Copyright © 2003 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org. May be copied or reposted for non-commercial use, with attribution to author and website. (15 January 2003)
Did it ever occur to you that life on Earth is like an orchestra, with each species of life representing a type of musical instrument? The members of each species are individual instruments, and their life is a song, or piece of played music. Their DNA is the written music, and the Sun is the player (source of energy). Each plant or animal species is a theme, and the subspecies and individuals are variations on the theme.
The piece of music being played on Earth is a grand opera, that started when life on Earth began, and will continue until the Sun burns out. Prior to the existence of life, the physical instrument was being formed – the air, land, and seas on which life, given the energy of the Sun, could thrive. The musical score is similar to Maurice Ravel’s Boléro ballet. When the first life forms were created in the oceans, their songs – their lives and activities – were very simple. As life became more complex, the songs became more complex, more varied, more beautiful.
At first, there were only plants and simple animals, and the songs of the Earth were delicate and soft. Then animal life became more complex, and moved from the seas to the land and air. The music increased greatly in its volume and complexity. The motion of the fish and birds and land animals were dashes and streaks soaring through the background music of the gently sleeping plants. The lives and deaths of the animals were elegant and intense passages of the stronger instruments played against the background of the plants. The physical forces of nature – the winds, the storms, the volcanoes, the earthquakes, the climatic changes, the polar shifts, the asteroids, the rising and falling of continents, all altering the instrument (Earth), modulating the song, and changing the movements.
But the music was not complete. Without higher intelligence – the memory, logical powers and complex drives of Man, with the knowledge of good and evil – the music simply went on and on in a beautiful, but very dreamy and slowly evolving melody and harmony of Lemuria (the time before modern man). What was needed to complete the picture was drama. Challenges, accomplishments, games, alternative value systems, resource constraints, intrigue, plots, the exquisite excitement of life-and-death struggle; creating, building, and rebuilding; exploration of the Earth and man’s abilities; discovering the nature of the universe; romance; war and peace. These components of opera played against the background music of the plant and animal kingdoms. Civilizations rise and fall with crashing resonance against the music of the natural background.
As man discovers fossil fuels and modern technology, human population explodes, and the drama increases in intensity and magnitude, reaching a ferocious crescendo of creation and destruction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the Common Era. As fossil fuels exhaust, industrial civilization comes crashing down, destroyed by its own hand. The echoing resonance of industrial civilization’s spectacular fall fades away, and its death throes are heard as fading groans within a biosphere that it never accommodated and quickly outgrew.
The music grows soft once more, as Man of the New Age – the Golden Age, the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Wisdom – chooses a different path to follow, living this time in harmony with the rest of nature. The prelude is over, the acts of the opera of the Fifth Race are completed, and the postlude has begun. But what is past is prologue, and the music plays on. The music and the stage are being prepared for the next opera, or Act Six of the Grand Opera that plays in the biosphere of Planet Earth. The Sun shines on and looks on, amused and entertained at the grand spectacle, the epic adventure, the fascinating game, the incredibly complex designs weaved by life on Planet Earth.
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FndTitle(Variations on a Theme)
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