Burning the Candle

[kokopelle]

Well, getting not a lot of sleep finally caught up with me. Tonight I got home from work and went to bed. Now, five hours latter, I am up for a short bit and then it is back to bed.

Here is a question for the contemplative. Is music more or less sacred than the spoken word? The answer may seem simple, but there are some interesting permutations to this line of thinking.

Comments

[valkyriur.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that one is more sacred than the other, only that one is more comfortable for some people over the other.

Music depends on rhythm and pitch. Words are secondary.

The spoken word seems to require meaning (for the words), but it has its own cadence.

[chimerae.livejournal.com]

I have a favorite "Truth in Advertising" print ad that says never confuse your address with where you live.

Sacred is a bridge between the divine and the mundane. It's sort of a ritual path one can take to increase the likelihood of meeting some aspect of divinity or transcendendance or whatever you frame as the goal at the planned destination.

So, the music vs words question would come back to the mind of the quester. It's whichever bridges current state with the destination. That has a lot to do with starting points.

A parallel but interesting issue is some recent rearch that when men listen to the voices of other men, MRI's indicate that their visual cortexes light up -- great for yes/no decision making, listing towards a goal and the like. When those men listened to women's voices, the cortecies lit up used for listening to music. Caused me to reframe some of my cynicism. Before, I thought that by the time most men reach adulthood they had learned to tune out the voice of any woman. Still might be true but I'm fascinated to learn if something else is in play.