Why Music is the Ultimate Expression of the Sacred

This article originates from and expands upon a lecture exploring Music and The Human Experience, which I had the pleasure of delivering at the Kitarika guitar festival in Slovenia, in late 2024.

While the core arguments and overall structure presented here remain faithful to that original talk, the written format provides a welcome opportunity to go deeper into certain concepts and articulate nuances that I didn’t have time for in the live presentation. For those who prefer watching the original lecture, the video recording is available here.

Introduction

Music permeates human existence, often touching us in ways that defy simple explanation. It fuels our emotions, shapes our cultures, and can provide profound personal meaning. This article will explore the relationship between music and the human experience, aiming to illuminate aspects potentially overlooked within conventional frameworks, perhaps offering a slightly different way of seeing both the world and the music that fills it. It seeks to uncover why music holds such a powerful place in our lives by examining its connections to the very fabric of reality, consciousness, and meaning.

Understanding this deep relationship requires traversing diverse fields of knowledge. Drawing upon insights from philosophy and psychology is essential for grasping how we make sense of the world and our place within it. Furthermore, neuroscience provides invaluable perspectives on the brain mechanisms underlying our perception of the world and how this mimicks some of the ontology of music.

However, a purely scientific or even a standard philosophical lens can sometimes feel incomplete when confronting the deepest questions that music often evokes — questions about profound beauty, meaning, value, and transcendence. Scientific inquiry, by its nature, often seeks to reduce phenomena to their constituent parts and measurable interactions. While powerful, this approach can encounter limitations when attempting to capture the fullness of subjective experience. Philosophy pushes deeper into conceptual analysis and the nature of meaning, yet it too can face boundaries when grappling with experiences that seem to lie beyond rational articulation.

Therefore, while acknowledging the inherent complexities and the need for careful consideration, this article will also cautiously touch upon theological and religious perspectives. Historically and culturally, music has been inextricably linked with the sacred and the spiritual. Exploring these connections is not necessarily about endorsing specific doctrines, but about recognizing that realms of human experience — often accessed or potentiated by music — may find resonance or articulation within religious and spiritual language when other frameworks fall short. There seems to be a potential progression: where science hits a limit in explaining subjective depth, philosophy ventures further, and where philosophy meets its edge, the language of the sacred might offer additional, albeit different, insights.

Rather than presenting a rigidly linear argument proceeding deductively from point A to point B, this article will combine various threads of thought. It aims to touch upon several key themes, building a cumulative picture of music’s significance. The intention is to offer a constellation of ideas that, taken together, suggest a richer, more holistic understanding of what music is and why it matters so profoundly. While the principles discussed may resonate broadly across musical genres, the primary context for considering ‘music’ throughout this exploration will often implicitly draw from the Western classical tradition, given its extensive history intertwined with philosophical and spiritual discourse.

The journey will unfold across several key areas:

1. The Nature of Reality: Establishing a broader conception of reality that moves beyond simple materialism, incorporating meaning, patterns, and subjective experience as fundamental aspects of being. This provides the necessary groundwork for understanding music’s deeper role.
2. Theology, Music, and the Sacred: Exploring the intricate and historical connections between musical experience and concepts of transcendence, the sacred, and ultimate meaning.
3. Neuroscience and Cognitive Science: Examining relevant findings from the study of the mind and brain, looking at concepts like insight, flow states, hemispheric differences, and potentially even the effects of altered states, to see how they illuminate our engagement with music and meaning.
4. History and Culture: Tracing echoes of these ideas through various historical and cultural traditions, demonstrating the long-standing recognition of music’s profound significance.

The initial exploration of reality aims to provide a context wherein the subsequent discussions of music, the sacred, cognition, and history become more understandable and resonant. The later sections on science and history, in turn, can offer perspectives that help ground and potentially validate the more abstract philosophical and theological considerations presented earlier.

Part 1: Groundwork: Reality, Mind, and the Limits of Reductionism

Beyond Objects: The Limits of Scientific Reductionism

What constitutes reality? This fundamental question invites numerous answers, yet a dominant perspective in the modern era approaches it primarily through the lens of science. The scientific method has proven extraordinarily powerful in explaining the physical world, generally doing so by defining the world in terms of objects and seeking to understand what these objects are fundamentally made of.

This approach often employs reductionism, a strategy that dissects complex phenomena into their constituent parts, seeking explanation at lower, seemingly more fundamental levels of organization. Consider a chair: from a strictly reductionist viewpoint, its ‘chairness’ — its function and form as an object for sitting — might be seen as secondary. Its primary reality is considered to be its material composition: wood or metal, made of molecules, which are comprised of atoms, themselves mostly empty space bound by forces. The tendency within this framework is often to assert that these lower-level physical constituents represent what is ‘truly real,’ potentially diminishing or even treating the higher-level phenomenon (the chair as a chair, a meaningful object in our lived experience) as less real, an illusion, or merely an emergent property lacking fundamental status.

While incredibly effective for investigating the mechanics of the physical universe, adopting this reductionist view as a complete account of all reality can be problematic and arguably simplistic. It risks overlooking or devaluing the emergent properties, functional significance, and subjective experiences that characterize reality at higher levels of complexity — precisely the levels at which human beings live and find meaning.

A significant potential consequence of internalizing a purely materialistic and reductionist worldview is the risk of nihilism: the conviction that existence is ultimately devoid of inherent meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. From a perspective strictly limited to objective, material components and their interactions, this conclusion can seem tragically reasonable. Within a framework focused solely on matter, energy, and physical laws, concepts central to human life — such as ‘meaning,’ ‘value,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘good,’ and ‘bad’ — do not exist as tangible objects or measurable forces. They lack objective, physical correlates and are often relegated to the status of subjective projections, social constructs, or evolutionary byproducts, devoid of fundamental reality. If only indifferent matter and energy are considered truly real, and these are inherently without meaning or value, then nihilism emerges as a plausible, if bleak, philosophical stance.

The philosopher Albert Camus powerfully articulated the resulting human predicament. Though technically an absurdist rather than a nihilist — emphasizing the confrontation between humanity’s innate search for meaning and the universe’s apparent silence, rather than simply asserting the absence of meaning — his diagnosis of this fundamental tension remains acutely relevant:

“If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of a pen.”

Camus highlights the profound disconnect: we are conscious beings fundamentally driven to seek meaning, value, and a sense of resonance or ‘familiarity’ with the world. Yet, when we examine that world solely through the detached lens of objective, material science, we often encounter a reality that seems indifferent, alien, and unresponsive to these deepest human needs. This creates an existential gap, a tension between our subjective reality, rich with felt meaning and value, and the objective world as depicted by a purely reductionist science, seemingly stripped bare of these qualities.

This potential for meaninglessness, arising from an exclusively reductionist view, underscores the need to explore whether reality might, in fact, be richer and more complex than just a collection of interacting physical objects. Perhaps meaning and pattern are not merely subjective projections but integral aspects of reality itself, aspects that music, as we shall see, seems particularly adept at revealing.

Cognitive Foundations: Perceiving a Complex Reality

To appreciate the richness of reality beyond mere objects, and to understand how music might interface with this richer reality, it’s helpful to consider some fundamental aspects of human cognition — the processes by which we perceive, think, and make sense of the world. These foundations reveal that our engagement with reality is far more complex and mediated than a simple, direct apprehension of objective facts.

Firstly, our sensory perception is profoundly limited. What we consciously perceive through sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell represents only a minuscule fraction of the physical information potentially available in our environment. The electromagnetic spectrum offers a good example: the ‘visible light’ our eyes detect is but a tiny sliver of the vast range of electromagnetic radiation. Even if our visual capacity for detecting different wavelengths were amplified hundreds of times, we would still register less than one percent of the total spectrum. Given that vision is typically our most data-rich sense, this underscores a crucial point: our experiential world is not a perfect mirror of external reality, but rather a construction based on highly filtered and incomplete sensory input.

Secondly, the vast majority of our cognitive processes operate unconsciously. The intricate calculations, interpretations, filtering, and associative leaps that underpin our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions happen largely ‘behind the scenes,’ below the threshold of conscious awareness. Our conscious experience is often described as merely the “tip of the iceberg” resting upon immense subconscious activity. We are generally not aware how we arrive at a particular perception, judgment, or feeling, only aware of the resulting conscious state. This challenges any notion of purely rational, fully transparent self-awareness and highlights that our conscious reality is continuously shaped and guided by complex processes we do not directly control or observe.

Thirdly, cognition must constantly grapple with the problem of combinatorial explosion. This concept, originating in mathematics and computer science, describes the rapid, often exponential, growth in the number of possibilities, variables, potential interactions, or sequences of actions within any complex system. As the number of elements or steps increases even modestly, the total number of combinations or scenarios to potentially consider can quickly become astronomically large — far exceeding the computational capacity of any finite system, whether biological or artificial. As we will explore shortly, this inherent complexity poses a fundamental challenge for navigating the real world.

Fourthly, it is crucial to recognize that reality exists and unfolds across multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. Consider any individual human being. They can be understood at the level of fundamental physics (as a collection of particles and forces), biochemistry (as a complex interplay of molecules and reactions), biology (as an organism composed of cells, tissues, and organs), psychology (as a being with thoughts, emotions, memories, and a personality), personal history (shaped by unique experiences), sociology (embedded in networks of relationships and roles), culture (influenced by shared norms, values, and language), and historical context (situated within a specific time and place). Importantly, validity at one level does not invalidate the others; these are all concurrently real and operative dimensions of that person’s existence. Reality is not simply reducible to the lowest physical level, as a strict reductionism might imply. Instead, it appears as a deeply complex web from interconnected material, informational, personal, cultural, and historical threads. The world we inhabit is far more intricate and layered than a simple collection of physical objects.

Finally, interconnected with these points, our cognition is fundamentally geared towards pattern recognition. We are not passive recipients of sensory data; we are active interpreters constantly, and often unconsciously, striving to extract meaningful patterns, structures, and significance from the influx of information. Consider the experience of looking at a complex or ambiguous visual scene — perhaps a field of dappled sunlight and shadow, or a textured surface. It might initially appear as a random assortment of shapes and colours. Yet, with a subtle cue, a slight shift in attention, or the activation of prior knowledge, a recognizable form — perhaps an animal camouflaged against its background, or a familiar object partially obscured — can suddenly ‘pop out’ and become clearly visible.

The raw sensory input itself hasn’t changed, but our cognitive system, applying expectations and searching for coherence, has successfully detected a meaningful pattern within the noise. This active process of discerning order and significance in the potential chaos is not merely an occasional visual phenomenon; it is a core mechanism by which we navigate the world, transforming raw, ambiguous input into a structured, meaningful reality. This inherent capacity for recognizing, anticipating, and responding to patterns is fundamental to learning, understanding, and survival — and, as will be argued later, lies at the very heart of the musical experience.

The Frame Problem: Navigating Infinite Complexity

The challenge posed by combinatorial explosion manifests acutely in what philosophers and AI researchers term the Frame Problem. This problem highlights the immense, perhaps fundamental, difficulty for any intelligent system in determining which pieces of information from a virtually infinite background are relevant to a specific task or goal in a dynamic world, and, just as importantly, which can be safely ignored.

A famous thought experiment, popularized by philosopher Daniel Dennett drawing on early challenges in artificial intelligence research, vividly illustrates this issue. Imagine researchers build a robot (let’s call it R1) with a seemingly simple goal: retrieve its spare battery, which is located in a room on a mobile wagon. However, unknown to R1, there is also a bomb placed on the wagon, set to detonate shortly. R1 enters the room, identifies the battery on the wagon, correctly deduces that pulling the wagon towards itself is a necessary step to retrieve the battery, executes this action, and is consequently destroyed when the bomb explodes. R1’s failure stems not from faulty logic about its primary goal, but from its inability to consider the relevant side-effects of its actions — the presence and danger of the bomb were critical factors it did not account for.

