Patterns and Meaning in Music

[Martin_]

We practically don't re-cognize anything as a conscious agent, so yes I can think of many examples : ) Pythagoras spoke of the music in the movement of the celestial spheres. This is literally true in my view.

But I suspect you are trying to highlight that ideational agency underlies all such Macrocosmic music, as it does microcosmic human music, and that is exactly right. Lou and Martin don't realize they have created dualism of Nature and man above. The human ideational spirit is not other than Nature and, as the Emerson quote on the other thread suggested, is a microcosmic expression of Nature's evolution into self-awareness. Humanity is the stage in Nature's evolution in which it awakens to itself and comes to know, appreciate, and make consciously manifest its heavenly choir.

Exactly where did i create dualism? (and how?)

Martin - see below:

Also, as Lou pointed out, if we interpret "conscious agent" strictly, in my case according to BK; wer're not left with much to choose from: falling rocks, blowing wind, and moving water in any of its forms is pretty much it. Oh, one more: The crackling of the fire. That's the 4 elements, btw.

We should ask ourselves, why are we seperating out these natural phenomena from conscious agency or ideational activity? For one, it should be admitted that this makes no sense under metaphysical idealism, but only makes sense under materialism-dualism. Secondly, we should admit that it is naive realism if we do not continue to Reason through the natural phenomena, which all too often we don't. Third, we should confront the fact that we are just idly speculating when there is absolutely no need to, because we have great evidence of exactly what rhythm, melody, harmony, etc. in musical aesthetic are reflecting in our immanent experience, IF we choose not to leave ideational activity in the blind spot and embrace "mysterious emptifulness" as the explanation for everything for some unknown reason.

I think it was you who said there was no need to read Steiner because Cleric was explaining everything much better on the other phenomenological idealism thread. And Cleric has outlined a phenomenology of music quite a few times on this forum, very imaginatively and adeptly as usual. But this is precisely why people may want to consider starting with Steiner's PoF - because all of Cleric's brilliant illustrations wash away like castles made of sand when the person reading them has not figured out why the illustrations work so well in the first place, which is the simple fact that they are reflections of the same ideational activity which Cleric is using to create those illustrations. That is what PoF provides utmost confidence in by guiding us through the phenomenal logic so we can discover it afresh from within ourselves.

You really can't tell when people are just having some fun, can you Ashvin?

Just because i say to interpret something a certain way, at a particular point in a specific discussion, it doesn't mean that I think this is how it is!
It's called having a discussioin / taking sides for the sake of argument / trying something out and see where it leads.

(there's a little "if" there in the text if you didin't notice, which is meant to indicate that we're engaging in a hypothetical scenario, not necessarilly a real one)

What is the thread about. It's about MUSIC. not About bl**dy dualism vs monism. I picked the division because Shu Asked an interesting question, and that division was a good compromise which focused the thinking on things like "can rocks make music?".
Yes. andother answer would be: Since everything is a conscius agent there is no such thing. But. this thread isn't PRIMARILLY about the ontiological prime. it's about Music.

So, my statement was never an ontological statement as in "This is how it is". It was a "let's have some fun, and see what happens if we play around a bit, maybe following this trail of thought can lead to something interesting.

So, just, like, peace out dude. Stop seing the Devil behind every rock

[AshvinP]

What is the thread about. It's about MUSIC. not About bl**dy dualism vs monism. I picked the division because Shu Asked an interesting question, and that division was a good compromise which focused the thinking on things like "can rocks make music?".
Yes. andother answer would be: Since everything is a conscius agent there is no such thing. But. this thread isn't PRIMARILLY about the ontiological prime. it's about Music.

Martin,

I am trying to explain to you, via constructive criticism, why you falsely think a discussion about "Music" is not about the Ontological Prime i.e. ideational activity, which you have once again asserted above. That is because of the implicit dualism in your thought. Dana made clear why he started the thread and he was definitely asking about the relation of Music to the OP. Instead of taking my criticism constructively as a way to better understand what Music is reflecting in our immanent experience, you throw a tantrum. But I am no longer surprised that it has gotten to the point in our times where any request for someone to think carefully is seen as a violation of their very being, a threat to their very existence, which is all the more reason for me to point these things out in response to comments like yours.

