This is a follow-up to “Beyond Positive Thinking and Intention”.
Music is not only a flow of sounds but a flow of silences. The beauty of music is not only in what is heard, but also in what is not. While it often thought that a note of music is a conscious choice to make that note, it is also a choice at that point not to have silence. Thus through a series of sounds and silence we have a melody. Something that is beautiful.
Our journey though life should be that of the melody. A combination of sound and silence; experience and silence. It is though this that we begin to understand what is around us, for without the silence we can’t grasp what the experience is, and without the silence we have a constant barrage of thoughts which cloud the experience. Life instead should be like when they flow together. Like a melody which flows even though it is composed of different sounds, lengths and silences. Our experience becomes a silence, and the silence becomes an experience.
When we attempt to describe music, ultimately we fail. While we can compare things to other things, we cannot grasp the melody without hearing the melody. Thus all writing about spiritual awakening should be viewed as instruction to have your own awakening, your own experience of the melody. Just as a musical notes can be transferred to paper to instruct the musician on how to play, until the notes are created with an instrument it is not music. This is how you begin to truly experience life as it was meant to be lived. Not by verbalizing everything and trying to describe it like notes on a page, but rather experiencing it for yourself and playing/listening the music. To read about music is not to know music, and to read about spiritual matters is not to know your own spirituality. These must be experienced, lived, for oneself.
A wise man once said to another “The mountains, the trees, the air and I are all in the same” And the other man, even wiser, said “Yes, but it is a shame to say so.”
In other words, everything in regards to life can not simply be a store of a language within our mind, for this is not a melody, it is not a dance of life. Life, in order to be lived fully, should be an attainment of instruction that resonates with us and then we must see if we can come to this conclusion on our own by actually trying to experience what it is all about.
In my own writings here, you are simply gaining instruction, but it means nothing until you incorporate it, experience for yourself and make it your own. I can offer instruction to bite an apple and the series of sensations that you may go through after you have done so, but this is not the same as you biting into the apple. Therefore with all teachings it is important that the instruction is taken as only that – instruction – and not misconstrued as the experience.
Once that is understood, to speak of the awareness is a pity and impossible, for it is beyond language. Once you have experienced the void, it is impossible to explain. But we can use language to aid each other in moving toward that personal experience. Only through learning and actual implementation (and sometimes abandonment of what does not work for us) do we become a symphony, and dancing to that symphony is all but inevitable.
Use language and others language to help you embrace the experience and the silence, but when you are ready, move beyond the language so that you truly experience what it is to be a melody – a flow from one moment to the next being both the notes and void between. In this way life becomes alive. It is not a description of the concerto you never seem to be able to sit in on, but that is written about in the paper; it is the actual music you are listening to, which can not described other than to hear it for oneself.
Cory Mitchell