Learning from this, the researchers design a more sophisticated robot (dubbed R2-D2 by Dennett, for Robot-Relevant-Deducer). To avoid R1’s fate, R2-D2 is programmed explicitly to consider all possible implications and consequences of its potential actions before making a move. When deployed in the same room, however, R2-D2 simply sits idle, motionless. Upon examining its internal processing, the researchers find it trapped in an endless computational loop. It began by trying to deduce all conceivable consequences of pulling the wagon (including the bomb exploding), but then realized it also needed to consider the consequences of not pulling the wagon. Furthermore, it needed to ensure that its considerations weren’t missing crucial factors — perhaps the ceiling might collapse, perhaps the battery wasn’t charged, perhaps pulling the wagon would change the room’s temperature slightly, which might affect… and so on, ad infinitum. R2-D2 became paralyzed by the sheer infinitude of potential relevance.

This exposes a fundamental dilemma: an intelligent agent must consider the consequences of its actions to behave effectively, yet attempting to consider all conceivable consequences makes timely action impossible. The crux of the issue lies in determining relevance. How does any system operating in a complex world know what information to focus on and what to filter out? R2-D2’s paralysis wasn’t merely about calculating the obvious effect (getting the battery) or even the dangerous side-effect (the bomb). It was also about its inability to efficiently dismiss the endless list of irrelevant possibilities: the colour of the wagon, the precise background noise level, the potential influence of distant solar flares on its circuitry, the chemical composition of the paint on the walls, and so forth. Assessing each of these potential factors simply to confirm its irrelevance creates an insurmountable computational burden.

This reveals two intertwined facets of the Frame Problem:

1. The Knowledge Problem: It is incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible in principle, to know in advance everything that might turn out to be relevant to a situation, especially in novel or ambiguous contexts.
2. The Computational Problem: Even if a system could somehow recognize relevance upon encountering it, the sheer computational cost of examining every potential factor in the universe (and its potential changes over time) to determine its relevance is prohibitive. This is the trap R2-D2 fell into — the need to process the infinite set of potential irrelevancies.

The staggering scale of this computational explosion, even in far simpler domains than reality, can be better understood with a typical game of chess. In a standard chess game, a player might have around 30 possible legal moves — this is the branching factor (b). An average game might last about 40 move pairs — the depth (d). The total number of possible sequences of moves in such an average game is thus roughly b^d, in this case 30^40. This number is astronomically large, far exceeding the estimated number of grains of sand on Earth, even if we imagine trillions of Earths. Furthermore, the Shannon number, representing an estimate of the total number of possible unique legal chess game configurations, is calculated to be around 10^120. This number is vastly larger still, dwarfing the estimated number of electrons in the observable universe, even multiplied by trillions.

If a highly structured, finite, rule-bound system like chess generates such paralyzing computational complexity, consider the complexity of the real world. Navigating even a seemingly simple room involves vastly more potential variables, interactions, ambiguities, and unforeseen possibilities than exist on a chessboard. Attempting to analyze every cubic centimeter, every potential physical interaction, every subtle environmental fluctuation, leads to a combinatorial explosion that makes chess look trivial.

This “problem of relevance,” stemming from combinatorial explosion, remains a central, perhaps defining, challenge for creating truly general artificial intelligence capable of flexible, adaptive behaviour in the real world. Current AI systems often struggle to efficiently filter the relevant from the irrelevant without extensive human pre-structuring of their tasks and data, or by learning statistical patterns from enormous datasets that implicitly capture relevance information curated by humans.

But somehow, humans navigate this complexity constantly, fluidly, and seemingly effortlessly. We focus our attention, ignore innumerable potential distractions, adapt to novel situations, and act effectively without getting computationally bogged down. This remarkable human capacity suggests that our cognition employs strategies — perhaps deeply rooted in our embodiment, our emotional responses, our intuition, our ability to grasp holistic patterns, or our participation within a shared cultural context — that allow us to dynamically “frame” situations and cut through the combinatorial explosion to grasp what matters. It implies that effectively dealing with relevance might involve more than pure computation, pointing towards the importance of the qualitative, context-sensitive aspects of experience — aspects that, again, music seems particularly attuned to.

Affordances and Optimal Grip

If reality is more complex than a mere collection of physical objects, and if human cognition is structured by more than just objective facts, how then do we perceive and interact with our surroundings? Insights from ecological psychology and phenomenology offer valuable perspectives that move beyond a purely computational or detached observer model.

Ecological psychologist James J. Gibson introduced the crucial concept of affordances to capture how the environment appears meaningful in relation to an organism’s potential actions. He defined affordances as follows:

“The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes… An affordance is a relationship between an object… or an environment and an organism, that affords the opportunity for that organism to perform an action.”

Crucially, affordances are not intrinsic properties of objects alone, nor are they purely subjective projections of the mind. They exist in the relationship between an organism and its environment. A chair, for example, affords sitting, but only to a creature with a body structured for sitting, like a human. The same physical object offers no such affordance to a fish or a dolphin. A tree branch might afford grasping for a primate, resting for a bird, or shade for an animal resting beneath it. The world appears to us not merely as a configuration of neutral objects with measurable physical properties, but as a landscape charged with possibilities for action, perceived directly in relation to our own bodily capabilities, needs, and goals.

Building on this relational understanding, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explored how we actively navigate and engage with these environmental possibilities. His phenomenological analyses, later synthesized by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus have popularized the term Optimal Grip in cognitive science, which defines how we constantly, and often implicitly, strive to achieve the best possible perceptual or interactive relationship with the objects and situations we encounter. We seek a “grip” that allows the world to disclose itself most clearly and effectively for our purposes. As Merleau-Ponty described:

“For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there’s an optimal distance from which it requires to be seen, a direction viewed from which it grants the most of itself: at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or deficiency. We therefore tend towards the maximum of visibility, and seek a better focus as with a microscope.”

This highlights our active role as agents within the world. We don’t just passively register the affordances presented to us; we move, adjust, and attune ourselves — often without conscious deliberation — to find the ‘sweet spot’. Think of adjusting your position to see a painting in a gallery clearly, finding the right way to hold a tool for effective use, or modulating your voice and proximity in a social conversation. In each case, we are actively negotiating our relationship with the environment to achieve an optimal state of interaction or understanding, a state where the world yields its meaning or utility most readily. We seek not just any perception, but the best possible perception for the task at hand.

Beyond Computation

These insights into affordances, optimal grip, embodiment, and the active role of the agent converge in a contemporary paradigm within cognitive science known as 4E Cognition. This framework offers a significant challenge to traditional models that often view the mind primarily as an abstract, disembodied computer processing symbolic information (often called ‘cognitivism’). Instead, 4E cognition emphasizes that mind and cognitive processes are fundamentally:

• Embedded: Situated and functioning within a specific physical, social, and cultural environment, which significantly shapes cognition.
• Embodied: Dependent on the unique capacities, limitations, sensitivities, and history of having a particular kind of living body. The body is not merely hardware for the mind’s software but an integral part of the cognitive system.
• Enactive: Arising through the dynamic, reciprocal interplay between an organism’s actions and the environment. Perception guides action, and action shapes perception; we actively ‘enact’ or bring forth our experiential world through this coupling.
• Extended: Capable of incorporating external elements — tools, technologies, notations, even aspects of the environment or other people — as integral parts of the cognitive process itself (e.g., using a notebook to offload memory).

By highlighting these dimensions, 4E cognition provides a richer, more biologically plausible account of how creatures like us navigate complexity, learn skills, and experience the world.

Flowing naturally from this more embodied, interactive, and situated view of cognition, philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke proposes a helpful framework identifying four distinct, yet interconnected, kinds of knowing. This taxonomy moves beyond a narrow focus on factual knowledge to encompass the diverse ways we relate to and understand reality:

1. Propositional Knowing: This is ‘knowing that’, the form most commonly associated with the word “knowledge” in everyday language and traditional epistemology. It deals with facts, assertions, beliefs, and theories that can typically be expressed in declarative sentences and judged as true or false. Examples include knowing that Paris is the capital of France, that E=mc2, or that there is a table in the room.
2. Procedural Knowing: This is ‘knowing how’, encompassing skills, abilities, techniques, and expertise acquired through practice and embodied learning. Knowing how to ride a bicycle, swim, speak a language fluently, or play a musical instrument falls into this category. This type of knowledge is often difficult or impossible to fully capture in propositional statements; one cannot learn to play the guitar simply by reading instructions. It requires thousands of hours of practice to develop proficiency.
3. Perspectival Knowing: This is ‘knowing what it is like’ to be in a certain situation or state, from a particular point of view. It is tied to subjective experience, consciousness, episodic memory (recalling specific past events from one’s own perspective), and the immediate sense of relevance and affordances present in a given context. It involves grasping the ‘salience landscape’ — what stands out as important or possible for you right now. The felt experience of being deeply moved while listening to music in a concert hall — the atmosphere, the shared attention, the emotional resonance — constitutes perspectival knowledge. It is distinct from merely knowing facts about the concert (propositional) or knowing how to perform the music (procedural). It is the qualitative character of the experience itself.
4. Participatory Knowing: This is knowing by engaging, interacting, identifying with, and co-creating within a situation or relationship. It involves the agent actively shaping the environment (or the relationship) and simultaneously being shaped by it. This form of knowing is deeply connected to the concept of Optimal Grip — it represents the embodied understanding gained through actively finding the right way to relate to and participate within the world, or within a specific practice, community, or even another person. It’s the sense of ‘being in sync’ or conforming oneself to a larger reality or process.

Together, these concepts — affordances, optimal grip, 4E cognition, and the four kinds of knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory, the ‘4 P’s of knowing’) — move us significantly further from a purely object-based, reductionist, or computationally-focused view of reality and cognition. They paint a picture of human knowing as multi-faceted, dynamic, deeply rooted in our physical being, and intrinsically linked to our active engagement with a world that continuously offers possibilities we must learn to skillfully and meaningfully navigate. This richer understanding of the human condition provides a crucial foundation for appreciating the complex ways in which music engages us — often simultaneously involving procedural skill (playing/singing), perspectival feeling (listening/experiencing), and participatory engagement (being moved/joining in), perhaps even pointing towards realities best understood through these non-propositional modes of knowing.

Classical Metaphysics: Forms, Purpose, and the Problem of Consciousness

The limitations encountered within a purely materialistic worldview, particularly its struggle with meaning and subjective experience, invite us to revisit insights from classical philosophy. The metaphysical frameworks developed by ancient Greek thinkers, notably Plato and Aristotle, offered ways of understanding reality that incorporated dimensions like form, purpose, and potentiality — elements often sidelined in modern scientific materialism but arguably crucial for a fuller picture of existence.

Plato, grappling with the fundamental philosophical problem of the ‘one and the many’ — how we recognize stable identities and universal concepts (like ‘beauty’ or ‘justice’ or even ‘dog’) in a world populated by diverse, changing particular instances — proposed his influential Theory of Forms. He argued that the tangible objects and phenomena of our everyday experience are not the ultimate reality but are rather imperfect reflections or ‘participations’ in eternal, perfect archetypes or essences: the Forms. These Forms exist in an abstract, intelligible realm accessible to reason, not the senses. How do we recognize vastly different creatures as ‘dogs,’ or various disparate objects as ‘cups,’ even ones utterly novel in design? Plato’s answer lies in their shared participation, however imperfectly, in the ideal Form of ‘Dogness’ or ‘Cupness’. This implies that underlying the flux of appearances are stable, intelligible patterns and structures that constitute true reality and make knowledge possible.

While the notion of a separate realm of Forms might initially seem abstract or ‘unscientific’ by today’s standards, its core insight resonates with enduring questions about the reality of abstract structures. Consider, for example, the status of mathematical objects and truths. Many practicing mathematicians intuitively identify as ‘Platonists’ in the sense that they regard mathematical entities (numbers, geometric shapes, theorems) not as mere human inventions or convenient fictions, but as objective realities that are discovered, not created. Mathematics deals with pure patterns, relationships, and structures — abstract realities whose existence and efficacy seem undeniable, even if they are not physically tangible objects. Plato’s theory can be understood as extending this intuition: reality’s fundamental constituents include not just material stuff, but also the intelligible patterns, forms, and structures that shape it and make it comprehensible. His famous Allegory of the Cave further dramatizes this conception, portraying the human condition as a potential ascent from the perception of mere shadows (fleeting, deceptive appearances) towards an intellectual vision of the true realities — the eternal Forms.

