Conclusion: Music of the spheres vs Conceptual boneyard

Engaging with Questions of Higher Order: cognitive vigilance required for higher degrees of twistedness (Part #13)

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This exploration suggests that the so-called "music of the spheres" may well not be an aesthetic conceit. Each of the "spheres" through which these questions may be explored is a quite distinct cognitive/enactive mode that is necessarily insufficient unto itself. The integrity of each is only sustained through its role in sustaining a larger dynamic through what is usefully described metaphorically as "music".

The "music" is the evolving interplay between the modes -- each understood metaphorically as notes, melodies or instruments in that symphony. Music can of course be understood as precisely encoded (mathematical) relationships (à la Pythagoras) with properties such as harmony and the potential of overtones -- whose resources entrain and sustain the human spirit.

It is such resonances that effectively form the systemic feedback loops between the spheres -- a form of cognitive wind harp.

In total contrast to the harp metaphor, and with apologies to Douglas Adams (Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980), the seemingly disparate conceptual pieces of the living experience held by such a table of complementary concepts might be understood as the "conceptual boneyard at the end of the cognitive universe" -- a boneyard from which the life has been withdrawn. The bones being the leftovers from the consumption experience at Adams' restaurant table! As the final resting place of Theories of Everything, this "boneyard" also has echoes of the legendary Elephants' Graveyard -- with the shadowy guardian of its magical book of spells, namely the lost treasure by which the planet may be transformed, whether peacefully or violently [more]

The challenge may then be that of providing the connective tissue for the set of bones in the conceptual boneyard, putting flesh on it, and reanimating the whole -- perhaps in the spirit of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (1959) or of the well-known Buddhist right mindfulness meditation on the skeletal bones in a charnel ground. The living nature of reality may lie in the nature of the answer to the terrifying question we do not want to know we asked. Reality, as experienced in its most alienating forms, may then be the answer to a question that we have forgotten we asked -- or continue, unconsciously to ask, for lack of the capacity to learn from the response. The experience of reality is thus the receipt of an answer to a "lost" or "forgotten" question. In that sense reality is a knot of unanswered WH-questions -- a topological challenge.

"Fear and Trembling" "Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world?... Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here?... Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality?... Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?" Thomas C Oden (Ed) The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology, 2004

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