The Cosmic Symphony and How to Hear It

In an autobiographical essay called Fifty Years of Metaphysical Reflections, Clarke asks whether there is "something like a metaphysical bent of mind." Were we just born this way? If not, how did we get bent? 

To be sure, "not everyone has the aptitude or the inner attraction to become a self-propelling, self-motivated metaphysician." What are the seemingly inborn characteristics of such an autotelic personality? One is

A passion for unity, for seeing how the universe and all things in it fit together as a whole, a meaningful whole, a longing for integration of thought and life based on the integration of reality itself.

I have that longing. I didn't always have it, or rather, it began as a kind of (mustard?) seed that eventually got out of hand. 

It reminds me of a giant pine tree that began growing on the side of my house some thirty years ago. I didn't plant it, but just left it alone, and now it's too big to remove. Or at least too expensive. 

A second predisposition is a sense -- the sneaking suspicion -- that there exists

some kind of overall hidden harmony of the universe, which could be picked up and possibly spelled out if one listened carefully enough.

Like a musical sense which not everyone possesses, at least to the same degree:

I felt there was something great going on under the surface of things, some kind of hidden music, some harmony of all things that I could not quite hear but somehow knew was there and longed to lay hold of it in my consciousness. 

Same. Nietzsche too heard it, even while denying the composer:

The philosopher seeks to hear the echoes of the World Symphony and reproject it into concepts.

Clarke goes on to list six main themes of what what we shall call the Cosmic Symphony, beginning with The Unrestricted Dynamism of the Mind toward Being, by which he means 

the deep natural drive of the human mind to lay hold of intellectually and understand as far as possible the entire order of being, all there is to know about all there is. This drive knows no limits short of the total understanding of all being, both in depth and in breadth [i.e., vertically and horizontally].

This requires a great deal of continuing education for which there is no fixed syllabus, since it involves both anything and everything. 

Frankly I can't keep up, because it involves assignments in physics, biology, anthropology, psychology, history, economics, politics, theology, and more. 

Since I can never catch up, I'm always looking for shortcuts, some way to reduce the sprawl to something manageable via unitary and unifying, cross-disciplinary concepts, more on these as we proceed.

Obviously nobody could never master a single one of these disciplines, let alone all of them:

as soon as we reach the limits of the thing in question..., the mind naturally rebounds beyond to something more. And so on and on until we reach the totality of all being. The natural correlative of the human mind is being itself in all its fullness. 

O.

No, literally: we come to realize that the intellect as such is the inverse image of this "totality of all being." In the book, I symbolize this relation as [(¶) (⇆) (⇅) (O)]. That's what you call the visual representation of a unifying meta-concept.

At our end (¶) is the unrestricted desire to know, which corresponds to "the intrinsic intelligibility of being," or O. 

Thus there is openness at both ends: we are open to O, while O is open to being known. The noumena is not closed, a la Kant, but "open, in principle, to being known"; "Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind." Otherwise to hell with it. We're just wasting our timelessness. 

To deny it [O] explicitly us to cut the nerve of any intellectual inquiry, since every inquiry presupposes, at least implicitly, that there is something there to be understood... 

The second great theme of our Cosmic Symphony is that Being itself is the act of Being, so -- in my words -- it is as if every existent is a fractal expression of this initial act of Being. 

This means that every real being, in virtue of its in-dwelling act of existence, has the power to express itself, relate itself to the rest of the universe, communicate its own existential energy to other beings. 

Not only is this a talking universe, it never shuts up, in that it is endlessly intelligible to intelligence, at every level. 

Looked at this way, knowledge is the bond or union between intellect and thing. The existence of any thing is itself "a kind of light" which "shines forth to other things." Finite beings "are not the source of their own existence," or in other words, "they are not 'the light itself." 

Rather, there is a kind of two-way Light that illuminates both things and the intellect that knows them. 

Two themes down, four more to go.