Aristotle, Plato’s famous student, offered a complementary, though distinct, metaphysical framework. While also emphasizing form, Aristotle located it within concrete, individual substances rather than in a separate realm. He focused on understanding change, development, and the inherent nature of things within the observable world. To achieve a complete explanation of any entity or phenomenon, Aristotle argued, one must understand its Four Causes:

1. The Material Cause: The underlying physical stuff from which something is made (e.g., the marble of a statue).
2. The Formal Cause: The essential structure, pattern, or definition that defines what the thing is (e.g., the sculptor’s conception of the figure embodied in the marble’s shape).
3. The Efficient Cause: The agent or process that brought the thing into being or initiated change (e.g., the sculptor and their tools).
4. The Final Cause (Telos): The inherent purpose, end, function, or goal for which the thing exists or towards which it naturally develops (e.g., the statue exists to commemorate an event or evoke beauty; an acorn’s telos is to become an oak tree).

Aristotle perceived the natural world as being imbued with such intrinsic purposes or ends. Furthermore, he analyzed the pervasive phenomenon of change through the fundamental concepts of Potentiality (Greek: dunamis) and Actuality (Greek: energeia). An acorn possesses the potentiality to become an oak tree; the mature oak tree represents the actuality of that potential. For Aristotle, potentiality was not merely an abstract logical possibility but a real, inherent capacity residing within a substance, actively directing its development towards its specific form and function (its telos).

Why do these classical perspectives, which integrate form, purpose, and potentiality into the fabric of reality, often seem so alien to our modern scientific sensibilities? A significant reason lies in the historical trajectory of science itself. The scientific revolution, spearheaded by figures like Galileo Galilei, achieved its unprecedented predictive and explanatory power by deliberately adopting a mechanistic and quantitative methodology. To render the natural world mathematically tractable and predictable, aspects that resisted easy quantification — particularly subjective qualities (the ‘redness’ of red — often termed qualia), consciousness itself, and inherent purposes (final causes) — were systematically excluded from the scope of scientific description. Galileo was aware that consciousness was most certainly ontologically real and irreducible, but he effectively ‘bracketed it out’ as it did not fit within the new mathematical and mechanical framework he was proposing.

Over subsequent centuries, this necessary methodological exclusion arguably hardened, for many, into an implicit ontological assumption: the aspects science couldn’t measure or model mechanically were deemed less real, or perhaps not real at all. The powerful ‘world as machine’ metaphor, initially a productive scientific model, gradually came to be perceived by many not just as a useful lens, but as a complete and exhaustive description of reality itself. This led to a widespread cultural ‘forgetting’ of the very aspects — consciousness, subjective experience, intrinsic meaning, purpose — that had been initially set aside, leaving them conceptually homeless within the dominant scientific worldview.

This historical exclusion brings us directly to profound and persistent challenges in contemporary philosophy of mind. While neuroscience excels at mapping the complex neural correlates of conscious states — tracking which brain areas activate during specific thoughts, perceptions, or emotions (addressing the so-called ‘easy problems’ of consciousness) — it struggles mightily to explain how and why these objective, physical brain processes generate, or are identical with, subjective, qualitative experience — the ‘what it’s like’ aspect of being conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers famously articulated this explanatory gap as the ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’:

“Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? […] we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.”

This ‘Hard Problem’ remains fundamentally unsolved, representing a significant fissure in the purely materialistic worldview. It serves as a potent reminder that our most immediate and undeniable reality — our own subjective awareness — stubbornly resists easy reduction to purely physical or computational terms.

Thus far, our exploration into the nature of reality has moved beyond a simplistic, object-focused materialism. The main points are:

• A purely reductionist scientific worldview, while powerful, risks overlooking essential aspects of reality like emergent properties and meaning, potentially fostering nihilism.
• Human cognition is not a passive mirror of objective facts but an active, embodied, and largely unconscious process that structures experience through limited perception, multi-level abstraction, and constant pattern recognition, facing the inherent challenge of relevance determination amidst combinatorial complexity (the Frame Problem).
• Our interaction with the world is shaped by perceived possibilities for action (Affordances) which we actively negotiate (Optimal Grip), involving multiple ways of knowing (Propositional, Procedural, Perspectival, Participatory) characteristic of an embodied, embedded, enactive, and potentially extended mind (4E Cognition).
• Classical metaphysical traditions (e.g., Plato, Aristotle) offered frameworks incorporating form, purpose, and potentiality as integral aspects of reality. The methodological exclusion of such concepts, along with consciousness, from the modern scientific project has led to profound explanatory gaps, most notably the ‘Hard Problem’ of subjective experience.

In essence, the picture emerging suggests that reality is fundamentally constituted not just by physical objects and forces, but also intrinsically involves patterns, relationships, meaning, potentiality, and the undeniable (yet scientifically elusive) presence of conscious experience. This expanded, more holistic understanding of reality provides a more fertile ground upon which to consider the profound role, function, and significance of music within the human experience. Music, as we shall now explore, seems uniquely positioned to engage with precisely these deeper, patterned, meaningful, and experiential dimensions of existence.

Part 2: Music, Meaning, and the Sacred

Transcending the Mundane: From Plato to Modernity

Having established a view of reality richer than mere objects — one incorporating pattern, meaning, potentiality, and consciousness — we can now explore concepts that are the core of the human experience, yet hard to make sense of in a typical scientific paradigm, such as Transcendence. Literally meaning to ‘climb beyond’ or ‘surpass,’ transcendence, in philosophical and religious contexts, refers to experiences, states of being, or dimensions of reality that go beyond the limits of ordinary, everyday sensory existence and conceptual understanding. There is a persistent human intuition or impulse, reflected across cultures in myth, art, and spiritual practice, to somehow pierce through the veil of the mundane world to connect with something more fundamental, more real, or more ultimate. It involves the claim, implicit or explicit, that there exists a Transcendent dimension and that human consciousness can, in some manner, make contact with or participate in it. But there are many competing views of what its precise nature is.

This idea boasts a long and complex philosophical lineage. We saw glimpses in Plato’s philosophy, particularly in the Allegory of the Cave, where the ultimate goal of the philosopher is depicted as an ascent — a transcendence — from the world of fleeting, deceptive shadows (sensory appearances) through the power of reason to contemplate the eternal, unchanging Forms, the true and ultimate reality.

Centuries later, Immanuel Kant, in his critical philosophy, profoundly reshaped the Western understanding of transcendence. By carefully distinguishing between the world as we can experience and know it through the structuring categories of our own minds (phenomena) and the world as it might be ‘in itself,’ independent of our perception (noumena), Kant established strict limits to what human theoretical reason could definitively ascertain about ultimate reality. While he did not deny the possibility of God, freedom, or immortality, Kant argued that such transcendent concepts could not be logically proven or disproven by pure reason alone. His work effectively shifted the focus for many subsequent thinkers away from attempting to achieve objective knowledge of the transcendent (like medieval proofs for God’s existence) towards understanding the conditions and limits of human reason in its potential relation to the transcendent, often opening doors for faith, moral reasoning, or aesthetic experience as alternative pathways.

In the 20th century, as traditional religious frameworks encountered increasing challenges from secularism and scientific materialism, scholars of religion like Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade undertook influential studies of the phenomenology and structure of religious experience and religious life. Otto, with his analysis of the ‘numinous’ — the experience of an awe-inspiring, terrifying, and fascinating mystery — and Eliade, with his extensive cross-cultural work on the structures of the ‘sacred’ (as distinct from the ‘profane’ or ordinary reality), sought to identify and describe the universal experiential core of encountering what they saw as a transcendent dimension. They worked to articulate the nature of this fundamental aspect of human experience even as the traditional languages and dogmas used to frame it became fragmented or perceived as incoherent by many in the modern West.

Against this rich and varied backdrop, a central proposition of this exploration emerges: music possesses a unique and powerful connection to the experience of transcendence. Across cultures and throughout history, music has frequently been employed as a vehicle for spiritual practice, described as an expression of divine realities, or felt as a direct source of experiences that seem to lift the listener beyond the confines of the ordinary self and the mundane world.

The Nature of Music: Patterns, Meaning, and Experience

To understand this connection, we must first ask: what is music? While a complete definition remains elusive and debated, a fruitful starting point is to consider music as fundamentally constituted by meaningful patterns. It is commonly understood as ‘organized sound’ (often incorporating intentional silence) unfolding dynamically through time. Musical works involve intricate webs of interconnected patterns operating simultaneously across multiple dimensions — rhythmic figures and meters, melodic contours and motives, harmonic progressions and dissonances, variations in timbre (sound colour) and dynamics (loudness), and overarching formal structures. It is this complex, multi-layered organization that distinguishes music from mere arbitrary noise and allows it to be perceived as coherent, expressive, and significant.

Music, especially purely instrumental music, holds a unique position among the arts regarding representation. While painting, sculpture, and literature often depict specific objects, tangible scenes, recognizable characters, or convey explicit narratives or ideas, instrumental music frequently seems non-representational, or at least abstract. It doesn’t usually ‘picture’ a house or ‘tell’ a story in the same direct way. What, then, is it ‘about’? This very ambiguity, this lack of fixed semantic reference, may be key to its profound power. By not being tied to representing specific external objects or concrete concepts, music might resonate more directly with the dynamic forms, patterns, and felt qualities of lived experience itself — the dynamics of tension and release, the interplay of expectation and surprise, the processes of growth, decay, and transformation, the change between unity and diversity. Could it be that music is ‘about’ the very structure and ‘feeling tone’ of reality and consciousness, presented not conceptually, but directly to our embodied perception and feeling?

Indeed, music seems uniquely capable of directly engaging with the richer conception of reality developed in Part 1. If our effective navigation of the world depends fundamentally on grasping meaning and pattern — if recognizing significance and coherence is essential for overcoming the paralysis threatened by the Frame Problem — then music appears as a concentrated, intensified, and perhaps purified form of this very meaningful patterning. It presents dynamic, evolving structures of significance that we often perceive and feel immediately, intuitively, without necessarily requiring conceptual translation or propositional analysis. In this sense, music arguably bypasses the world of static ‘facts’ or discrete objects to present something akin to the felt, dynamic flow of reality itself.

Furthermore, the profound subjective impact of music provides a powerful challenge to simplistic reductionism. Consider the deeply engaging experience of listening intently to a musical masterpiece — perhaps a complex and moving symphony by Beethoven or an intricate fugue by Bach — feeling its structural coherence, its emotional depth, its seemingly inevitable rightness, its sheer beauty. If one were to attempt to explain away this rich experience by stating it is ‘just complex patterns of vibrations in the air’ or ‘merely the result of certain auditory stimuli triggering predictable neural pathways,’ it would feel profoundly inadequate, a failure to capture the phenomenon itself. The felt meaning, the perceived significance, the sense of value, and even the potential feeling of sacredness encountered in powerful musical experiences provide a potent phenomenological counter-argument to worldviews that attempt to reduce reality solely to its lowest-level physical components. Music insists, through the immediacy of direct experience, that meaning, beauty, and value are undeniably real aspects of our world.

