Of trance, exploration, and rationality
This is an entry from my journal.
Trance is the first music genre that piqued my interest. I enjoy practically every type of music, though trance speaks to me in ways others do not. Perhaps it is because I have to be in a certain state of mind to listen to it. A song with lyrics is impressed as something more limited in my head even if it is otherwise expansive. I can interpret it in multiple ways, though it is already giving me plenty to work with and thus it potentially precludes certain thoughts. Whereas the soundscapes of trance inspire in me the impression of a higher order of openendedness.
I am a philosopher because I have an innate desire for exploration. I am curious and have developed the fortitude necessary for journeying. I have a propensity to cover the compass and depth of whatever it is I am interested in. The key here is interest, which is an irrational disposition. I can rationalise it, of course, such as me being interested in refining my computing environment because it helps me write more effectively. Though I can sense that the interest is there prior to any reasonable plan I can come up with.
Behind every rationality there is a deep-seated emotion. To save money, for example, requires an astute sense of managing resources across time. This is about purposeful and coherent sequences of action. The entire endeavour is rational. Though the reason that compels one to save money will be something like the pursuit of comfort, to ease some pain, to satisfy a want that comes from the body. This is no longer a matter of reason: the body does the talking at that level the way it does for every animal.
Analytically, the body and the mind are two distinct magnitudes. We talk of them as being separate. Those this is a figment of analysis. There is no disembodied mind of ours that we can run tests against and, by the same token, there is no mindless body of our own to be studied in isolation. We are embodied mind and thus exhibit the multifacetedness of having a connection to the spatiotemporal as well as the transcendent. Ours is the state of in-between-ness, which is a microcosm of the cosmos, else a fractal.
In thought, there is no separation between that which can be and that which is. What I am thinking of already is there as thought. If I speak of potentiality, I refer to something that I cannot think of beside potentiality itself, for thought reifies whatever concept as actual. To the mind, then, there is no distance and no disconnect. There is no here or there, no before or after. All that is, is. Furthermore, there is no distinction between ideas qua ideas. The idea of something benign is equally an idea as something deleterious. Whether they contribute or not to some state of affairs, itself an idea of a constitution representing a case whose factors are ideas, is not a matter of ideas as such.
In sensation, in all that the body brings, there is separation of space and of time as well as difference of quality or modality, else the way in which something becomes present. The potential is not the actual. The proximate is not the distant. The remedy is not the poison. To the mind these are equal notions as notions that the body establishes as distinct through bundles of associations which it reveals. The mind derives meaning from “poison”, for example, because it connects that idea to the idea of the consequences of poisoning and then to the resulting sensations. It is the body that lives through the experience of poisoning in what is a partial reconstitution of its structure.
As embodied mind, every form of life in the cosmic continuum of life represents the unison of abstraction and instantiation. The abstract dog is that which describes all actual and potential instances of dogs. Each specimen extends and particularises the abstraction. Though dog itself cannot contain in it all the particularities, as those will contradict each other: it cannot be both short-haired and long-haired, black and fawn, etc. For the abstraction to be all-inclusive, it is devoid of particularities, to the point where it is not descriptive of any one specific specimen.
Descriptiveness is germane to the embodiedness of mind, for therein the abstract and its instantiations acquire meaning. To the cosmic mind, then, the realm of physics is the realm of meaning.
Coming back to trance music, its art form admits to the indeterminacy of direction within the boundaries of expression. Like the landscapes and seascapes I have been exposed to, it engenders in me a sense of awe, of possibility that is saturated with opportunity and danger. Through exploration I confirm that the here is not there even though it will become a here once I am there. Why? Because I can. And this no longer is a matter of reasonableness.