Our first new library addition this month is an article on the “Metaphysics of Musical Polyphony”, by Marco Pallis, who was not only a renowned metaphysician and mountaineer, but also an accomplished violist and an important promoter of early English music. His understanding of musical harmony comes from a lifetime of personal experience.

That counterpoint we call “life” is a search for a unity which, across all the vicissitudes of existence, is sensed as ever present: only in a return to our existential keynote will peace be found.

• On a similar note, as a new addition to our Sacred Audio Collection, we have recordings of an ancient Japanese norito, or sacred incantation, said to be “beyond comprehension, no matter how deeply we may think.” These songs play on the idea that human beings are children of heaven who have lost their purity, and that by restoring it through prayers they return to their divine origin. The symbol of the frog is used to express the idea of returning to the kami, incorporating a play on the word kaeru, which means “I return” as well as “frog”.

• Finally, in an article on the cosmology of the North American Plains Indians, “The Three Circles of Existence”, Kurt Almqvist explains how once we are grounded on “the tipi of the heart”, “anywhere is the center of the world.”