Cosmic Sound, Sacred Number, and the Architecture of Musical Consciousness
Music occupies a paradoxical space in human culture and consciousness. It is simultaneously material and immaterial, scientific and spiritual, mathematical and ecstatic. Every civilization throughout human history has sought to explain why music moves us so profoundly, why it organizes emotion with such precision, and why it appears to resonate with something beyond the merely physical world. In the Classical period of Western civilization—stretching from the Pythagoreans through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and into the medieval scholastics—music was understood not merely as an art form or entertainment, but as a metaphysical principle. It corresponded to nothing less than the architecture of the cosmos itself.