...Sometimes I find myself wondering how real all of this is. Some people caution us that the virtual reality of the Internet can be addicting; I agree, but I don't think the statement goes far enough.

I think the concrete, everyday reality might be an addiction, too.

I find it interesting, at times, to reflect on Karl Pribram, a Yale psychiatrist and neurological researcher whose research indicates that memories are processed and stored in the brain as a set of wave-patterns derived from overlapping frequencies. Since the input received from the body's senses arrive at the brain in the form of frequency-based stimuli (most obviously in the case of light- and sound-waves), he began to become curious about whether the world of objective reality was, perhaps, also frequency-based on some more fundamental level.

...The physicist David Bohm, one of Einstein's successors, intrigues me as well. His research and theories about the nonlocal, interconnected behaviour of subatomic particles, and the ensuing implications of an interconnectedness between all things, fascinates me; so, too, does his extraordinary view that the tangible "reality" we see each day is merely a reflection of some deeper, more connected, more basic order of subatomic activity.

...Taken together, one finds oneself wondering about all the reality we know and accept as "real". Perhaps, as Bohm and Pribram cumulatively suggest, the world we accept as real is just a reflection of a huge, intricate orchestration of overlapping subatomic frequencies.

Not unlike an immense, powerful symphony.

"Then the voices of the Ainur... began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void...
"But when they were come into the Void, Iluvatar said to them: 'Behold your Music!'...
"...and their hearts rejoiced in light, and their eyes beholding many colours were filled with gladness; but because of the roaring of the sea they felt a great unquiet. And they observed the winds and the air, and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron and stone and silver and gold and many substances: but of all these water they most greatly praised. And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Iluvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen..."

...Makes you wonder, don't it?...