What's the deal with the "Cosmic Slinky"?
When I was a kid, like a lot of other kids my age, I had a slinky. I remember being fascinated by it, but I didn't know why. It wasn't the funny ringing sound it made, or the way it "walked down stairs..." etc. No, it was something deeper than all that. Somewhere in my subconscious a light was flashing.
As I grew, I kept noticing recurring patterns in nature like the circle and the sine wave, and, of course, the spiral. And then one day it hit me: they were all different aspects of the same design, the spiral, and this led me to consider the spiral more particularly.
I had already been aware of the spiral as a resilient, utilitarian structure as evidenced by such things as drills, bedsprings, screws, lighthouse stairs, as well as DNA molecules, but now I was beginning to notice it in other, more subtle manifestations. One such manifestation was the musical scale.
A two-dimensional model of, say, the major scale, can be expressed as a circle, starting with DO at the top and progressing clockwise around the six other points (RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, TI), until finally ending on DO again, thus completing the octave. This was the way in which I'd become accustomed to conceiving scales.
But there is a problem with this model: it does not account for the rise in pitch. All we see is that we're back at DO again; according to the model, it's the same DO we started with, while in reality we are now a full octave higher than the original DO.
What we need is a third dimension to represent the rise in pitch. If we could just somehow raise the circle right off the paper and into the air above it--but then it wouldn't be a circle anymore, it would be...a spiral!
Using our new 3-D model, we can plainly see that notes are arranged in a spiral configuration moving up the spiral or down it according to their pitch, but remaining at the same exact point as their octave-brothers when viewed from either end.
When we apply this "vertical third dimension" to commonly-held circular ideas like, for example, the progression of the four seasons (using it in this case to represent time), we see that such laws of nature were based on the spiral design all along. We begin the year with winter, go through all the phases of the seasons and wind up at the same point on the spiral (winter) having completed one round. We are now one revolution along on the spiral.
And then there's reincarnation, again with the spirals: The Wheel of Birth and Death is actually a spiral, continuing ever onwards and upwards.
This spiral pattern seemed to be the basis of everything, of seasons and vibrations, of human growth and development, of man's spiritual unfoldment through the myriad phases and planes of knowledge and space and time.
I realized, in short, that the spiral is the blueprint for Cosmic Evolution. That's what the "Cosmic Slinky" is all about.
I later found out, of course, that I wasn't the only one who had picked up on the spiral thing.