Music also vividly engages the different kinds of knowing previously discussed (the ‘4 P’s’):

• Procedural knowing (‘knowing how’) is obviously central to the performance of music. The years of dedicated practice required to master an instrument or the voice result in a deeply embodied, skillful knowledge that far transcends mere theoretical understanding.
• Perspectival knowing (‘knowing what it’s like’) is arguably paramount for the listener. The core of musical appreciation often lies in the subjective, qualitative experience — ‘knowing what it’s like’ to be immersed in the sound world of a piece, to feel its emotional contours, to perceive its unfolding structure from one’s own unique, situated standpoint. This felt sense of meaningful experience is irreducible to simply knowing facts about the music.
• Participatory knowing (‘knowing by doing/being’) is also strongly evoked by music. It often seems to invite or even compel participation, whether overt or subtle. Listeners commonly tap their feet, sway their bodies, feel the urge to dance or sing along. Even in seemingly ‘passive’ focused listening, particularly to complex classical works, one might experience a profound sense of mentally ‘following’ the interwoven musical lines, anticipating resolutions, feeling affectively ‘in sync’ with the music’s temporal unfolding — a kind of active, internal participation in the music’s becoming. There can arise a distinct feeling that the music is ‘calling out,’ asking for the listener’s engaged attention and presence to help it fully ‘shine forth’ or realize its potential meaning within the shared space of performance and listening. This resonates strongly with the idea of achieving an ‘optimal grip,’ not just with static spatial objects, but through dynamic attunement and participation within unfolding temporal patterns, contributing to the co-creation of the musical event and its significance.

Meaning-Making: From Facts to Stories to the Sacred

To further understand music’s profound connection to the human experience, particularly its potential link to transcendence and the sacred, it’s helpful to consider the fundamental role of stories in structuring our reality. We often think of stories simply as sequences of events related in speech or writing. However, considered more deeply, stories represent primary ways in which human beings abstract meaningful patterns from the undifferentiated flow of raw experience. Our minds do not passively record every detail of existence like a video camera; instead, we constantly filter the overwhelming influx of sensory data and potential facts, selecting and organizing elements based on perceived relevance, significance, and coherence in relation to our goals and values.

Imagine recounting a specific incident from your workday — perhaps a challenging interaction with a colleague or a moment of unexpected insight. In telling this story, you wouldn’t typically include every single detail: the precise colour of the walls, the number of leaves on a nearby plant, the exact background hum of the air conditioning, unless these details were somehow critically relevant to the point of the narrative. Instead, you instinctively abstract the meaningful elements — the key actions, the words exchanged, the intentions perceived, the emotions felt, the underlying conflict or resolution — and weave them into a coherent pattern that conveys the significance of the event. You extract a meaningful narrative structure, the story, from a potentially infinite sea of irrelevant background facts.

These abstracted patterns of meaning — these stories — are not all equal; they exist on a spectrum, or perhaps a hierarchy, of importance and depth relative to our lives. There is the relatively mundane, transient story of the specific workplace incident. Then there are patterns we recognize as more central to the arc of human life: narratives concerning birth, coming of age, forming significant relationships like marriage, facing adversity, experiencing loss, or raising children. Moving further, we encounter the powerful stories presented in enduring works of art — films, novels, plays — that explore profound and universal themes like courage, betrayal, sacrifice, love, mortality, and the search for meaning. These resonate deeply because they tap into archetypal patterns of human existence. Beyond these lie the foundational narratives that shape entire cultures over millennia: great works of epic literature, persistent fairy tales carrying deep psychological wisdom, foundational mythologies explaining the cosmos and humanity’s place within it, and ultimately, the core narratives of the world’s religious traditions, which can be thought of as sacred stories.

We can conceptualize this relationship using a model where just like we move from facts to meaning, we likewise move from stories to the sacred. At the base lies the realm of raw phenomena, potential information, or unordered ‘facts’ — the blooming, buzzing confusion of unfiltered reality, perhaps corresponding to the purely objective world described by reductionist science. However, we rarely, if ever, experience the world directly at this level. Our perception is always already filtered through layers of meaning, relevance, and value. When we consciously or unconsciously abstract, structure, and communicate this meaning, particularly concerning events unfolding in time, we create recognizable patterns or stories. These stories themselves are layered according to their perceived significance, generality, and integrative power, ascending from the personal and everyday towards the collective, archetypal, and universal. At the apex of this hierarchy, representing the most fundamental, comprehensive, widely resonant, and meaning-bestowing patterns that orient our lives and understanding of reality, lies what cultures have traditionally identified as the Sacred. This model suggests we inhabit a world already imbued with layers of meaning and structured by narrative patterns, with the most vital and enduring patterns connecting us to the deepest perceived realities and providing our ultimate frameworks for value and orientation.

Music and the Sacred

If music operates primarily through the direct perception of dynamic, meaningful patterns, and if the most profound and integrating patterns are those we associate with the sacred, then we might reasonably expect to find deep resonances and shared characteristics between powerful musical experiences and those experiences typically described as sacred, mystical, or transcendent. Exploring these parallels can illuminate why music has so often been perceived as a gateway to, or an expression of, these deeper dimensions of reality. Indeed, several recurring qualities seem particularly salient:

Ineffability: Both profound musical encounters and experiences deemed sacred often share the quality of ineffability — they seem to defy adequate description or capture in ordinary, conceptual language. One might feel deeply moved, gain a profound sense of understanding, or experience a state of awe or unity, yet subsequently struggle to articulate precisely what was experienced or understood. Words, concepts, and propositional statements feel clumsy and insufficient. The psychologist and philosopher William James, in his foundational work The Varieties of Religious Experience, explicitly highlighted this connection, suggesting music’s unique power in this regard:

“Not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.”

James implies that music, perhaps due to its non-discursive, patterned, and affect-laden nature, operates on a level closer to holistic, intuitive, or mystical insight than standard language can typically reach.

Seeking Completion/Wholeness: Music, particularly within the Western tonal tradition but arguably possessing analogues elsewhere, often embodies a dynamic narrative arc involving tension and release, departure and return, striving towards completion, resolution, and a sense of wholeness.

Harmonic progressions seek the stability of the tonic chord, melodic lines find closure, thematic materials are developed and recapitulated, leading potentially to a feeling of profound finality, integration, and structural integrity where ‘nothing more needs to be said.’ This inherent musical striving towards resolution and arrival powerfully echoes a central theme found across many spiritual and religious traditions: the longing for, or the journey towards, a state of ultimate perfection, unity, reconciliation, integration, or wholeness. This spiritual aspiration might be conceptualized as returning to a lost primordial state of harmony (consider the Garden of Eden in Abrahamic traditions before the alienation of the fall) or as achieving a future state of enlightenment, liberation, or salvation where fragmentation, suffering, and illusion are overcome (as in Buddhist paths towards enlightenment, where some schools emphasize uncovering an innate wholeness that was merely obscured by defilements and desires). Music, in its very structure, often seems to enact this fundamental human drama of seeking and finding completion.

Inexhaustibility: Both truly great works of music and objects or texts deemed sacred frequently possess a remarkable quality of inexhaustibility. They seem to offer endless depths for exploration and interpretation, resisting attempts to fully grasp, definitively explain, or deplete their meaning. One can return to a profound symphony, a complex fugue, or a deeply resonant folk song time and time again across a lifetime, yet always discover new structural subtleties, deeper layers of emotional significance, or fresh connections to one’s own evolving experience. This sense of boundless depth, of always having more to give, is vividly captured in the common experience of people finding that any given musical piece, it continues to reveal more over years of engagement, feeling perpetually incompletely understood. This quality resonates strongly with descriptions of the sacred. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, contemplating the genius of Mozart, expressed this paradoxically:

“I am convinced that if Mozart ever became completely comprehensible to me, he would then become completely incomprehensible.”

Kierkegaard seems to intuit that the very essence of Mozart’s profundity lies in a depth that inherently transcends complete rational analysis or final interpretation; its inexhaustibility is intrinsic to its identity. To fully ‘comprehend’ it in a finite way would be to misunderstand and lose its true nature.

Similarly, the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil spoke of the enduring value of sacred texts and the example of mystics:

“The value of mystics […] resides exclusively in their infinite capacity to furnish truths that may be grasped by anyone who contemplates them for a long time with a religious attention.”

Here, inexhaustibility is directly linked to the potential for continuous revelation, accessible through sustained, dedicated, and receptive attention — an attitude similar to that required for deep listening to music. This theme also echoes powerfully in foundational texts of traditions like Daoism:

“The dao that can be described is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name.” (Dao De Jing)

The ultimate reality or principle, the Dao, inherently overflows any attempt at fixed conceptualization or verbal definition, remaining perpetually inexhaustible to finite human understanding. This shared characteristic of inexhaustibility suggests that both profound music and experiences of the sacred point towards realities that are fundamentally richer, deeper, and more complex than our ordinary conceptual frameworks can fully contain or define. They invite ongoing engagement rather than final consumption.

These common threads — ineffability, the motif of completion, and inexhaustibility — offer compelling reasons why music is so often intimately associated with the sacred and experienced as a potential pathway to transcendence. Music seems uniquely equipped to embody and communicate these deep patterns and qualities of existence directly to our embodied consciousness.

Obstacles to Perceiving the Sacred in Music

Despite the profound connections explored thus far — suggesting music inherently touches upon deep structures of reality, meaning, and potentially the sacred — acknowledging or readily perceiving this connection can be challenging within the prevailing currents of contemporary Western society. Several factors contribute to this difficulty:

1. Music Framed Primarily as Entertainment: In a culture often heavily influenced by commercial interests and oriented towards immediate gratification, music is frequently produced, marketed, and consumed primarily as entertainment. It becomes a product designed to be fun, casual, mood-regulating, or simply a background distraction. While music certainly possesses the capacity for enjoyment and entertainment — valuable functions in themselves — this dominant framing can overshadow or obscure the deeper, more transformative roles it has played throughout human history: as an integral part of ritual, a vehicle for spiritual expression and communion, a catalyst for social cohesion, and a source of profound personal insight and existential meaning. When music is habitually encountered as just another consumer good, its potential sacred dimension can easily be missed.
2. The Distinction Between Hearing and Listening: Related to the above is the crucial difference between merely ‘hearing’ music and actively ‘listening’ to it. ‘Hearing’ often describes the passive, semi-conscious, or unintentional exposure to the sounds that constantly surround us in modern life — the background music in cafes or stores, snippets used in advertisements, the casual flow of radio or streaming playlists. ‘Listening,’ in contrast, implies a deliberate act of focused attention, an intentional engagement with the musical work itself. It involves an attempt to follow its unfolding structure, perceive its nuances, understand its language, resonate with its emotional content, and potentially exhaust its meaning to the best of one’s ability. It might even involve, as described earlier, a form of participatory engagement, a ‘giving of one’s whole soul’ to the experience. Accessing the deeper layers of meaning, the structural beauty, and the potentially sacred dimensions of music arguably requires this shift from passive hearing to active, dedicated listening — an engagement characterized by openness, concentration, and what the philosopher Simone Weil termed a kind of “religious attention.”
3. The Prevailing Secular Frame: Perhaps the most significant obstacle is the influence of a dominant secular framework, largely shaped by a scientific-materialist worldview, which can make the very concept of ‘the sacred’ seem unintelligible, archaic, irrelevant, or simply nonsensical. Within a perspective that primarily values the measurable, the quantifiable, and the physically reducible, the category of ‘the sacred’ — often associated with non-material realities, transcendent values, subjective experience, and holistic meaning — can struggle to find any coherence for the modern man. If a concept isn’t readily intelligible or considered ‘real’ within one’s default operating worldview, one is unlikely to look for experiences related to it or recognize them as such if they do occur. Furthermore, the rich and complex notion of the sacred is often reductively conflated with specific religious doctrines or testable propositional claims (e.g., ‘Does a personal God, as described in text X, exist? Yes or No?’). These specific propositional claims may then be evaluated according to scientific criteria of evidence and proof, found wanting, and dismissed. This dismissal, however, often leads to a broader rejection of the entire domain of the sacred itself, overlooking its potential reality as an experiential dimension characterized by awe, profound meaning, unity, or transcendence, regardless of specific doctrinal interpretations.

Despite these cultural headwinds, it remains arguable that profound music, by its very nature — its intricate patterning, its deep emotional resonance, its resistance to complete reduction — inherently pushes back against a purely ‘scientified,’ flattened, or disenchanted view of the world. Music may always contain latent echoes or potentials for experiencing the sacred, whether these are consciously recognized or named as such. Nevertheless, the prevailing cultural and intellectual milieu undoubtedly makes perceiving, valuing, and articulating this connection more difficult for many individuals today.

