In 1982 one of Odano Sensei's long-time students made a remarkable discovery. Yuko Nagano placed the letters of the alphabet along the points and lines of a five-pointed star and, in so doing, uncovered an essential element of the alphabetical design.

　　　The relationship between linear alphabetical order and this two-dimensional geometric figure is, in retrospect, so obvious that the bigger marvel is how it escaped notice until now. Intrinsic to the alphabetical order is the phonetic order, and the pentacle is its cipher.

　　　I will show you how to recreate Nagano's discovery. To publish it outright would be easier, however the impact would not be the same. The

　　　You will need a piece of paper, a pencil, and a straight edge. Please have these items at hand before reading further.

　　　On the piece of paper, draw a five-pointed star by connecting five lines. To allow adequate space for what follows, draw the star fairly large-at least four inches to a side.

　　　Now, label the points and lines of the star in alphabetical order following these instructions:

1. Place the letter A on the uppermost point.
2. Descending the left leg from A, place the letters B, C, and D in order, one on each of the three line segments.
3. This will bring you to the lower left point. Label this with the letter E.
4. Continue up from E in the same way, labeling the three line segments connecting E to the right hand point.
5. The ninth letter I falls on the right-hand point, and the tenth letter J will fall on the next line segment. With the completion of the first decimal tier, the rules change slightly: Beginning with K, label not only the tips and line segments, but also the points where two lines intersect. Thus K falls on the point marked by the intersection of the horizontal bar stretching from I and the right hand leg reaching down from A.
6. Continue on around the star in this same way, labeling points and lines in order.
7. Y will fall on the point already labeled K. Z will fall on the last unmarked line segment.

　　　If you have completed this operation correctly, each of the five points of the pentacle will be labeled with one of the vowels, A, E, I, O, and U.

　　　The alphabet in its usual context is a free-flowing linear progression of letters subject to infinite rearrangement and combination. Here it crystallizes, much the way that water crystallizes into six-sided snowflakes, in two- dimensional configuration along the path of a five-sided star and, in so doing, calls out its vowels in high relief. The configuration is defined by the vowels marking its extremities. And in turn the vowels are defined by the configuration as the alphabet's cardinal coordinates.

　　　I will make a brief digression. A to Z and back to A again spells aza, which in Japanese is the word for birthmark . It is also one reading of the ideograph , more commonly read ji, meaning letter or character. Taken at face value, the spelling aza suggests that the star is a birthmark of alphabetical culture, the contents of which are the letters A to Z.

　　　Coincidental and arbitrary, you say? How one describes convergence of meanning ultimately comes down to one's choice of words: I prefer the words, by design.

　　　Consider the iconic use of five-pointed stars in the flags and national seals of Europe and North America, just as the moon is an icon in Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries and the sun an icon in Japan and the Far East. Arabitrarily or otherwise, these symbols clearly reside deep within the respective collective cultural subconscious of each of those parts of the world.

　　　The classic example of the use of stars as symbols is, of course, in the American flag. The number of stars now displayed in this national ensign equals the number of open-syllable sounds in the basic kana syllabery (see Character Sound & Number, Volume 2 Issue 2).

　　　Coincidence or design? Coincidence, as the word suggests, is a function of happening (incidence) together (co). By this definition, as a function of the instant now, the universe and everything it contains is all one big co-incidence. The fragmentation of the universe into fields of isolated events is an act of human cognition only and reflects, not the real natural order, but the limits of human understanding.

　　　On its own the American flag has no more significance, either patriotic or esoteric, than a piece of cloth blowing in the wind. Whether fifty States, fifty stars, or fifty sounds, what is significant is not the flag but the number fifty.

　　　Fifty is significant and does describe both flag and syllabery. And since number, together with sound, is the essence of meaning (Character Sound & Number, Volume 2 Issue 2; The Anatomy of Meaning), the more useful interpretation of this coincidence is as a call to sit up and take notice.

　　　Now notice this. There is more to the relationship between the pentacle and the Japanese word-sounds. Return to your piece of paper and draw a circle around the star so that all five points fall on the circle's circumference. Reading clockwise around the circle, beginning at the top, the vowels follow the order, A, I, U, E, and O. This is the precise order in which they fall within the kana syllabery.