[Martin_]

What is the thread about. It's about MUSIC. not About bl**dy dualism vs monism. I picked the division because Shu Asked an interesting question, and that division was a good compromise which focused the thinking on things like "can rocks make music?".
Yes. andother answer would be: Since everything is a conscius agent there is no such thing. But. this thread isn't PRIMARILLY about the ontiological prime. it's about Music.

Martin,

I am trying to explain to you, via constructive criticism, why you falsely think a discussion about "Music" is not about the Ontological Prime i.e. ideational activity, which you have once again asserted above. That is because of the implicit dualism in your thought. Dana made clear why he started the thread and he was definitely asking about the relation of Music to the OP. Instead of taking my criticism constructively as a way to better understand what Music is reflecting in our immanent experience, you throw a tantrum. But I am no longer surprised that it has gotten to the point in our times where any request for someone to think carefully is seen as a violation of their very being, a threat to their very existence, which is all the more reason for me to point these things out in response to comments like yours.

Yeh. whatever. I could try to clarify yet again, but i won't. I said earlier that i don't care whether you tag me as a dualist or not, so I'm going to drop the issue. Nothing good is coming from this.


Music anyone?

[Martin_]

Cleric said:

In the highest sense, Music is the flowing Word

I resonate a lot with this, because just as we words are the symbols through which we grasp the True Meaning, so is music full of communicative symbols through which we may grasp the same.

The thread-starting video, discusses this ( ~31:30 - the Rhetoric of Bach), and how these were musical structures that were well understood and carried meaning. This Meaning it carried was to a higher extent than today, since that particular Musical Language has been so some extent forgotten today.

(or, we can say it still carries the same level of meaning, it's just that it's harder for us to access it today)

[AshvinP]

I'm curious, does anyone know of an example in nature of what we would recognize as music that is not being expressed through what we would recognize as a conscious agent?

We practically don't re-cognize anything as a conscious agent, so yes I can think of many examples : ) Pythagoras spoke of the music in the movement of the celestial spheres. This is literally true in my view.

But I suspect you are trying to highlight that ideational agency underlies all such Macrocosmic music, as it does microcosmic human music, and that is exactly right. Lou and Martin don't realize they have created dualism of Nature and man above. The human ideational spirit is not other than Nature and, as the Emerson quote on the other thread suggested, is a microcosmic expression of Nature's evolution into self-awareness. Humanity is the stage in Nature's evolution in which it awakens to itself and comes to know, appreciate, and make consciously manifest its heavenly choir.

Exactly where did i create dualism? (and how?)

Martin - maybe you should ask yourself why you ask questions that you don't want answers to. Not only do you not want the answers, but you ask two questions and then act like someone has assaulted you when answering them...

[AshvinP]

Cleric said:

In the highest sense, Music is the flowing Word

I resonate a lot with this, because just as we words are the symbols through which we grasp the True Meaning, so is music full of communicative symbols through which we may grasp the same.

Not what Cleric is saying at all, rather he means it is the flowing Spirit (ideational activity) which creates and lights up the phenomenal world through our knowing. But I won't bother clarifying more to someone who clearly doesn't care if he is representing anything correctly.

[AshvinP]

Cleric said:

In the highest sense, Music is the flowing Word

I resonate a lot with this, because just as we words are the symbols through which we grasp the True Meaning, so is music full of communicative symbols through which we may grasp the same.

Not what Cleric is saying at all, rather he means it is the flowing Spirit (ideational activity) which creates and lights up the phenomenal world through our knowing. But I won't bother clarifying more to someone who clearly doesn't care if he is representing anything correctly.