The Music of the Spheres

The deep-seated intuition connecting music, cosmic order, and the sacred finds one of its most influential historical expressions in the ancient concept of the Music of the Spheres, or Musica Universalis. This cosmological and philosophical doctrine, resonating through Western thought for millennia, proposed that the universe itself — the cosmos — is fundamentally structured and governed according to harmonious musical and mathematical proportions.

Often attributed to the Greek philosopher, mathematician, and mystic Pythagoras (flourishing around the 6th Century BC) and his followers, the idea appears to have stemmed, in part, from the groundbreaking discovery (traditionally credited to Pythagoras himself) that musical intervals perceived by the human ear as consonant or harmonious (like the octave, perfect fifth, and perfect fourth) correspond to simple whole-number ratios in the physical properties of the sound source (such as the lengths of vibrating strings on a monochord). This revelation — that audible beauty and harmony were directly linked to underlying mathematical order — was profoundly suggestive, hinting at a deep connection between number, sound perception, and the structure of reality.

The Pythagoreans boldly extended this principle from the strings of the lyre to the structure of the entire cosmos. Their reasoning seems to have involved several interconnected layers. There was perhaps a somewhat naive physical analogy: observing that rapidly moving objects on Earth often produce sound, they inferred that the massive celestial bodies (planets, stars) wheeling eternally through the heavens must surely also produce a magnificent, albeit unheard, sound or vibration. More significantly, Musica Universalis functioned as an early attempt at cosmology, seeking to understand the underlying order, structure, and principles governing the movements of the heavenly bodies. The most profound layer, however, was philosophical and metaphysical: it embodied the conviction that the universe (cosmos) is not a random chaos but an ordered, intelligible, and harmonious whole, and that this fundamental cosmic order is essentially musical or mathematical in nature.

The ancients looked particularly to the heavens — the seemingly eternal, regular, and predictable movements of the stars and planets — to discern this fundamental order. Compared to the complex, chaotic, and unpredictable events on Earth, the heavens displayed a reassuring constancy and stability. Just as modern science often relies on controlled laboratory experiments to isolate underlying principles by minimizing extraneous ‘noise’ and variability, the ancients saw the perceived regularity and predictability of the heavens as revealing the fundamental, harmonious patterns governing all of reality.

This perceived cosmic order was inextricably linked in the ancient mind with concepts of beauty, goodness, and intelligibility. The Greek word kosmos itself encapsulates this fusion, signifying not just ‘universe’ but also ‘order,’ ‘arrangement,’ ‘harmony,’ and even ‘adornment’ or ‘beauty.’ It is the root from which we derive not only cosmology (the study of the universe’s order) but also cosmetics. The purpose of cosmetics is not to impose beauty where none exists (one cannot typically make a plain rock beautiful with makeup), but rather to enhance, reveal, or bring forth the inherent beauty and underlying harmonious form of something already capable of possessing it, like a human face. Similarly, the proponents of Musica Universalis viewed the universe itself as an inherently beautiful, well-ordered entity, whose deep structure was fundamentally resonant with musical harmony and mathematical proportion.

Though it may seem unfamiliar or even fanciful to the modern ear, the idea of Musica Universalis was profoundly influential in Western intellectual and cultural history for over two thousand years, shaping developments in astronomy (most notably in the work of Johannes Kepler, who sought to demonstrate the harmonic ratios in planetary orbits), philosophy, theology, music theory, art, and esoteric traditions well into the Scientific Revolution and beyond (figures like Isaac Newton were still actively engaging with related concepts).

Crucially, however, this cosmic ‘music’ was often conceived not as physically audible sound vibrating in the air, but rather as a silent, intelligible harmony — an underlying system of mathematical proportions, relationships, and resonances governing the structure and movements of the celestial bodies, and perhaps, by extension, all of reality. It represented a divine, rational order accessible not primarily to the physical ear, but potentially perceivable by the attuned mind or soul through reason, mathematics, and contemplation. It was believed that through disciplines involving philosophy, mathematics, virtuous living, and inner purification, wise individuals or sages — like Pythagoras himself was reputed to be — could potentially harmonize their own inner being (‘soul’) with this underlying cosmic music. By attuning themselves to the fundamental harmonious structure of reality, they could achieve inner order, wisdom, virtue, and a profound sense of participation in the beautiful, rational order of the cosmos.

The Sacred Pattern: Duality, Mediation, and the Ascent to Wisdom

Building upon the idea that reality is fundamentally structured by patterns, relationships, and meaning, we can postulate the existence of what might be called Sacred Patterns. These are not merely superficial or arbitrary arrangements, but rather the most fundamental, recurring, generative, and meaning-conferring structures that seem to underlie both the external cosmos and our internal conscious experience. Grasping these deep patterns provides orientation, facilitates wisdom, and connects us to the very fabric of being. While inherently difficult to define exhaustively, these sacred patterns might be recognized by several key characteristics:

1. Fractal Nature: They often exhibit a quality of self-similarity, where the same basic pattern repeats itself at different levels of magnitude. In the same way that can see that in branching pattern of a tree, the way the main trunk divides into large branches is echoed in how those branches divide into smaller ones, and again into twigs. This same branching logic appears elsewhere in nature — in the formation of river deltas, the structure of lightning bolts, the network of veins and arteries in a body, or even the structure of certain crystals. This fractal quality suggests an underlying coherence and resonance between microcosm and macrocosm, hinting that the same fundamental organizing principles might operate throughout different domains of reality.
2. Universal Utility: Once a sacred pattern is grasped, even partially or intuitively, it often proves remarkably useful as a lens, a template, or a navigational tool applicable across diverse areas of life. It provides insights that transcend its original context, helping to make sense of relationships, personal challenges, societal dynamics, or artistic creations.
3. Explanatory Power: Recognizing a sacred pattern can bring a profound sense of understanding, where previously disparate or confusing phenomena suddenly ‘click’ into place, revealing their connection within a larger, coherent framework. It illuminates relationships and provides a deeper sense of ‘why’ things are the way they are. These patterns are often highly abstract and may require intuition, contemplation, or embodied practice, rather than purely analytical thought, to grasp fully.

A core element frequently encountered within these fundamental patterns involves the recognition and skillful navigation of inherent dualities or polarities that seem to structure existence. Examples abound across cultures and philosophical traditions: Chaos and Order, the formless and the formed; the Yin and Yang of Daoism, representing complementary receptive (feminine, dark, passive) and active (masculine, light, dynamic) principles; the distinction between Heaven (transcendent, spiritual, eternal) and Earth (immanent, material, temporal). Other related conceptual pairs include the unknown and the known, potentiality and actuality, novelty and predictability, the Dionysian (representing ecstatic, instinctual, chaotic forces) and the Apollonian (representing rational, ordered, measured forces), the periphery and the center, stability and change. And many, many others. While these pairs are not all identical, they collectively point towards a fundamental reality composed of complementary, often tension-filled, yet ultimately interdependent opposites whose dynamic interplay generates the world we experience.

Wisdom, in many traditions, can be understood as developing through stages of learning how to perceive and skillfully navigate these crucial dualities. We might envision a conceptual hierarchy or ascent in understanding:

• Starting with basic Propositional Knowledge: Accumulating discrete facts and information about the world (‘knowing that’).
• Progressing to Practical Wisdom (the Greek concept of phronēsis): Developing the embodied skill, judgment, and character to act effectively, appropriately, and ethically within specific, complex life situations. This is typically learned through experience, mentorship, and reflection.
• Reaching towards Divine Wisdom (often associated with the Greek sophia, or related concepts like gnosis in mystical traditions): This signifies a deeper, more holistic, and transformative understanding. It’s often conceived not merely as acquired skill for specific situations but as an attunement to the fundamental nature of reality itself. It involves a transformation of one’s being, overcoming egocentric biases and self-deception, and seeing the world and one’s place within it from a radically integrated and participatory perspective. It is less about knowing what to do in a particular instance and more about how to be in right relationship with the whole.
• At the heart of this deeper wisdom often lies a principle of mediation and integration, sometimes identified with the Logos. This resonant Greek term carries diverse meanings (‘word,’ ‘reason,’ ‘ratio,’ ‘principle’) but in this context can signify the dynamic, unifying principle of order, meaning, connection, and intelligibility that mediates between the fundamental dualities. It is the generative tension, the creative force, the ‘Middle Way’ that harmonizes opposites (like Chaos and Order, Being and Becoming) and brings forth coherent reality from their interplay. It can be conceived as the underlying ‘logic,’ ‘spirit,’ or ‘pattern of patterns’ governing reality’s harmonious functioning.
• TThe pinnacle of this developmental path is often described using terms like Enlightenment (prominent in Eastern traditions like Buddhism, with concepts such as Nirvana or Satori, and Hinduism, with Moksha). Analogous concepts of ultimate spiritual realization, transformation, or union with the divine appear across diverse traditions, including Theosis (Eastern Orthodox Christianity), Fana (Sufism within Islam), Devekut (Judaism), Mukti (Sikhism), and Zhenren (Daoism), alongside more general terms like Union or Salvation, each reflecting the unique cultural and theological framework from which they arise.

The idea of embodying an abstract principle like the Logos might seem elusive. Consider an analogy from music: a truly great musician playing a complex and profound piece. They possess abundant propositional knowledge (reading the score, understanding music theory) and extraordinary procedural skill (masterful technique honed over years). But beyond that, a masterful performance requires embodying the ‘spirit’ or ‘logos’ of the music itself. This involves finding the perfect dynamic balance — the ‘optimal grip’ — between technical precision and emotional expression, fidelity to the composer’s apparent intent and authentic personal interpretation, structural clarity and improvisatory freedom, adherence to the score and responsiveness to the moment. The performer, at their best, becomes a living conduit for the music’s inherent organising principle, mediating its diverse elements into a coherent, meaningful, and ‘alive’ whole. This act of fully embodying an ideal pattern in performance is perhaps analogous to the sage or enlightened individual embodying the Logos in their way of being and acting in the world.

This journey of recognizing duality, seeking mediating wisdom, and ascending towards integration finds expression in universal symbolic patterns across cultures. Archetypal images vividly portray this upward path. One of my favorites is William Blake’s watercolour depicting Jacob’s Ladder, where ethereal figures ascend a luminous spiral staircase connecting Earth to Heaven, symbolizing the soul’s journey towards divine wisdom and reality.

In Dante Alighieri’s culminating vision in the Paradiso, his ascent through the celestial spheres into the highest Heaven (the Empyrean) is described as an overwhelming experience of divine light, love, and ultimately, the harmonious sound of the Music of the Spheres, explicitly linking ultimate reality, transcendence, beauty, and music.

Similarly, intricate Tibetan Buddhist Thangkas often depict Mandalas or Pure Lands — structured cosmic diagrams mapping hierarchical paths leading inwards or upwards towards enlightenment at the center.

The crucial wisdom of integrating dualities is powerfully symbolized in figures who embody this delicate balance. A famous Buddhist story recounts the Buddha advising a musician disciple struggling with his practice. Asking about the proper tuning of his lute (or vina), the Buddha elicited the understanding that strings stretched too tight will break (representing excessive effort or harsh asceticism), while strings left too loose will produce no sound (representing laxity or indulgence). The path to skillful playing, and by analogy, to enlightenment, lies in finding the ‘Middle Way’ — avoiding destructive extremes to discover the specific point of optimal tension and functional harmony. This principle of balance is central to Buddhist philosophy and practice.

Similarly, the iconic Byzantine image of Christ Pantocrator (‘Ruler of All’) traditionally portrays Christ in majesty, often holding the Book of Gospels (symbolizing Divine Law, Truth, Judgment according to that truth) in one hand, while the other hand is raised in a gesture of blessing (symbolizing Divine Love, Compassion, Forgiveness, Mercy). He is depicted as the perfect mediator who embodies and reconciles these seemingly opposed, yet equally necessary, divine attributes. This theological concept resonates with the universal human challenge, faced vividly by any parent or leader, of needing to balance unconditional love and acceptance with the necessity of upholding standards, setting boundaries, and exercising judgment wisely.

