. The dog with three heads won't be satisfied with a dialectic, positivist, or Cartesian approach (Guba, 1990) . That will only take care of two of the heads of Cerberus, leaving all those who offered just two to be torn apart by the third. There have to be three to satisfy.

The Sibyl knows. She gives me a fractal (period 3) (Briggs & Peat, 1990) (Peat, 1991)(Brown, 1995) cake, the dog accepts it and with a golden bough, I'm away to explore the underworld.

Adagio: Further attunement across dimensions

As I became competent in establishing the appropriate harmonic structure in the tuning of the instrument (Godwyn, 1987), I found myself going in auto-hypnosis (Erickson & Rossi, 1976) wandering through multiple levels of thought and being (Guenon, 1984) . After a time, I began to notice a kind of landscape that seemed to have a direct relation to whose piano I was tuning (Campbell, 1997). As a participant-observer (Bohm, 1980)(Wolinsky, 1993) I began to notice how various thoughts and later sounds and pictures would come and go while I was tuning.

I began to make some sense of what I was perceiving. I'd been doing it for long enough that I knew my own terrain in this context. I began to recognize that the territories I was in weren't mine (though I might go through my own territory to get there). I began to learn more about attunement, at-one-ment, and attonement.

Congruencies and incongruence. Consonance and dissonance of emotions as absorbed by the piano (Teilhard de Chardin, 1959).

Minuet: Experiencing the essential

Existence arises from the chaos of the essential (de Nicholas, 1989). Without the essential there can be no existential position (Tillich, 1961). The critical third variable is iterative and transpersonal (Brown, 1995)(Walter, 1994)(Sutich, 1969). It is the very point where bifurcation happens; the choice point of either/or yet before the choice is made.

It is the place of b-values (Maslow, 1962). It is the place where ego and id are birthed from the superego (Rothgeb, 1973). It is the place of the son and holy ghost, out of the father in Christian mysticism.

It is possible as a facet of the essential to be other than lost or unmindful in the Hegelian sense (Suzuki, 1970). Or polarized in the sense that Kierkegaard meant it. Implicit in the Elizabeth Cady Stanton's (1892) Solitude of Self is this unity of self with the essential, contrary to any attempted denial of one's-self from or by any one.

Plato knew of this place, and chose to use story and myth in this land of not-one-not-two-before-choosing (de Nicholas, 1989). Eastern religious disciplines of Taoism (Baum, 1958) and Buddhism (Price & Mou-Lam, 1969)(Suzuki, 1970) embody it. Zen uses koans or paradoxical phrases to bring the student to this place just at bifurcation. If you can think of it, its already too small.

In Greek mythology, psychopomps traveled between the worlds of gods and men (Bullfinch, 1959)(Hamilton, 1940) . Hermes and Pallas-Athene were two. Under Pallas-Athene's direction was Clotho and Arachne, spider-like muses who 'wove a web of reality' out of spun threads.

In the act of bringing harmony into the world, I experience tuning as a sacred occupation and art. And now from a meta-position, I offer in my work my awareness of how some have chosen to make their bridges from 'reality' and myth, to this place of under, this place of psycho-pathos or where souls suffer, where Persephone is Queen.

Allegro: Reverence for resonance

I'm returned, having experience the underworld at a new depth, something for which there is no speech. Yet now I'm slower to act, slower to say I know what it will take to understand someone's difficulty, than I was before when I was just recently armed and ignorant with the tools of NLP (Bandler, et.al., 1980) .

Now I know how the journey can be really difficult, and no one can take it for you, and no one can tell you what it means. In a very real way it is the first steps into the real soul journey of the rest of life. A part of me continues the journey there, teaches me and reminds me of what it is to be lost. Another part teaches as well, what it is to have been lost and then to be found, and to find one's way out, though I don't quite remember how. Or particularly, for how long; for this place is outside of time.

I guess that's the part about crossing the river Lethe, is that you forget, at least cognitively, some part of the suffering experienced when lost. Which helps when you're talking with someone else who has begun the journey that you are on. And what it is for them to be with your presence, someone who has found their way through. And you, knowing that the finding wasn't exactly your personal doing, that finding of the way out and through.

Coda

I was glad to find Theodore Reich's book Listening with the Third Ear (Reich, 1949). He talks about this very phenomenon of going, as Eugene Taylor puts it, 'trans-personal' by going into the internal places (Taylor, 1999). I really had no idea of this trans-...

Postlude

And now, as I pack up my tools, and make the next appointment with the present customer, and begin to think of the next customer that I am scheduled to visit for the day, I find that I'm going to be approaching them in a slightly different manner.

As my foot touches the front doorstep on my way out to my truck, I'm back in the world, in the truck, in the traffic, listening to the news. But I left some harmony back there, and I can feel it, changing the world and my-self, just a little.

FINI

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References

Bandler, et.al. (1980). NLP: Volume 1. Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications.

Baum, A. (Trans.). (1958). Tao Teh King by Lao Tzu. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co..

Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, Inc..

Briggs, J. & Peat, F.D. (1990). Turbulent Mirror. New York: Harper and Row.

Brown, C. (1995) Chaos and Catastrophe Theories . Sage University Paper series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, 07-107. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Bullfinch, T. (1959). Hercules-Hebe and Ganymede. In Edmund Fuller (Ed.), Bullfinch's Mythology (pp. 118-121). New York: Dell Publishing.

Campbell, D. (1997). The Mozart Effect. New York: Avon Books.

de Nicholas, A. (1989). Habits of Mind (1st ed.). New York: Paragon House.

Erickson, M.H, & Rossi, E.L & S.I. (1976). Hypnotic Realities. New York: Irvington Publishers.

Godwyn, J. (1987). Harmonies of Heaven and Earth. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, Ltd..

Guba, E. (Ed.). (1990). The Paradigm Dialog. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Guenon, R. (1984). The Multiple States of Being (J. Goodwyn, Trans.). Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, Inc..

Hamilton, E. (1940). Hercules. In Edith Hamilton (Ed.), Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (pp. 164-167). Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.

Maslow, A. (1962). Towards a Psychology of Being. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.

Peat, F. David. (1991). The Philosopher's Stone. New York: Bantam.

Price, A.F & Mou-Lam, Wong. (Trans.). (1969). The Diamond Sutra. Berkeley: Shambala.

Reich, T. (1949). Listening with the Third Ear. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Co..

Rothgeb, C. (Ed.). (1973). Abstracts of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: International Universities Press.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, (1892). Solitude of Self: An Address to the United States Congressional Committee on the Judiciary, January 18th , 1892. Washington D.C.: United States Congressional Record.

Sutich, A. (1969, Spring). Some Considerations Regarding Transpersonal Psychology. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1 (1), 11-20.

Suzuki, S. (1970). Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Tokyo: Weatherhill.

Taylor, E. (1999). Shadow Culture (1st ed.). Washington D.C.: Counterpoint.

Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959). The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper and Row.

Tillich, P. (January 1961). Existentialism and Psychotherapy. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 1 (1), 8-16.

Walter, K. (1994). Tao of Chaos. Ithica, NY: Kairos Center.

Wolinsky, S. (1993). Quantum Consciousness. Norfolk, CT: Bramble Books.

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