Harmony of Being: Reflections on Art, Nature, and Consciousness
When I Was Younger…
I knew that there was something bigger than myself, but I didn't really know what it was. I didn't know how it worked. I didn't fully understand how I could fit into it, how I could connect to it. The list of things I love all start with the letter M - music, martial arts, meditation, mindset work, and marketing. All these things connect. But before I had gone through the trials that have brought me to where I am today - a father, a business owner, a mentor - I knew there was something bigger, but I didn't know what it was.
You could call it God, you could call it the universe, you could call it the great architect. It has many names. But if you go all the way up to the divine level and say, okay, there's this thing that's a consciousness, a universal consciousness that's bigger than me that I can connect to - well, that's one way of looking at how things are connected. But we don't even have to go that far to see right in front of us, with our own eyes and ears, with things we can touch with our hands, things that we can feel in our hearts, that there is a harmony to the world.
Finding Harmony
When I say the word harmony, I want you to think about a capital H. When we capitalize things, we give them a level of importance that makes them more like a proper noun. Harmony with a capital H is the idea that there is an order to the world that we live in, that we are part of.
As a young man, it was very easy for me to feel disconnected from this harmony. The reason for me, personally, was because I lost my father when I was 13 years old. He died of cancer, and without a father to guide me... I had mentors, I had my mom - she's amazing, still is amazing. I had family, but I didn't have that father figure kind of teaching me how to balance a checkbook, showing me how to put a suit on correctly. It took a lot longer for me to figure out some very fundamental things.
Without that strong male guiding force in my life, I actually had to become that for myself, and then through time, have become that as a mentor for students, and then also as a father to my children. When you become a parent, and this happens often to people at an older time now, you can't get away from it. You can't not see how everything is connected, because everything you do is being watched, studied, observed and copied by a small child.
The Music of Life
Music is the universal language because it's based on physics, and physics doesn't care if you believe in it or not. Physics is physics, no matter what you think. Physics is based on math, and music and physics are interconnected. Here's how: if I were to play a note on a guitar, if I were to sing a note, play it on a piano, you hear one note. Inside of that note, there's other notes.
If I were to take a guitar and mute the string and mute it halfway down the string, at exactly halfway point, you're going to hear that is going to be silenced, but there's the other notes are going to be there. You can finally hear them, because the loudest note is called the fundamental tone, and it's drowning out all the other notes which are called overtones.
All of those overtones create the major scale, except for one of the notes, the fourth degree, which is not in the overtone series. All the other notes in the major scale come from the overtone series of a single note. So that means that music theory itself is based on the physics of sound.
Even though there are cultural patterns in music that are unique to each individual culture, all these different cultures are basically like points around a circle. Imagine a circle with a point in the middle of the circle, which is the reality of physics. All the points around that create a sort of a circle around it are all the different ways of seeing that reality.
You can think of music as a container. Different cultures will express themselves through musical forms, and they're using the same frequencies, the same vibrations, the same rhythms. But then they insert themselves into it. They put a little bit of their own spices and their own flavor profile into that foundation, which is shared by everyone. We all have rice. We all have bread or noodles. What we do with it is our own culture, and you can have a million different cultures with a million different combinations of the same basic ingredients.
Frequency and vibration is what connects us with each other all the way down to the first moment of a child hearing their mother's heartbeat all the way through your entire life. We are biological, spiritual beings that are expressing vibrations that are singing out to each other, even as we talk. Talking is musical, and those notes are the same in all these different cultures, in certain ways. In other ways, there's differences, and our differences are what make it interesting. It makes it fun.
Architecture of the Soul
Architecture is frozen music. When you look at ancient architecture, as well as classical architecture - something that maybe isn't brutalist post-modernism - the columns, proportions, doors, there's a golden mean proportion in there somewhere. These are things that connect the person moving through the space with the space itself. The reason why these spaces have such beauty to them that we can feel in our bones is because they're made out of the same proportions as our bodies.
Have you ever shook somebody's hand and it felt like a dead fish, or like my uncle, who's a National Guard Commander in Alabama, shake his hand and it feels like you're getting hit with a brick wall? You shake someone's hand, and you feel a resonance. You feel a vibration. You feel a connection. Your nervous systems have connected, your bones, your nerves, your muscles are all dancing, and for just a moment, there's a little shake and trust is created. Great architecture does that, but it shakes hands with your soul, and it does it through beauty and through proportion.
You're actually looking in a mirror, and in that mirror is you, but it's not just you as you rolled out of bed, it's the best version of you. You're walking into a place that lifts you up and brings you into a higher flow, and in that flow, you can start to breathe and see through the space that there's messages for you to receive.