While the specific terminologies, symbols, narratives, and practices differ profoundly across various spiritual and wisdom traditions, the underlying structural pattern — recognizing fundamental dualities at the heart of existence, understanding the necessity of finding a mediating principle or path (Logos / Middle Way / Tao ) to navigate them wisely, and aspiring towards a transformed state of being characterized by integration, wisdom, compassion, and enlightenment — appears remarkably consistent. This suggests that the dynamic interplay of opposites and the search for harmonizing wisdom may reflect a deep, perhaps archetypal, structure of human consciousness itself as it strives for meaning, coherence, and effective participation within reality.

Finding the Balance

The discussion of fundamental dualities like Chaos and Order, Yin and Yang, or Heaven and Earth, and the mediating function of principles like the Logos, might understandably feel highly abstract and removed from everyday concerns. However, the necessity of perceiving and navigating such polarities manifests constantly in our ordinary lives, particularly in the realm of practical wisdom — the art of living well.

Consider the common phenomenon of traditional folk sayings or proverbs that often appear to offer directly contradictory advice. We are told, for instance, to “Look before you leap,” emphasizing caution and foresight. Yet, we are also warned that “He who hesitates is lost,” urging decisiveness and timely action. Similarly, we might be advised to “Think twice before you act,” promoting deliberation, but also encouraged to “Strike while the iron is hot,” advocating seizing opportune moments. Does “Absence make the heart grow fonder,” suggesting that distance can strengthen bonds, or is the opposite true, that it’s “Out of sight, out of mind”?

At first glance, such contradictions might seem to render the advice useless or incoherent. However, their enduring value lies precisely in their polarity. Each proverb encapsulates an essential truth or a valid perspective relevant to navigating the complexities of life, often highlighting one pole of a fundamental situational duality. The first pair contrasts caution with decisiveness; the second pits deliberation against opportunism; the third weighs the endurance of attachment against the effects of separation. These reflect deeper underlying tensions we constantly face, such as managing Risk vs. Certainty, embracing Change vs. Consistency, asserting Individuality vs. Conformity, or balancing Optimism vs. Realism.

The key insight is that neither proverb in a pair holds the absolute truth applicable to all situations. True practical wisdom lies not in rigidly adhering to one maxim while ignoring the other, but in discerning the appropriate, context-dependent balance between these valid but opposing poles. It requires sensitivity to the specific nuances of a situation and the skill to manage the inherent trade-offs involved. Wisdom in action is rarely about finding a single ‘correct’ answer dictated by a rule, but about skillfully finding the ‘right measure,’ the most fruitful balance point, for a particular moment, challenge, or relationship.

This everyday act of finding the right balance in complex life situations can be seen as a direct analogue, or perhaps a broader application, of the concept of Optimal Grip introduced earlier. Just as we physically adjust our posture and distance to achieve the clearest perception of a painting, practical wisdom involves mentally, emotionally, and behaviourally adjusting our stance to find the most effective ‘grip’ on a life situation. This inevitably means finding the right balance between its constitutive tensions or polarities. It demonstrates that the concepts of affordances (the possibilities and demands presented by situations) and the dynamic process of seeking an optimal grip apply not merely to interacting with physical objects, but to the entirety of our multi-layered engagement with reality.

Extending this line of thought further, one might tentatively conceive of the Logos — the fundamental principle of mediation, integration, and right relation discussed previously — as representing the potential for a ‘perfect spiritual optimal grip’ on reality as a whole. It signifies the ultimate wisdom that intuitively and perfectly balances all relevant dualities in every context. While this is undoubtedly a highly condensed metaphor for a profound concept, it serves to connect the abstract cosmological or metaphysical principle to the concrete, ongoing human challenge of living wisely amidst complexity and tension.

Intriguingly, this fundamental structure of reality and experience as constituted by the interplay of essential dualities is mirrored profoundly within the very fabric of music itself. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how music, particularly within the Western tonal tradition but also in many other forms globally, could even function or achieve its expressive power without relying fundamentally on the dynamic tension, interplay, and eventual integration of core polarities:

• Tension and Release: Perhaps the most pervasive dynamic engine in music, driving it forward through cycles of building expectation, instability, complexity, or dissonance, followed by moments of arrival, stability, simplicity, or consonance that provide a sense of resolution or return.
• Dissonance and Consonance: The strategic interplay between sounds perceived by a given musical culture as clashing, rough, or unstable (dissonance) and those perceived as smooth, stable, and resolved (consonance) is a primary means of creating harmonic movement, emotional intensity, and structural articulation.
• Silence and Sound: Music is shaped not only by the notes that are played or sung, but crucially by the intentional use of silence. It creates rhythm, defines phrases, provides breathing space, builds suspense, and throws the sounding elements into sharper relief.
• Predictability and Novelty: Effective music constantly plays with our ingrained cognitive tendency to detect patterns and anticipate what comes next. It establishes expectations through repetition and familiar structures (predictability) and then artfully either fulfills, delays, varies, or surprisingly subverts those expectations (novelty). This dynamic interplay is key to maintaining listener engagement, generating emotional responses (like surprise, satisfaction, or longing), and creating a sense of meaningful journey through time.

Music’s extraordinary power to capture our attention, evoke deep emotions, feel profoundly meaningful, and seemingly reflect the intricate complexities of life arguably derives, in large part, from its masterful embodiment and dynamic navigation of these essential dualities. By presenting the interplay of tension and release, order and complexity, expectation and surprise directly to our embodied perception and feeling, music resonates deeply with the fundamentally patterned, often paradoxical, and dynamically unfolding structure of our own conscious experience, and perhaps, of reality itself.

Part 3: The Cognitive Science of Meaning and Transformation

Brain Hemispheres, Insight, and the Path to Deeper Knowing

Our exploration of duality, pattern, and meaning finds intriguing resonances within the very structure and functioning of the human brain. The brain is famously divided into two distinct cerebral hemispheres, left and right, which are densely interconnected, primarily via a massive bundle of nerve fibers known as the corpus callosum. While the two hemispheres work together constantly in a healthy brain, extensive research, particularly as synthesized by psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist, suggests they exhibit distinct, yet complementary, styles of attending to and processing the world. Moving beyond simplistic and often misleading pop-psychology dichotomies (‘left brain = logic, right brain = creativity’), McGilchrist offers a nuanced interpretation grounded in neurological evidence, psychiatric observation, and cultural history.

The fundamental difference, McGilchrist argues, lies in how each hemisphere attends:

• The Left Hemisphere (LH) tends towards narrow, sharply focused attention on details. It excels at grasping, manipulating, abstracting, categorizing, and using explicit language to represent specific parts of the world that are already known, fixed, familiar, static, and decontextualized. It operates primarily in the realm of utility, mechanism, sequence, predictability, and breaking things down into components for analysis or control. It gives us focused precision and the power to manipulate the world effectively.
• The Right Hemisphere (RH), in contrast, employs broad, vigilant, sustained attention towards the whole context. It is crucial for understanding implicit meaning, metaphor, humour, irony, emotional tone, non-verbal cues, and the ‘big picture.’ It deals more effectively with novelty, ambiguity, uncertainty, and the interconnectedness of things. It apprehends the world as embodied, alive, changing, unique, and fundamentally relational, enabling the perception of Gestalts (meaningful wholes that are more than the sum of their parts) and providing our sense of spatial awareness, emotional depth, and connection to others. It gives us breadth, flexibility, and our sense of lived reality.

McGilchrist further argues that the RH plays a primary, foundational role in our sense of connection to the world, empathy, morality, our appreciation of beauty, and our capacity for experiencing the sacred or transcendent — precisely those aspects often marginalized in a modern Western culture that he believes has become dangerously over-reliant on the LH’s mode of detached, analytical, and utilitarian processing. Crucially for this discussion, the RH’s capacity for grasping complex relationships, holistic patterns, context, and implicit meaning makes it vitally important for understanding and appreciating music, which is pre-eminently an art of dynamic relations unfolding in a rich context over time. The perceived ‘aliveness,’ emotional depth, and holistic coherence of music arguably depend heavily on the integrative functions of the RH.

Interestingly, the very etymology of the word ‘intelligence’ — derived from the Latin inter (‘between’) and legere (‘to choose, gather, read’) — carries the connotation of an ability to ‘read between the lines,’ to discern relationships, or to skillfully navigate between different perspectives or poles. True intelligence or wisdom, in this light, might involve not merely the focused analytical power associated primarily with the LH, nor just the broad holistic apprehension of the RH, but rather their dynamic, flexible, and balanced interplay — the capacity to find the ‘middle way’ between necessary dualities, leveraging the strengths of both modes of attention as appropriate to the situation.

This dynamic interplay seems vividly illustrated in the cognitive phenomenon of insight. Often experienced as a sudden ‘Aha!’ moment or the metaphorical ‘light bulb’ switching on, insight represents a cognitive breakthrough — a sudden restructuring of understanding that resolves a previously intractable problem, paradox, or confusion. Insight typically feels subjectively distinct: it arrives unexpectedly, feels obviously true and clear once grasped, and is often accompanied by positive emotion like joy or relief.

The core cognitive mechanism underlying insight appears to be frame breaking (or frame shifting). It occurs when we realize, consciously or unconsciously, that our current way of perceiving, conceptualizing, or approaching a situation (our existing mental ‘frame’) is inadequate, incomplete, or misleading. Insight involves abandoning or loosening this old frame and spontaneously shifting to a new, more encompassing, or more appropriate perspective that suddenly makes better sense of the available information or allows a solution path to become apparent.

Psychologically, the process leading to insight often involves a dynamic interplay between phases of differentiation and integration. Initially, one might focus on analyzing the problem, breaking it down into its constituent parts, examining details (differentiation — perhaps leaning more on LH-style processing). However, the crucial ‘Aha!’ moment typically involves a shift towards stepping back, perceiving new connections between these parts (or relating them to a wider context), and synthesizing them into a novel, coherent whole or Gestalt (integration — perhaps requiring more RH-style processing). This often involves flexibly shifting between different levels of abstraction or considering the problem from an entirely new angle, allowing the more adequate frame to emerge from the cognitive landscape.

As an additional level of this kind of understanding of insight, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke proposes a compelling model of a ‘Cognitive Continuum’. This framework suggests that these moments of insight are not merely isolated cognitive events but share fundamental underlying neural and psychological mechanisms with other significant, often profound, states of being. These states can be seen as lying along a continuum, potentially differing in intensity, duration, scope, and the degree of ‘frame shifting’ involved. Key points along this continuum include:

1. Insight: The foundational unit of adaptive cognitive restructuring and frame-breaking, essential for everyday learning, problem-solving, and understanding.
2. Flow: The deeply absorbing state of being optimally engaged and ‘in the zone,’ frequently experienced by musicians, athletes, artists, programmers, craftspeople, and others involved in activities that are both challenging and intrinsically rewarding. Flow is characterized by intense focus, a merging of action and awareness, a sense of effortless control, diminished self-consciousness (ego recession), altered perception of time, and inherent meaningfulness. Achieving flow requires a dynamic balance between the agent’s skill level and the demands of the task (a clear instance of achieving an ‘Optimal Grip’ in action) and can be conceptualized as involving a continuous cascade of relevant micro-insights and fluid, adaptive responses.
3. Mystical Experience: Understood within this framework as a profound intensification and generalization of the processes underlying insight and flow. These powerful, often spontaneous experiences typically involve a more radical dissolution or transcendence of the ordinary sense of self (sometimes termed ‘ego death’), accompanied by overwhelming feelings of awe, reverence, bliss, unconditional love, profound peace, a sense of unity with all things or a divine reality, timelessness, and encountering a reality perceived as ultimate, fundamental, or sacred. They represent a major, deeply felt frame-shift in one’s understanding of the self, the world, and their relationship, and are often reported by those who have them as being among the most personally meaningful and significant experiences of their entire lives, comparable in impact to events like getting married or the birth of a child.
4. Transformative Experience: This term refers specifically to those mystical experiences (or sometimes profound insights or flow states) that result in lasting, fundamental, and often positive changes to an individual’s core sense of identity, worldview, values, personality structure, and overall way of living in the world. The profound insight, realization, or felt connection gained during the experience is integrated in such a way that it permanently alters their most fundamental ‘frame’ on life, leading to significant personal growth and reorientation.