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　　　Odano Sensei has taken the evolution of this pentacular, alphabetical schematic one step further by placing the letter N inside of the letter O on the star's left point. This amendment, reflecting the ontology of word-sounds, marks a decisive development in the history of the alphabet and alphabetical culture. As the implications of this

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　　　With that introduction I move to the subject at hand: the construction and evolution of word-sounds. As an anchor for this discussion I turn to the sounds of the Japanese language, for this is an area where Japanese and the kana system provide invaluable insight. In no other language are phonetics so clearly defined as in Japanese, and in no other language is there as precise a schedule of sounds as that provided by the kana syllabery. This is not a statement of cultural bias but of hard fact.

　　　The word-sounds defined by the kana system are, first of all, a complete set. In as much as this set constitutes all of the sounds of a particular language-Japanese-it carries, in a precise number of elements, the full potential for meaning, knowledge, logic, aesthctics, and so on of one of the world's oldest continuous cultural traditions. And, to the extent that the Japanese language embraces, in the modern global context, all major cultural traditions, past and present, that potential represents the potential of the human linguistic tradition.

　　　The human linguistic tradition, however, derives from the evolutionary tradition of the natural universe. The human phonetic constitution derives directly from the sequence of events that brought the universe and life into being.

　　　Thus the investigation of word-sounds takes us beyond the bounds of phonetics directly into the domain of ontology. Before phonetics comes the question of sound-its origin and dynamics-and this in turn leads to the question of the origin and dynamics of the phenomenon of energy.

　　　Where did it all begin? Basic questions are part of the wonderment of being alive: Who hasn't given thought to some variation of this question, especially as a child?

　　　Historically and culturally, this distinctly human line of inquiry dates back to the earliest stirrings of intellectual curiosity. The Book of Genesis for examle speaks of how, in the beginning, there was darkness, and The Kojiki talks about a time when there was neither a work done nor a name known. These statements are intuitively insightful and compelling, and they have withstood the test of time as signposts in human understanding.

　　　These writings are endearing for their poetic quality as well as their insight: Their manner of expression is entirely appropriate to the age in which they were written. For our purposes however they lack substance. As children of modern pragmatism we demand answers stated in rational terms and logical arguments.

　　　Scientific speculation has likewise made its way to the threshold of creation, and in so doing, it has produced a description remarkably similar to those in Genesis and The Kojiki. Prevailing modern wisdom has it that the universe began with a big bang. This bang took place, according to theory, as a historical event-that is, at a paricular moment at the first tick of the cosmic clock and in a particular place located dead center in the physical universe-accounting for the cosmic distribution of matter and energy.

　　　When Odano embarked on her course of inquiry she did so not as a representative of any branch of academic discipline or with any aspiration or intent to contribute to the public discourse. Rather she acted purely and simply as an intelligent individual with a vivacious curiosity. As in all of her work, she approaches the question of the origin of life with no preconceived assumptions or special tools and motivated single-mindedly by the desire to know. She also relies on common sense and the simple and unadorned terms of common language.

　　　The jumping-off place for Odano is the formation of time and space, since these are the essential conditions for the world of events, including the physical big bang and the resulting hydrogen cloud. Odano's ontological big bang is the grandparent of the phenomenon of life; its substance is pure energy, the attributes of which are motion (speed), heat (temperature) and sound.

　　　This discussion requires a willingness to engage in conjecture. It also requires a willingness to engage in metaphor, since what we are describing defies the mathematical language of science. At the same time, the challenge in all of this is to be as accurate and precise as possible. Here we go.

　　　Since it exists outside of time in no time, this preconditional state has no history. It neither sees nor hears nor feels, since all of these imply inner and outer, subject and object. Thus it is also totally unconscious and unaware.

　　　Unconscious nonetheless, it moves. This movement is an unpremeditated and fundamentally volitional act: movement without provocation or purpose. And because there is no distance and nowhere to go, it is a movement neither toward nor away from-a movement without direction.

　　　Thus, precisely because it has nowhere else to go, it turns inward upon itself, a sort of primordial act of introspection. Its tendency is fundamentally centripetal, even though it has no center nor knows what it seeks. The inevitable consequence of this act is intense friction accompanied by searing heat and a deafening yet muted roar.

