To each music its refrain
Was the phrase “to harp on” really coined by Shakespeare – Still harping on, my daughter? – or did he conveniently lift it from earlier works, freshen it up, add a dash of dash, and re-release it to a marveling public?
Perhaps every artist should work this way. A rather recent invention of the overweaned ego, the Artist as Creator of All Things has got to go. The real artist is a channel for sunlight, not the sun itself: she drinks in the world through her senses, a true tantrika whose openness to life is unlimited (and not limited to sexual connection, as some small spirits would consider the Tantra, a Reader’s Digest version of the Kama Sutra), and being filled to overflowing with sight and sound and touch and taste and scent – as well as that subtle combination of what we do not outwardly sense – allows that water to pour out in whatever form it may take.
And is creating a child not the greatest art? Where every other work leaves the fingers or leaves the voice, and is immediately fixed in quality and content, as though the art lived while it was on the tongue and lost its life thereafter, like a flower growing in a field that is plucked… and offered to another, beauty while the petals are remain.
My refrain today: is that every practice that increases life, bringing more life into and through you, is what you must go after. Every practice that opens your eyes and softens your touch, makes you receptive and active at one and the same time… one must be watching for those practices all the time. They are there just out of sight, even when we look straight at them. So you watch for them like you look at stars, with slightly averted gaze, watching with the sensitive rods and cones at the corners of your sight – then reaching without reaching, and pulling down a star, despite all improbability of your ability to do so.
My harp is meditation, a word or a concept which is about as hard to bring into focus as a dim star at night. You have to look sidelong to understand it: when you look straight on, it looks like a blank slate, an empty sky, an uncomfortable void.
It is not a guy sitting on a cushion with his eyes closed. It is not trying not to think. It isn’t a woman wound into a yogic posture; it isn’t a set cadence of breath or holding the breath. It isn’t the sound when you strike a meditation bell, nor the ringing that comes after, nor the diminishing of that sound, nor the sound that follows the sound, nor the lack of sound altogether (although it could be argued that the atoms and elements of the bell, in constant motion, are in constant song). It isn’t a way of thinking nor is it a way of not thinking. In fact, it isn’t a way at all, which is why it frustrates all but the ones who are persistent enough to face a mystery without flinching.
What you see (or don’t see, since so much happens subtly and internally) are physical practices – tools and techniques – that have been shown to create the conditions for stillness, for a state of meditation where you are most open to all of the energies of the world, yet not susceptible to them, observing and mastering them.
Some say that life comes without an instruction manual – humorous, but false. The manual is constantly being written, it is added to every day by the brightest lights humankind has produced, woman and man. Believing there is no instruction and no guide is simply our childish resistance to take responsibility for our own lives. It is yours, it is mine.
Therefore, know that there is and always has been a well lit path, that is becomes brighter with every passing year, on the accumulated lights of generations of spiritual scientists, and that all you need do is… take a book from a shelf, take a workshop, take a breath.