This Cognitive Continuum model powerfully links the cognitive mechanisms involved in everyday understanding and problem-solving (insight) to the peak states of absorption and optimal performance (flow) often found in artistic and skillful pursuits like music, and further connects these to the profound, often life-altering experiences (mystical/transformative) frequently associated with spiritual practice, contemplative traditions, encounters with nature, deep interpersonal connection, or encounters with the sacred. It suggests a common underlying psychobiological process related to optimizing relevance realization, breaking free from inadequate or maladaptive frames of reference, and achieving deeper, more integrated, and more meaningful ways of knowing and being in the world — processes that music seems particularly well-suited to engage and facilitate.

Psychedelics as Tools for Understanding Mind and Transformation

The Cognitive Continuum suggests a deep link between moments of insight, states of flow, and profound mystical or transformative experiences. While insight and flow are relatively common, mystical experiences — those powerful states often characterized by ego dissolution, feelings of unity, sacredness, and encountering fundamental reality — tend to be spontaneous, rare, and somewhat random, making them inherently difficult to study systematically in a controlled scientific manner.

This is where psychedelic substances (like psilocybin from ‘magic mushrooms,’ LSD, DMT, or mescaline) become relevant to this discussion, not necessarily as ends in themselves, but as potential tools for scientific and philosophical inquiry. There are several reasons for this relevance:

• Reliable Induction of Mystical-Type Experiences: Classic psychedelics, when administered under supportive conditions (‘set and setting’), have a well-documented capacity to reliably occasion experiences that closely resemble spontaneously occurring mystical experiences. This allows researchers to study the neural correlates and psychological effects of these profound states in a more predictable laboratory context.
• Facilitating Frame-Breaking: As discussed, insight requires breaking inadequate cognitive frames. Psychedelics appear to potently facilitate this process. Subjective reports frequently emphasize a dramatic loosening of ordinary assumptions, conceptual structures, and ego boundaries, allowing for radically new perspectives on oneself and the world. Neuroimaging studies provide objective correlates for this: for example, studies using fMRI have shown that psychedelics can lead to a state of hyper-connectivity across the brain. Visualizations of brain networks under psychedelics often show dramatically increased communication between brain regions and networks that normally operate much more independently. This breakdown of the brain’s usual modular structure and increased global integration seems to provide a neural basis for the dissolution of rigid mental frames and the emergence of novel insights and connections.

Giulio Petri, Phil Expert, Federico Turkheimer, Robin Carhart-Harris, David Nutt, Peter J.
Hellyer, & Francesca Vaccarino. (2014). Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks.
Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 11, 20140873.

• Engaging Insight Mechanisms: The process of insight involves differentiation and integration. Psychedelics seem to powerfully engage similar dynamics. They can plunge individuals into experiences of intense sensory detail or emotional complexity (differentiation) but also frequently lead to overarching feelings of unity, coherence, and holistic understanding (integration). They appear to catalyze the very cognitive processes involved in deep reframing and meaning-making.
• Potential for Transformative Experience: As noted on the Cognitive Continuum, profound experiences can lead to lasting personal transformation. Psychedelic experiences are frequently reported by individuals as being among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant events of their lives, sometimes leading to enduring positive changes in attitudes, values, behaviour, and overall well-being. This potential for deep transformation underscores the power of the states they can occasion.

To understand the nature of these experiences often facilitated by psychedelics, researchers frequently use tools like the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30). Developed based on the work of scholars like Walter Stace and building on William James’ descriptions, this questionnaire assesses several key dimensions typically reported in such states:

• Transcendence of Time and Space: A sense of timelessness, eternity, or being outside the usual confines of spatial location.
• Ineffability: The experience being beyond words, difficult or impossible to adequately describe.
• Sense of Sacredness: An intuitive feeling of encountering something holy, divine, or worthy of reverence.
• Deeply Felt Positive Mood: Overwhelming feelings of joy, peace, love, or bliss.
• Experience of Truth/Reality: A powerful sense of encountering ultimate reality or objective truth about existence.
• Experience of Profound Unity: A merging of the self with the surroundings, loss of ego boundaries, feeling connected to all things, or union with a perceived ultimate reality or divinity.

Brain Dynamics Under Psychedelics: Towards Criticality

Recent neuroscientific research has employed sophisticated methods to understand how psychedelics alter brain function to produce these effects. One fascinating approach involves analyzing brain activity using connectome harmonics. Inspired by how complex sounds can be decomposed into simpler fundamental frequencies (harmonics), this method analyzes complex patterns of brain activity (measured via fMRI) by breaking them down into a combination of fundamental, simpler spatial patterns (connectome harmonics or eigenmodes). These basic patterns are derived mathematically from the underlying structural wiring map of the brain (the connectome). By seeing which ‘harmonics’ are more active under different conditions, researchers can gain insight into the organizational principles of brain function.

A key study using this method (Atasoy et al., 2017) examined brain activity under the influence of LSD. The findings were revealing:

• Increased Energy and Frequency: LSD significantly increased the overall ‘power’ or energy of brain activity, particularly boosting activity in higher-frequency connectome harmonics. This suggests a shift towards more complex, intricate patterns of neural communication compared to the more constrained patterns typical of normal waking consciousness. The brain’s ‘dynamical repertoire’ — the range of functional states it explores — appeared significantly expanded.
• Decoupling from Structure: While normal brain activity is strongly shaped and constrained by the underlying anatomical wiring, LSD seemed to allow functional activity patterns to become somewhat ‘decoupled’ from this rigid structural scaffolding, enabling more flexible and less predictable interactions across the brain.
• Interaction with Music: Interestingly, when LSD was combined with music, some of these effects (particularly related to visual cortex activity) were further enhanced, suggesting a synergistic interaction between the drug state and musical stimulation in shaping brain dynamics.
• Reorganization Towards Criticality: Perhaps the most significant finding was that LSD appeared to induce a structured reorganization of brain dynamics towards a state known as criticality.

What is criticality in this context? It’s a concept borrowed from physics and complexity science. A system operating ‘at criticality’ is precisely at the boundary between rigid order (like a crystal lattice) and chaotic randomness (like turbulent gas). It’s a state often described as being ‘at the edge of chaos.’ Systems at criticality exhibit a unique blend of properties: they are simultaneously stable enough to maintain coherence but flexible enough to adapt and change rapidly. They show complex patterns that are neither completely predictable nor completely random, often exhibiting fractal-like structures in space and time. In the brain, criticality is hypothesized to be an optimal state for information processing, learning, and adaptation, allowing for both robust function and maximal responsiveness to new information. It represents a dynamic balance between order and chaos, stability and flexibility.

This finding is profound because it links the subjective effects of psychedelics (like loosened assumptions, novel connections, intense experience) to a specific, measurable, and theoretically significant mode of brain function. It suggests that psychedelics push the brain into a state that is optimally configured for exploration, pattern detection, and cognitive restructuring — essentially, for insight and frame-breaking on a potentially global scale. This state of criticality might be considered the brain’s ‘optimal grip’ on the complexity of potential thought and experience, balanced perfectly between being rigidly stuck and incoherently disordered.

Why Criticality and Mystical Experience Matter

The relevance of inducing such states extends beyond mere intellectual curiosity. Research increasingly suggests these altered states of brain function and the profound subjective experiences accompanying them are deeply intertwined and potentially crucial for therapeutic outcomes:

Correlation with Subjective Effects: Studies find correlations between measurable changes in brain dynamics under psychedelics (like shifts towards criticality or increased network integration) and the intensity of the reported subjective experience, including ego dissolution and mystical feelings.

Correlation with Therapeutic Benefits: Crucially, a growing body of clinical research investigating psychedelic-assisted therapy for conditions like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction consistently finds a strong correlation between the intensity of the mystical-type experience during the psychedelic session (as measured by questionnaires like the MEQ30) and the magnitude and durability of the subsequent therapeutic benefits. Patients who report more profound experiences of unity, sacredness, insight, and emotional breakthrough tend to show greater and longer-lasting reductions in their symptoms (Yaden & Griffiths, 2021). Many also report significant improvements in overall well-being, life meaning, and quality of life post-experience.

This strongly suggests that the subjective journey facilitated by these altered brain states — the deep insights, emotional processing, and perspective shifts characteristic of mystical-type experiences — may not be mere side effects, but rather central mechanisms driving profound psychological change and healing. It underscores the potential importance of states that facilitate insight, meaning-making, and a felt connection to something larger than the everyday self — states that, as argued throughout, music also seems uniquely capable of inducing or resonating with.

Synthesizing the Argument

Having journeyed through diverse terrains of philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and neuroscience, we arrive at the core propositions this exploration has sought to illuminate and render plausible. These central claims, distilled from the preceding discussions, are as follows:

1. Music embodies and reveals the deep, dynamic, patterned structures of reality itself. It resonates not merely with subjective emotion, but arguably with the fundamental nature of a world understood as constituted by meaning, inherent relationships, unfolding potentiality, and the crucial interplay of fundamental dualities like order and chaos, predictability and novelty, tension and release. Music, in this view, is not just about something; it is a direct presentation of the patterned ‘logics’ and ‘textures’ of existence.
2. Music, particularly in its most profound instances, directly manifests or provides access to the experience of the sacred. It can serve as a conduit to dimensions of transcendence, experiences of wholeness and completion, encounters with ineffable meaning, and a sense of inexhaustible depth that lie beyond the explanatory reach of purely materialistic or reductionist frameworks.

These are undoubtedly bold and abstract assertions. Divorced from the context built throughout this article, they might appear vague, overly romantic, or simply unsubstantiated. Their plausibility and intelligibility rest entirely upon the cumulative weight of the groundwork laid previously: the critique of simplistic scientific reductionism and its potential for nihilism; the understanding of human cognition as inherently limited, embodied, largely unconscious, multi-layered, and fundamentally geared towards meaning and pattern recognition; the examination of how we navigate overwhelming complexity through relevance realization and achieving ‘Optimal Grip’; the exploration of transcendence, the significance of duality, and the integrative potential of mediating principles like the Logos; and the insights gleaned from the Cognitive Continuum linking everyday insight to profound states like flow and mystical experience, potentially illuminated by research into altered brain dynamics.

The very complexity and length required to build a case for these seemingly simple core statements point towards one of the profound values inherent in art, and perhaps in music most pre-eminently. Great art possesses a remarkable, almost alchemical capacity to compress and encapsulate immense layers of complex reality, meaning, and experience within its specific forms and structures. It presents these integrated truths directly to our perception, intuition, and feeling, allowing for genuine understanding, resonance, and even personal benefit or transformation at an implicit level, often bypassing the need for exhaustive discursive analysis or explicit philosophical articulation. Music, as a predominantly non-representational art form dealing directly with the dynamic unfolding of patterned energy in time, seems uniquely potent in this regard. Like powerful symbols and encompassing cultural or religious frameworks, it offers a way to grasp, participate in, and be shaped by realities and truths that are otherwise difficult to articulate or pin down conceptually.

Furthermore, this entire line of inquiry serves as a reminder that human beings have grappled with these fundamental questions — the ultimate nature of reality, the source and status of meaning and value, the possibility of transcendence, the enigma of consciousness itself — for millennia, employing diverse methods including reason, contemplation, ritual, storytelling, and artistic creation. The fact that these profound dimensions of experience do not always lend themselves easily to quantification or explanation within the specific methodologies and ontological assumptions of contemporary natural science does not automatically negate their reality or significance. Indeed, the powerful, undeniable reality of the human experience of music — its capacity to convey profound, non-propositional meaning, evoke the deepest emotions, resist facile reductionist explanation, and connect individuals to overwhelming feelings of beauty, unity, wholeness, and transcendence — serves as compelling experiential evidence. It challenges us to reconsider worldviews that might prematurely exclude these fundamental aspects of conscious existence and urges us towards a conception of reality rich and complex enough to accommodate them.