　　　Motion on top of motion results in acceleration and deceleration. What begins as a single movement now acquires the qualitative differential that distinguishes speed (that is, if everything is moving at the same rate there is no distinction speed-speed is distinguished by relative differential, a function of acceleration and deceleration). And in turn this differential generates primordial abrasion, giving rise to the original vibrational state.

　　　Vibration manifests heat and sound. Confined heat is incombustible; it has no release. The heat in this primordial state therefore builds to inconceivable degrees of temperature.

　　　The qualities of this primordial roar are defined by the medium of no time and no space. It is completely closed and deeply internal. In human terms there is only one sound that comes even remotely close: It is voiced from the abdomen with the mouth firmly closed.

　　　In the kana syllabery this sound is represented by the character . In the alphabet it is represented by the letters M or N; I will chose N as a matter of convention to be consistent with the usual alphabetical spelling of the Japanese sounds.

　　　 N lies outside of the fifty basic sounds. It is normally attached to the table at the upper far left-that is, at the far end-in a single square of its own (this table is displayed in the previous issue of Character Sound & Number).

　　　This placement is entirely appropriate to its use in everyday Japanese. The sound N always occurs attached to and following one of the preceding open syllables, as for example in the word nihon ( Japan), written in katakana .

　　　For purposes of this discussion, however, I will move N front foremost and center, preceding U. The implication of this placement is that N is both preconditional to, and holds the potential for, the vowels.

　　　 N as the sound made from the abdomen with mouth closed is a distant reflection of that primordial pre-intelligent (pre-language) state. It is characteristic of a welling up of internal power or strength-the sound made for example when lifting or pushing something heavy.

　　　In colloquial Japanese, N (or un) pronounced alone is an affirmation, the equivalent of the English ub-bub. The primordial sound N is likewise self-affirming: With no one to look to and nowhere to go it seeks its own core.

　　　Ultimately however this self-seeking implosion reaches an absolute limit defined by the enormity of the force building up upon itself. Frictional stress exceeds the tolerance of undefined primordial being, and the gravity and mass of the unilaterally centripetal vortex no longer sustains the resulting vibrational extremes. In a single instant preconditional being explodes, converting primodial centripetal bias into totally uninhibited centrifugality.

　　　This event occurs so quickly that it is over as soon as it begins. It is accomplished in a single profound flash of light, an unequivocal brilliance constituting the complete enlightenment of primordial being and the birth of universal intelligence.

　　　The energy released by this event moves instantaneously from a single point of origin to the limits of infinite expansion. The speed of this accomplishment is not speed, in the ordinary sense, defined as distance traveled over time elapsed. Rather, as all of space traveled in a single unit of time described as a moment, it is the universal

yardstick against which time and space are measured-the speed accountable for the creation of time and space. This is the speed Odano Sensei describes as C. Its characteristics are absolute presence-it is always right now right here-and total transparency.

　　　In real terms, the time-space now-here is quite beyond grasp; it cannot be measured with a stopwatch or a ruler and, in that sense, is indeed, nowhere. That nowhere, we would have to concede, however, is not non-existent. Now and here are the absolute coordinates of life, to which yesterday, today, and tomorrow -and for the sake of argument, France, China and the moon-are all relative. But for now and here, time and space would quite simply not be.

　　　Like the surface of an inflating balloon, infinite expansion brings a multiplicity of points or loci into being, creating space through division. Each locus is the image of the original singularity, and each locus, operating from specific coordinates, has its unique vantage on the whole while, as a function of the same instantaneously creative energy, inextricably bound to that whole and all other loci. The emptiness we call space is not empty at all; rather it is a manifestation of energy traveling so fast as to be totally invisible, totally transparent.

　　　Transparent reality is one that conceives and nurtures ( parents) all things over and across (trans) the expanse of time and space; it carries the phenomenal world within its womb. Furthermore, the transparent universe as a whole is the original state of living being and, therefore, the fundamental condition of life-dispensing life energy.