Actually let's go ahead and quote the rest of that comment since it was such an excellent one:

It's very interesting to note the connection between Music and Singing. In the highest sense, Music is the flowing Word. When we think logically and truthfully, we feel consonance. When we think confusedly and illogically, we feel dissonance. These are very subtle feelings that modern man has quite lost perceptivity for. Logic has become a matter of ingrained consensual thought habits, instead of something that we extract as musical lawfulness directly from intuition. Unfortunately, the insensitivity to these intuitive experiences concealed in Thinking, has gone so far that we can see today how thinking is deconstructed to mere communicational consensus. Most of the popular mystical schools, with their seemingly original application of thinking such that it comes to peace with contradictions by simply abolishing itself altogether, also have devastating effects on the feeling sensitivity for truthfulness concealed in Thinking.

Developing the feeling Thinking (Thinking of the Heart) is indispensable for higher cognition. It's impossible to approach the higher worlds with preconceived thought templates that we hope to align against supersensible perceptions. Only by developing the musical element within Thinking we can trace the relations of higher processes and beings. This is not as if we develop some external musical tool (as a telescope or a microscope) that we then use to perceive higher processes. No. Just as the only way we can experience and understand mathematical relations is by engaging into mathematical thinking, so the only way to experience the higher processes is by finding them within Thinking. And for this reason Thinking must be transformed to become similar to them, to resonate with them.

Here we should not make the mistake and imagine that what is being spoken about, refers to intellectual interpretation of feelings. No, it's the opposite - we are lifted into a more fundamental element of Thinking which in fact reveals the true nature of ordinary feeling. What we know as feelings in our ordinary life are really only dream images of the higher spiritual activity of the Thinking Heart. Only small sparks of these higher elements filter through the intellect and are experienced as the feeling of truthfulness and wrongfulness. In this sense, higher spiritual activity is Musical in its very essence. Music is all about relations - temporal, pitch, timbre. So it is in cognition - it is relations of meaning. In the intellect we experience a very mechanical shadow of these relations, which project as logical chains of thoughts. When we behold our whole soul life not as linear streams but as metamorphic process which at any point symphonizes countless and quite independent spiritual streams, we already step into the Imaginative realm. That's also why in the scriptures the Angelic beings are often portrayed as singing.

The key is that Higher Music is weaved out of meaning - in fact, meaning infinitely more dense and comprehensive that the shadowy bits we can grasp in the rigid concepts of the intellect. Nevertheless, it is only through the meaning contained in the shadowy concepts that we can ascend again to the world of higher meaning. This is only logical when we consider that each concept connects us as with a silver thread to the world of Intuition to which it really belongs.

14 For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unfruitful.
15 What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.

[Lou Gold]

My little two cents to the universe of music:
La Guitarra

Thanks Eugene. I enjoyed it.

[Soul_of_Shu]

14 For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unfruitful.
15 What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.

This surely sings volumes ... Indeed, 'What am I to do?' Being nothing apart from the ever-present Origin, what quality am I originating, singing into existence, that being a clear and present example of what is possible, others may take to heart, and sing along?

[Martin_]

We practically don't re-cognize anything as a conscious agent, so yes I can think of many examples : ) Pythagoras spoke of the music in the movement of the celestial spheres. This is literally true in my view.

But I suspect you are trying to highlight that ideational agency underlies all such Macrocosmic music, as it does microcosmic human music, and that is exactly right. Lou and Martin don't realize they have created dualism of Nature and man above. The human ideational spirit is not other than Nature and, as the Emerson quote on the other thread suggested, is a microcosmic expression of Nature's evolution into self-awareness. Humanity is the stage in Nature's evolution in which it awakens to itself and comes to know, appreciate, and make consciously manifest its heavenly choir.

Exactly where did i create dualism? (and how?)

Martin - maybe you should ask yourself why you ask questions that you don't want answers to. Not only do you not want the answers, but you ask two questions and then act like someone has assaulted you when answering them...

It's becasue some patters are really frustrating, unproductive, and hard to get out of. But that's for a different thread.