Let's play a little game. If you wanted to separate people from themselves, to separate people from a meaningful sense of harmony with their families and their communities and the world around them, if you wanted people to be programmed to feel disconnected, to feel kind of angry and not really know why, you would surround them with ugliness. But it wouldn't just be any kind of ugliness. It would be very well constructed ugliness. It would be ugliness that detaches them from their spirit, ugliness that detaches them from the evidence of how we are all connected.
That's what post-modern architecture is. That's what brutalism is. There's a kind of a morbid curiosity that I have sometimes when I look at those forms, but it's quickly replaced by a feeling of motivation to propagate a message that there's a far older tradition here that we cannot lose - of divine beauty brought into physical form, that we can walk through and literally bathe in every day, if we choose.
Architecture is a reflection of the values of the people that created it. An architecture of space is telling you that space is valuable. An architecture of clutter is not telling you the same message. An architecture of beauty is telling you that natural forms are valuable and that there's healing and there's a healthy relationship between the observer and the observed, where you're in communication and harmony because you're seeing a reflection of yourself, of the best version of yourself.
Order, Chaos, and Consciousness
Let's think about the word art. The word art is actually inside of the word heart. It's also inside of the word hearth, and it's also inside of the word Earth. Art is also the royal art, and that is a name for alchemy. Alchemy is the science of raising vibrations. And what that means is the science of self improvement through entering into a flow state and increasing your level of consciousness.
Who are the artists? The artists are the people that have gone through the chaos and the disorder of life, that have slain the dragons, that have gone through the hero's journey and gone into the abyss, and they've come back with something. They've come back with a gift. And the gift is their art, and their art came from their heart. Great art raises consciousness, whether it's culinary, architecture, music, it could be literally anything. I need redemption out of my art, I can't just be in pain the whole time.
Lower levels of consciousness would correlate to the release of certain brain chemistry, serotonin versus dopamine versus cortisol. Fight or flight, low level consciousness would be fighting, flighting or freezing, that kind of survival instincts. Evil is just fear in action, and you could say good is love in action. From fear at the bottom to all the way to the top, highest levels of consciousness of like a yogi, divine direct connection that spectrum - we find ourselves somewhere in the middle.
Emotions get stored in the body. We carry them around like toxic load. They need to be released. To get to a higher level of consciousness, we have to release the negativity. Art can help us release that. It's why it exists. What does it mean to level up your consciousness? It means that you're releasing the things that scare you, they no longer scare you. The things that trigger you no longer trigger you. The things that cause you to become the worst versions of yourself, snarling lunatic who's selfish and just wants to take and not give - let all that go.
Beautiful works of architecture, beautiful pieces of music enchant us because they tell us something we wanted to hear. They tell us that we are beautiful, that we are capable of beauty. They show us of possibility. They allow us to feel something that we maybe weren't letting ourselves feel, and they lift us up out of fear and into a place of inspiration and love.
The Path Forward
In the space between my father's death and the birth of my first son, I went through a hard time. I had to make my own way in the world. I had support, and then I didn't have support, I had mentors, and then I didn't have mentors. I had money, and then I didn't have money. I had to figure a lot of stuff out, and in the core of it, there's really only one thing that mattered that got me through, and it was a question I have to ask myself, and I have to be able to look in the mirror, and have to answer this question in a way that feels good, and I know when it doesn't feel good.
The question is, Who do I want to be? What kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be a person that's in harmony with the world around me, or do I want to be selfish? Do I want to be a loser? Do I want to be a winner? Do I want to be sad? Do I want to be a victim, or do I want to have victory?
By tuning your perception to artistic principles, high levels of beauty in any discipline, it can actually transform you. There's this thing called mimetic desire. It's where you see people around you that have certain things, and you start wanting what they want and having what they have and being who they are. When you immerse yourself in it enough, through repetition, over and over and over again, eventually you'll wake up one day and you'll realize how far you've come. Art is kind of like weight lifting for the soul. It's putting you in a place where you're seeing things that are making an imprint on you, that's actually changing you.
As I teach my sons, which I have two now, as they get older and older, I keep coming around to the same lessons over and over again that I've taught myself and I've also learned from great teachers of mine, which is that you got to show up every day for yourself first and be the best version of yourself, and everything that you occupy your time and your attention with can connect to that or not.
Curate your world, curate your reality, curate the things that you focus on, and build those structures that build you up, because there's a much bigger mission here for you. If you could make yourself worthy of receiving it, you'll discover what it is. But only you can do that, nobody else is going to do it for you.
When you become a parent, you don't have a choice at that point. You really have to raise your consciousness because they're copying you. They're following you around. They're doing everything. They're trying to get your attention. You are now a model for another human being. It's pretty amazing.
The bottom line, the foundation, is the idea that the world is put together harmonically or harmoniously, and you are part of that harmony. You have a part to play. You have a role.
You might not know what it is yet, but it's there waiting for you to discover it.
Interested in ways to actually embody these concepts in your life? Check out Meriwether Academy, a new approach to educating young men to discover who they are and find their place in the world.
