Acceptance
The scientific community, until recently, has given little attention to the effects of sound on our consciousness. The medical applications of sound are acknowledged but tend to focus on diagnostic and discrete treatment procedures. This essay deals with consciousness and thus the information reviewed is mostly from psycho-spiritual and esoteric writings.
SOUND AS CREATOR
Physicists, attempting to determine the precise nature of...matter, have probed deeper into the realms of atomic and subatomic behavior, only to find that there is...no 'thing' there in the sense in which we normally think of matter. They describe the tiniest subatomic particles as 'interference patterns of various sound frequencies.' They call them 'nodes of resonance.' (Carey, 1992, p. xi)
Before the advances in modern physics, many myths in some way implicated sound as causal in creation. Sound in many of them, as Carey suggests above, precedes manifestation of all forms and energy. The creation stories that begin the western traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity imply an "a priori" movement. The Babylonianís religion spoke of a third aspect of creation that existed between heaven and earth: "a third element they called lil -- a word which the nearest meaning would be wind, air, breath, or spirit; its essential characteristics seem to have been...movement and expansion" (Doresse, 1986, p. 268)
Exoteric Traditions
Judeo-Christian Cosmology
His image is the word, a form more brilliant than fire; -- the Logos is the vehicle by which God acts on the universe, and may compare to the speech of man. (Philo, trans. 1914, Pike)
The philosopher Philo spans the years when Christianity diverged from Judaism. His translation (text unknown) of "the word" implies vibration -- movement -- sound as the root of creation. Neil Douglas-Klotz (1990) points out that the Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic languages all express many layers of meaning with one word. The same word may be translated as name, light, sound, or experience. Thus "His image" is movement.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life ; and the life was the light of men. (John 1: 1-4, King James Version)
Logos [Greek] as interpreted in the Wisdom or Sophia tradition has a receptive female implication. This translation from the Greek Judeo-Christian texts suggests first, that a willfully directed energy, brought some-thing out of no-thing; and second, that the receptive, empty quality, was with it at the beginning. This union again suggests movement in the oscillation between the two poles of the projective creative father and receptive mother of form. Thus, both the translations of the Word as sound and the oscillation between the projective and receptive in creation delineate vibration.
The rich mystical tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church also reflects this view. The creator God works through the auspices of the Logos in the writings of St. Maximos the Confessor's Four Hundred Texts on Love as follows. "God [next page]