This article is about something I call the Muse. The Muse is not mythological superstition, rather it is the idea of music itself. Plainly, the Muse is music. Externally, the Muse is music in its most concrete and literal form: rhythm, melody, harmony, etc. Internally, the Muse manifests as a state of mind where the movement is felt, stimulating the mind and body. The musician is a conduit through which the Muse may pass into an audible form and enter the listener. The Muse is alive both externally as sound and internally as thought and feeling. What may be unintelligible to the more literal-minded of us, is that in both modes, internal and external, music remains the same thing. Understanding how this is requires that you step outside the static thinking you’ve been conditioned into by ordinary attitudes toward music.

Faith is a simple word that gets used without thought given to the depth of its meaning. Atheists tend to regard faith derisively, presuming that faith lazily fills a void left by reason. Theists generally regard faith as a virtue, and even the means for God’s saving grace. In either case, people who use the word often do so without regard for its depth of meaning, and this deficiency of understanding reflects itself as a deficiency in the relationships humans have with each other and with their spirituality. What follows is a semi-critical and open-minded exploration of the subject of ‘holistic faith’ from my own ex-Christian angle, interpreted through the lens of the Bible, and also applied to a few illustrative examples. The aim is to use the Bible to paint a picture of how we may arrive at a fuller understanding of faith with God.

From an engineering perspective, math presents itself as a practical device, a set of tools to be used as tools. Similarly, a physicist uses math to construct models of reality, and as such may be inclined to see the correspondence between math and reality as evidence of mathematical realism. For both the engineer and the physicist, the study of mathematics appears to be a study of the very structure of reality and truth itself, a notion not uncommon to mathematicians who style themselves as practitioners of the purest science, a science upstream from the rest. This is, in truth, a backwards and fanciful idea. Insofar as math actually means anything, it is truly downstream from physics and engineering, and the inversion of this relationship has confused the modern notion of “truth”.

Lately I have been reading the Science of Logic by G.W.F. Hegel. This is a mountain of a text and I am not yet through it. Nonetheless, I am finding that Hegel speaks to much of what I intuitively feel is true about the world. What follows is my own personal reflection of the first development in the Science of Logic: Being, Nothing, Becoming. This should not be taken as a commentary or a guide to Hegel’s ideas; if you are interested in that you should go read him yourself as I have less than no authority on the matter. The intent of this is to put my own understanding into words.