12/28/2009 20:29

Supra-Actual Reality

Yesterday worship began with a jazz trio, later augmented with 2 additional players. The music seemed so true, so perfect, that when it paused I could only think That was reality. But if it is the music which was most true, what is this where we live after it stops?

Of course, no musical performance is perfect. One could reasonably say that music isn't even real because it is entirely ephemeral and the reality it has can only be ascertained indirectly. Yet there is the sense that in the music I have contact with a reality which exceeds normal experience.

Possibly that sense is only an illusion, but I think not. Sensory illusion may well have a part in what I feel, but I believe that sense is pointing to truth. The phenomenon of music emerges out of the complexity of actual existence. It is, in the technical jargon of modern science, an emergent phenomenon, something truly different from the breath and fingering and resonances which underlie the making of music. I offer the opinion that music which touches the soul does very literally, and very scientifically, point to a higher-order reality which our selves can touch but in which our consciousness cannot live.

The question I want to ask is, Why can't we live there all the time? But I think the question I've left lying has been, How can it be that we are able to touch this reality even for the few moments that the music plays? How is it that we are ever invited into this realm?

If this supra-actual reality is more than my imagination, more than only sensory illusion, then perhaps it exists all the time. Perhaps there is a "music" playing, an emergent phenomenon existing, which I do not hear except when the jazz trio makes a connection to it with their playing.