The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer captured this unique metaphysical status of music most aptly and enduringly when he famously wrote:

“Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing.”

Music plunges us directly into the deepest questions and patterns of being, allowing us to experience metaphysical truths through feeling, intuition, and embodied resonance, often without our being consciously aware of the profound philosophical territory we are walking on. It speaks directly to the core of our being about the nature of reality, bypassing the filters of analytical reason.

Part 4: Music, Culture, and the Sacred

The arguments presented thus far, combing strands from philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology to suggest a deep link between music, the structures of reality, and the experience of the sacred, might seem largely theoretical or perhaps even idiosyncratic. However, this proposed connection is far from a novel invention; rather, it resonates with attitudes and practices found across diverse human cultures throughout history. To ground these ideas, this short final section offers a brief historical and cross-cultural overview, demonstrating that music has persistently been recognized and utilized as a powerful means of engaging with the spiritual, transcendent, and most profound dimensions of human existence. This historical perspective suggests that the article’s core thesis is rooted in long-standing, widely shared human experience.

In many of the world’s oldest known forms of spiritual practice, often broadly categorized under the umbrella of Shamanism or indigenous traditions, music and patterned sound serve vital, pragmatic functions. Shamans, often acting as intermediaries between the everyday world and unseen spiritual realms, frequently employ rhythmic drumming, rattling, chanting, and sometimes ecstatic dance as powerful technologies. These practices are used to induce altered states of consciousness, considered necessary gateways for performing healing rituals (where restoring physical health and spiritual balance are often seen as inseparable), undertaking visionary journeys, engaging in divination, or communicating with spirits and the deeper forces of nature. Music, here, is not entertainment but a potent tool for navigating different levels of reality and restoring wholeness.

Within Judaism, a tradition profoundly centered on sacred texts and the power of the revealed word, music nonetheless holds a central and cherished place in communal worship and spiritual life. The ancient practice of cantillation, for example, involves chanting or singing the sacred words of the Torah and prayers according to specific melodic modes, rather than simply reciting them. This imbues the text with heightened emotional resonance, communal participation, and spiritual gravitas.

Furthermore, mystical streams within Judaism, such as Hasidism, cultivate the Niggun — a often wordless, deeply soulful, and sometimes ecstatic improvisational melody used as a form of communal prayer and spiritual elevation, intended to lift the heart and mind beyond the limitations of conceptual thought towards direct communion with the Divine. As the late Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks eloquently observed, reflecting this dynamic:

“Judaism is a religion of words, and yet whenever the language of Judaism aspires to the spiritual, it modulates into song, as if the words themselves seek escape from the gravitational pull of finite meanings. Music speaks to something deeper than the mind.”

The Christian tradition boasts a rich and multifaceted history of sacred music, deeply interconnected with its theology and worship. From the early Gregorian chants, designed to elevate the mind in prayer and unify the monastic community, through the development of hymns for congregational expression of faith, to the intricate polyphonic splendors of the Renaissance and the Baroque eras (epitomized by composers like J.S. Bach, whose complex works are often interpreted as profound theological meditations rendered in sound), music has been consistently integral to Christian devotion. While the subsequent Classical and Romantic periods, featuring composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, witnessed a gradual shift with music increasingly appreciated as an autonomous aesthetic experience in concert halls rather than solely within liturgical settings, it is strongly arguable that the aspiration towards transcendence, profound beauty, overwhelming emotional depth, and the sublime remained central to their artistic projects.

While the subsequent Classical and Romantic periods witnessed a gradual shift, with music increasingly appreciated as an autonomous aesthetic experience in concert halls rather than solely within liturgical settings, it is strongly arguable that the aspiration towards transcendence, profound beauty, overwhelming emotional depth, and the sublime remained central to the artistic project. This inherent striving towards experiences that surpass the ordinary arguably retained a deeply religious or mystical quality, even when detached from specific doctrinal content. As Ludwig van Beethoven, a pivotal figure in this transition, famously declared:

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”

Within Islam, which maintains a complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship with music, the mystical dimension known as Sufism often places a profound emphasis on music and disciplined listening as a direct path towards experiencing the Divine presence. Sufis utilize practices like Sama (a term meaning ‘listening’) — spiritual gatherings involving devotional music, rhythmic chanting of divine names (dhikr, meaning ‘remembrance’), and sometimes the famous, mesmerizing whirling dance of orders like the Mevlevi (‘whirling dervishes’) — as powerful methods for cultivating spiritual states, inducing ecstasy (wajd), facilitating the dissolution of the ego (fana), and achieving a felt closeness or unitive experience with God.

The diverse traditions encompassed within Hinduism arguably present one of the most pervasive and profound integrations of music, sound, and spirituality. Foundational concepts include Nada Brahma, a doctrine literally meaning ‘Sound is God’ or ‘Divinity is Sound,’ suggesting that the ultimate reality (Brahman) itself possesses an essential vibratory or sonic nature. Relatedly, the sacred syllable OM (or Aum) is considered the primordial sound, the fundamental vibration from which the entire cosmos manifests and to which it ultimately returns. Certain advanced yogic and meditative practices involve deep inner listening and withdrawal of the outer senses, aiming to allow the practitioner to eventually perceive this subtle, inner, ‘unstruck’ sound (anahata nada), considered a direct manifestation of the divine — a concept bearing intriguing resemblance to the silent Music of the Spheres in the Pythagorean tradition. The ancient power of sacred sound in Hinduism is reflected in the role of Vedic chanting. As the religious scholar Karen Armstrong notes regarding the hymns of the Rig Veda:

“Even though human beings could not think about the Brahman [the ultimate, ineffable reality], they had intimations of it in the hymns of the Rig Veda. When the priest chanted the Vedic hymns, the music filled the air and entered the consciousness of the congregation, so that they felt surrounded by and infused with divinity. These hymns did not speak of doctrines… but referred to the old myths in an allusive, riddling fashion because the truth they were trying to convey could not be contained in a neatly logical presentation.”

Within Buddhism, the role and prominence of music vary significantly depending on the specific school and cultural context. Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, employs a rich and complex array of instrumental music, multiphonic chanting, and ritual soundscapes as integral parts of its tantric practices and ceremonies. Zen Buddhism, in contrast, often emphasizes silence or utilizes sound in a more minimalistic and precise manner, such as the resonant tones of bells or wooden clappers used to punctuate meditation periods.

However, chanting scriptures, mantras (sacred syllables or formulas), or sutras (discourses of the Buddha) is a remarkably widespread practice across most Buddhist cultures. Chanting serves multiple functions: as a form of mindfulness meditation, a method for focusing the mind and cultivating positive mental states, a way of internalizing and memorizing teachings, a communal expression of devotion, and an integral element of numerous rituals and ceremonies. The deep association of music with ultimate spiritual attainment is reflected even in ancient scriptural descriptions of the Buddha’s final passing into ultimate liberation (parinirvana), such as this passage from the Mahaparinibbana Sutta:

“Heavenly music played in the sky in honor of the Realized One. And heavenly choirs sang in the sky in honor of the Realized One.”

This brief survey, though necessarily selective and simplified, highlights a remarkably consistent pattern across diverse cultures and historical epochs: music has been persistently recognized and utilized not merely as a source of pleasure or entertainment, but as a potent means of engaging with the deepest dimensions of human experience and perceived reality. It has served as a technology for altering consciousness, a conduit for spiritual devotion and communion, a method for expressing profound truths beyond words, a tool for healing and integration, and a pathway for providing felt contact with realities experienced as sacred, transcendent, or ultimate. This extensive historical and cultural weight lends significant credence to the view that music’s profound connection to meaning and the sacred is not a mere subjective projection or a fringe phenomenon, but reflects a genuine and enduring aspect of its fundamental nature and function within the human world.

Conclusion

This exploration of music and the human experience has traversed a wide and complex landscape, drawing connections between the nature of reality, the workings of the mind, the echoes of the sacred, and the flow of history. As we conclude, it is important to offer some context and acknowledge certain inherent limitations.

The journey undertaken here has necessarily involved simplifying immensely complex topics. Each philosophical concept, cognitive theory, theological notion, or historical tradition touched upon could itself be the subject of extensive study. Providing a broad, interdisciplinary overview inevitably requires sacrificing deep nuance and omitting many significant counter-arguments or alternative perspectives that exist within each field. Furthermore, some of the frameworks presented — such as the conceptual hierarchy linking facts, meaning, stories, and the sacred — are interpretive models designed to aid understanding within the context of this specific argument, rather than claiming objective, universally accepted status.

Moreover, while a central theme has been the critique of excessive reductionism, it must be acknowledged that some degree of reduction or focused analysis is often unavoidable, even necessary, for understanding complex phenomena. Similarly, while concepts like duality have been highlighted as central to understanding the sacred pattern, this is not to suggest that the rich meaning of the sacred, or the profound states of enlightenment and wisdom, can be exhaustively captured solely through the lens of duality. These concepts served as heuristic tools within this particular exposition.

It is also important to recognize that the perspective offered here is inevitably shaped by specific philosophical leanings and personal experience — perhaps reflecting a predisposition towards what might be termed a more romantic or mystical sensibility, valuing intuition, subjective experience, and holistic understanding alongside analytical reason. Others approaching this vast topic from different backgrounds or with different philosophical commitments might arrive at different syntheses or conclusions.

I’d also like to acknowledging my influences, mostly notably Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, and Iain McGilchrist, among others, which framed much of my thinking in these topics, and that I’d suggest studying for anyone that found this thesis to resonate with the most intimate parts of their self about what music is and how reality discloses itself.

Lastly, I understand that my argument was fairly complex and sometimes abstract. Why all of this to discuss music? Because the central argument contends that music is far more than a mere pastime or a source of fleeting pleasure. It engages with the most fundamental aspects of our existence: our perception of reality, our search for meaning, our negotiation of complexity, and our relationship with dimensions of experience that often feel transcendent or sacred. Understanding music’s profound potential requires appreciating the richer, more complex view of reality and cognition outlined earlier — a reality composed not just of physical objects but of patterns, meaning, potentiality, and consciousness; and a cognition that is embodied, interactive, multi-layered, and capable of different kinds of knowing beyond the purely propositional.

Relatively little space was dedicated to discussing music more directly partly because, as discussed (ineffability), the deepest effects of music often resist easy verbal description. The primary aim was instead to build a conceptual framework — drawing from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and history — within which the significance of music, even when felt only implicitly, might become more apparent and understandable.

Ultimately, exploring music’s connection to the sacred and the deep structures of reality matters, touching upon what is most important in human life. In an age often characterized by materialism, fragmentation, and a potential crisis of meaning, this exploration suggests reality is likely far richer and more complex than a purely object-based, materialistic worldview allows, encompassing fundamental dimensions of pattern, meaning, potentiality, and consciousness. Music offers a powerful, universally accessible avenue for experiencing coherence, beauty, emotional depth, shared humanity, and glimpses of transcendence. It continually reminds us, through direct experience, that reality is more than meets the reductionist eye, challenging a purely disenchanted worldview by offering felt evidence of meaning, value, and the human spirit’s power to create harmony.

The concept of the sacred, pertaining to ultimate meaning, wholeness, transcendence, and fundamental patterns, remains crucial to human experience, even if challenging to articulate secularly. Music thus stands as a unique bridge, embodying reality’s deep patterns and offering direct, felt access to the sacred. Cultivating a deeper appreciation for music, therefore, nurtures a vital capacity for perceiving meaning, connecting with deeper realities, and enriching human experience.

Thank you for reading. Many themes touched upon in this article — the nature of reality, the search for meaning beyond nihilism, the relationship between subjective experience and the world — are explored from a more personal and experiential perspective in my recent book, “In Search of the Infinite — A Psychedelic Memoir”, available on Amazon. I have an article on Medium that explains what the book is about. I also post a lot of the books I’m reading on my Instagram: @tiagobooks.

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