　　　Parental compassion is innate and profoundly fundamental to the human experience. Just as the human fetus unconditionally receives the life- support it requires to come to term in the womb, the care and nurturing that we received after birth and that we extend to our own progeny is motivated by forces exceeding the domain of human volition. Although this love may be expressed in many ways, parental love is unconditional: The roll of a parent as protector and nurturer is an absolute mandate and a direct consequence of the ontological big bang.

　　　Compassion or universal parental love is the basic emotion (motion of energy, e, where E = C) of centrifugal expansion. The character for love, , read ai in Japanese, is a composite of the chracter

ukeru, meaning to receive, and kanarazu, meaning always and without exception. In the scheme of things, love is an absolute condition. It is the all-pervading trans- parental affection to which we are privileged recipients, always and without exception: the vibrational content of C.

　　　Now the kinetic content of a vibrational state is also what we experience as heat. In the self-imposed no-time / no-space restrictiveness of the preconditional state, vibrational content approaches an absolute limit of infinite frequency and infinitesimal wavelength. The actual degree of this temperature is quite beyond any relative scale of measurement; the stress inherent to this state causes it to explode into its opposite, and out of vibrational extreme comes a state of absolute equilibrium.

　　　The temperature of being is an absolute mean halfway between hot and cold. Absolute temperature-a quality altogether different from the concept of no temperature (absolute zero), a state we would experience as extreme cold- is, in human terms, the vibrational condition of life. The obvious metaphor is physical boby temperature, and Odano Sensei has chosen to label this temperature absolute thirty-six degrees (human body temperature in the oriental races is 36 ).

　　　The characteristic of this temperature is that it is imperceptible. As sentient beings we gauge the difference between bot and cold relative to our own physical vibrational state: Bath water at 40 is pleasantly warm, whereas anything warmer than that feels hot and anything much less than 33 feels distinctly chilly (the bath water at this point begins to draw on body heat instead of the other way around).

　　　Tactile perception is said to be the product of thermo- chemical reactions in the skin to minute changes in temperature. These are interpreted mentally as not only hot and cold but also the quality of texture. If so, what if there was no temperature differential between that which is being sensed and that that is doing the sensing? Subject and object, inside and outside. would be indistinguishable, one and the same. This, we can guess, is more or less the state of affairs inside of the womb.

　　　Such is the way of things in the ontological transparency. This state of absolute temperature is equal to the absolute condition of parental compassion that supports and nurtures all life. And just as most of the time we take the parents in our own lives for granted, the profundity of this parental compassion slips by unrecognized and unnoticed.

　　　Where the universal emotional state is all-provident and all-nurturing on the one hand, it is supremely intelligent on the other. And here we return to our discussion of sound, for the nature of intelligence is fundamentally phonetic (the matrix of sound and number, as discussed in the last issue, however sound is the direct experiential and therefore formative, intuitive aspect). The

　　　The sound that accompanies the ontological big bang is first of all not audible sound. The great transparency, C, is pervasively silent. This silence however is not silence as the absence of sound but rather silence that gives birth to sound. It is the listening ( silent / listen) in which sound shows up. Furthermore, the sounds that show up there are not just any sounds but a specific set of sounds, sounds that house meaning.

　　　Word-sounds are not a random or arbitrary occurrence. They conform to the fundamental dynamics of the ontological big event that calls them into existence, and in as much as they bear witness to the natural order of that event, they occur as an ordered set.

　　　The sounds associated with C are entirely antithetical to the closed and internal sound N of preconditional being-they are, that is, of outward orientation: freely expressive, open ended, and moving from a closed state toward an open one. They are, by definition, open syllables.

　　　An open syllable is nothing more than a sound (syllable ) that ends in an open, or vowel, sound. Odano Sensei has further refined this definition by making a distinction between momentary sounds and continuous sounds. The syllable, KA, is a momentary sound, in that it is only KA for a moment or split second; if extended, KA turns very quickly into aaa, a continuous sound.

　　　Closed syllables are almost exclusively momentary sounds, with one notable exception. The closed-mouth N sound is continuous. It therefore contains the defining attributes that in combination make up the table of open syllables.

　　　The continuity exhibited in N extends through the vowel sounds, A, I, U, E, and O. By the same token, the closed-ness (closed beginning) that is the basic attribute of the momentary sounds is also a fundamental quality of N.