There is a wonderful book, published some years ago, called the Music of the Mind, which was written by Darryl Reanney and published posthumously. Reanney was a distinguished biologist and his previous book, The Death of Forever, was a bestseller. Why is he important? Because as a scientist he increasingly came to see that even the science pointed towards what Socrates, the philosopher, observed.
Socrates, we remember, argued that there were two proofs for the existence of God. The first was internal: the reality of the human soul. The second was external: ‘from the order of the motion of the stars, and of all things under the dominion of the mind which ordered the universe’. In short, the argument from design. Interestingly, Socrates thought that those who could not perceive that order were dull and stupid.
Reanney through his investigations came to similarly startling conclusions, although he remained on his premature death bed, according to one Australian broadcaster, still an atheist. However, in talking of consciousness he said: ‘it is the unique function of consciousness to recognise patterns but they are patterns of a particular type. They are in the vast majority of cases characterised by symmetry, to use the physicist’s term, or rhythm, to use the dancer’s term, or harmony to use the musician’s term, or beauty to use the most general and most meaningful term of all’. And from this he deduced: ‘reality – the hidden structure of the universe – has harmonic configuration.’
Thus, if we want to describe the universe as consciousness ‘knows it’, then he said, ‘We should stop thinking about it as a machine or a system or a process and start thinking of it as a song.’ But this is his account of consciousness seeing ‘it’; when we consider the etymology of the word ‘universe’ itself, we find it means either ‘one song’ or ‘one poem’. Staggeringly, then , creation itself is a song: an unfinished product and process both – consciousness creating the self-building building blocks of the whole!
In describing reality in this way we become aware, I think, of the intrinsic energy in all things: these ‘harmonic configurations’ whether they be in physics, dance, music or beauty itself all conspire to inspire and motivate us.
One of the great challenges of the Twenty-first century is to resist ugly art and artists, valueless and meaningless work, packaged and commoditized relationships on the grounds that they are seriously de-motivating and unhealthy. Why? Because they go against the grain of the universe; they are discordant to its song. Where there is real music, there is real motivation.
The Mapping Motivation Series 