When I was learning how to mix music, I went through a phase of boosting this and that, adding more bass, pushing the top end, adding more reverb, cranking up the compression… and the music ended up sounding plastered against the ceiling and generally a bit crap.

It took various people and many years to convince me that you do most of your work on a mix by taking things away, not adding them.

“Subtractive EQ” means cutting frequencies from a sound rather than boosting them, and results in a more laid-back, less distorted sound that’s easier to mix with everything else. And I’ve learnt to enjoy turning things down – now, my mixes typically have one or two sounds up front, then a much quieter layer of sound off in the distance.

And of course there’s classic analogue synthesis, which is also subtractive: your oscillators typically make huge, wideband sounds which you filter and chip away at until you’ve sculpted, revealed, the (lesser-yet-better) sound you want.

I’m now convinced that this principle applies to the rest of my life, too. I won’t become happier by eating more food, or if the food I eat is richer; I won’t become happier by watching more TV, or seeing more films, or reading more books – by consuming more culture. The best solution to a cold winter might not be simply to turn our central heating constantly on and high.

Perhaps I should be looking for subtractive solutions. If winding myself up with films and music hasn’t made me happy, how about seeking some silence? If 3000 calories, three lagers and seven coffees a day haven’t made me blissfully satisfied, what would happen if I ate and drank more simply and sparingly? If working 14 hour days and preparing every night for intensely agenda’d meetings the next day didn’t bring me wealth or pride, what would happen if I sought a simpler job, one which paid less than the last one? Which aspects of my life could be improved by consuming less, by seeking less, by doing less?

Because… when I try to meditate, I struggle with too many thoughts, too much mental chatter, too many distractions. That means I’m suffering from having too much, so the key question is what I can give up, not what I can gain.

Components don’t make sense outside the context of a Whole. And the Whole is a persistent network that persists because of the way its components interact.  There’s probably a discussion here somewhere about a bench, which is nothing more than the ongoing interaction between nuts, bolts, washers, planks and bars.

And if there isn’t a clumsy dumbing-down of Gerald Edelman’s ideas about consciousness as a beautifully structured and complex re-entrant tumble of activity in neural pathways in this blog already, then that’s a glaring omission which I’m sure will be corrected before too long.

And obviously, this project is literally all about the string: seeing the world as emerging from the spinning together and the unravelling or fraying of… entities which themselves emerge from the spinning together and unravelling of other entities…

So tonight I was at a Buddhism discussion session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre. The session focussed on Ethics. There was a quote in the reading material for the previous week about ethical living tending to generate conditions which help improve the quality of meditation, and ease the path to the gaining of wisdom. I was reminded of it tonight, and it felt quite powerful, and I had a quick mental image of ethical progress feeding into progress in meditation, which then led to wisdom and conditions which made ethical decisions easier in the future.

The vision was quite abstract: slightly like a celtic knot, but always in motion. Like porpoise acrobatics, three dolphins tumbling around each other. But… it was saying that progress towards a Buddhist style of improvement emerges from the interaction of ethics, meditation, and insight. Each drives the other on. I’m very tempted to call it a virtuous cycle but that would be to impoverish this vision of how the process flows, because I think it might be exactly the same process that Edelman describes when he talks about the spinning-together of consciousness from recursively stimulating, pseudo-cyclic, tumbling, rolling neural activity. And if we accept the claims of atomist chemists and physicists – that interactions between objects are based on interactions between atoms, between electrons in orbit around atomic nuclei – then, at a sub-atomic level, the relationships that hold a bench or a chair together are also mediated by tumbling, intertwining electrons and nuclei.

Which means that, when you study one aspect of a whole Thing, or topic, you’re probably studying a thread which tumbles around and facilitates or hinders or becomes other threads; and that it’s the total interaction of those threads that spins the whole Thing together.