Reading through Peter’s chapter on the “Varieties of musical experience,” I found myself wandering off on a tangent to consider spiritual corollaries. While Peter explored the academic trail which unites brain function, social health, and music, I was led by these resonances to consider more metaphysical parallels.

First off I was reminded as I was reading of Guy Murchie’s beautiful book “Music of the Spheres” which I read many, many moons ago–we’re talking decades. Murchie explored the mysterious forces holding everything together from galaxies to atoms. Dr. Brown does the same with brain function, exploring how it resonates, is shaped by and attempts synthesizes with the external world and the language, words, and music found there-in–all for the purpose of connecting and creating a whole.

This unity is amazing. While Peter, being the careful physician-scholar he is, confined himself largely to observable phenomena in the material world, its physics, and societies, I believe there is a single metaphysical force which not only aims at creating this unity but animates its evolution.

I say “evolution” because, as Peter notes, these life processes, anatomical and social, are interactive and evolve–usually in synchronicity but in the case of mental illness and distress in dysfunctional ways. So too it is with religions. They usually start out elevating human society, but they can also veer off-course, becoming dysfunctional and out of synch with the divine purpose.

It is important to tend to the markers of this deviation which, Peter notes, is what Dewey called the Problem Situation.

These days, it seems to me, we are confronted with a large scale, planetary, Problem Situation–indications that we have again drifted off-course and have camped out in the land of social pathology. We will, I believe, get back to our spiritual homeland and learn again to follow the prescribed narrow divine path, but it’s also clear that as the Problem Situation has become so encompassing, no-one will emerge from this socially dysfunctional land completely unscathed.

Our oneness as a social organism has been disturbed. We are out of synch with the prescribed and disciplined rhythms Peter describes. The first step to get back in tune, it seems to me, is to call out the obvious, that we are out of tune. But until we can agree on this, until we can agree on what is in tune, we will remain discordant and our social pathology will deepen. I believe it is the job of pure religion, not what we’ve created and call religion, to show us how to play in tune so that we can get on with the evolving melody we were created to play.