Corby's Orbit

Corby's Orbit
Listening in All the High Places illustration by John Kricfalusi

Sunday, March 5, 2017

Music To The Wise


"In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as "dazzling obscurity", "whispering silence", "teeming desert" are continually met with. They prove that 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... Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.  

There is a verge of the mind which those things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores."

~ William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience

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