It's fitting, then, that we begin this exploration of ourselves and of the world with music, and more specifically with a musical quality called vibrato. This pulsation that wells up within the sounded note can lead us to what is most spontaneous and creative in human life, and possibly even to deeper mysteries--to powers of knowing and doing which we have lost or given away during the epoch of civilization, and which perhaps we may now regain.

The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous.

At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of patterned frequencies against the matrix of time, Before we make music, music makes us.

For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man - the heart of it - is pure and holy joy.

The universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level. The novelty, the new, more complex order, doesn't emerge from the present in a steady stream, nor at all places at the same rate. It comes, as all things do, in rhythmic waves; there will always be times and places of scarcity and stagnation and retrogression. Still, the long-term direction is clear. The intention of the universe is evolution.

What was once impossible now summons us to dismantle the walls between ourselves and our sisters and brothers, to dissolve the distinctions between flesh and spirit, to transcend the present limits of time and matter, to find, at last, not wealth or power but the ecstasy (so long forgotten) of commonplace, unconditional being. For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man-the heart of it-is pure and holy joy.

The subtle dance of the body joins us to the world.