Harmonic Awareness
The idea of Harmonic Awareness came to me in a flash after a morning meditation. On the wall in the room where I do my practices there is a graphic I created some time ago. It shows 4 identical Kufic calligraphic renderings of the name Allah in a precise geometric composition. As I bowed my head towards it, suddenly a rather elaborate idea appeared to me in the form of a graphic representation. I understood it all at once but only as a visual. In the following months I’ve tried repeatedly to render this understanding in words. This is one more attempt at that.
4 X ALLAH IN KUFIC
I perceived that the perfect geometry of this artwork symbolized something fundamental about existence itself—a truthful, structural, eternal beauty at the heart of reality. For the moment, let us call this underlying existence the Perfect Geometry. In a flash of insight, this Perfect Geometry seemed to represent the limitless source of love, light, and sublime order. I saw that this was not merely a design but a symbolic expression of the underlying perfection from which everything arises.
The insight that followed was that we humans are not merely inheritors of this geometry, we are embodiments of it. If the Perfect Geometry represents the originating pattern of reality, then each person possesses replicas of that perfection, a unique geometry of her/his own. This personal configuration, like everything else about us, is shaped by experience, character, circumstance, and aspiration.
The proposition of Harmonic Awareness is that if we maintain a connection with our original geometry, it is more likely that our personal geometry, as it changes and develops, will reflect its source; harmonizing with the Perfect Geometry. In the same way, if we lose contact with our perfect Source, it’s almost inevitable that our passions, fears and struggles will distort our original geometry.
This is where the graphic vision I experienced comes in. I saw the moire patterns that emerge when my personal geometry is superimposed and moves upon the Perfect Geometry: refractions, reflections, illuminations, ripples and resonances. The interplay of these two geometries generates the parameters, the shapes and the qualia of my life.
This is an attempt to reproduce the visual insight although it falls far short of what I actually saw.
When these geometries move in harmony with one another, emergent qualities appear—surprising forms of beauty, meaning, insight, and presence. These epiphenomena (harmonics) are, in a sense, greater than either the Perfect or the personal geometries could express alone. Harmonic Awareness is the capacity to perceive and participate in this unfolding resonance.