The Answers We Already Knew

This song explores Max Planck’s 1944 quote that has been misunderstood, argued over, and rallied against since he uttered the words:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

In my previous song “There is No Paradox,” I was trying to express the very nature of this quote, but didn’t quite hit the mark. In this new song, I believe I’ve come a bit closer, but our language is lacking the ability to express anything that could have or did exist outside of spacetime or especially, the idea of consciousness existing before matter (and therefore spacetime). It’s a mindboggling concept and we’d have to throw out anything and everything we think we know about consciousness and simply redefine it or come up with another name for the concept of consciousness before matter. Did the universe dream itself into existence?

Verse
At first it spoke in riddles that we could understand
The aurora borealis and footprints in the sand
Instead we made up myths to ease our growing fears
And for centuries we prayed as the footprints disappeared

Chorus
It tells us to be quiet and listen when it speaks
But our minds cannot be silenced, our vocabulary’s weak
The language of this speech was never written down
No human ever spoke it, it simply can’t be found
It’s the dream you can’t remember
The feeling deep within
That we’ve always had the answer
But we’ll never know

Verse
It filled us with the longing to search among the stars
First we searched with telescopes now we search with code
We’ve built our towers skyward but missed the open road
It answers every question as we gaze up to the sky
It’s not the god we fashioned, just the reason why

Bridge
We’ve always known the silence
Before the need to speak
Before we learned to measure
When time was still unique
We named the constellations 
But never touched the sky 
We mapped the laws of motion 
But never asked it why

Outro
So let the silence teach us 
What words could never show 
We’re held, not by the answers 
But by the need to know 
It’s not the flight that frees us 
It’s falling through the dark 
Where gravity is holding 
The shape of every spark