Meditation 10 - Life is a symphony

Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life? (Mt.19.16)

Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings.

Life to those who have the ears to hear is a symphony; but very, very rare indeed is the human being who hears the music. Why? Because they are busy listening to the noises that their conditioning and their programming have put into their heads. That and something else - their attachments. An attachment is a major killer of life.

To really hear the symphony you must be sensitively attuned to every instrument in the orchestra. When you take pleasure only in the drum, you cease to hear the symphony because the sound of the drum has blotted out the other instruments. You may have your preferences for drum or violin, or piano; no harm in these, for a preference does not damage your capacity to hear and enjoy the other instruments. But the moment your preference turns into an attachment, it suddenly undervalue them. And it blinds you to its particular instrument, for you give it a value out of all proportion to its merit.

Now look at a person or a thing you have an attachment for; someone or something to whom you have handed over the power to make you happy or unhappy. Observe how, because of your concentration on getting this person or thing and holding onto it and enjoying it exclusively to the exclusion of other things and persons, you have less sensitivity to the rest of the world.

Observe how, because of your obsession with this person or thing, you have become hardened.

Have the courage to see how prejudiced and blind you have become in the presence of this object of your attachment.

When you see this you will feel a yearning to rid yourself of every attachment. The problem is, how?

Renunciation and avoidance is no help, for to blot out the sound of the drum once again makes you as hard and insensitive as to concentrate solely on the drum.

What you need is not renunciation but understanding, awareness.

A. If your attachments have caused you suffering and sorrow, that's a help to understanding.

B. If you have at least once in your life had the sweet taste of freedom and the delight in life that unattachment brings, that too is a help.

C. It also helps to consciously notice the sound of the other instruments in the orchestra.

D. But there is no substitute for the awareness that shows you the loss you suffer when you overvalue the drum and when you turn a deaf ear to the rest of the orchestra.

The day that happens and your attachment to the drum drops, you will no longer say to your friend, "How happy you have made me." For in so saying you flatter his ego and manipulate him into wanting to please you again. And you give yourself the illusion that your happiness depends on your friend.

"Rather you will say, "When you and I met, happiness arose."

That leaves the happiness not contaminated by his ego and yours. Neither of you can take the credit for it. And that makes it possible for the two of you to part with no attachment to each other, or to the experience which your meeting generated, for you have enjoyed, not each other, but the symphony that arose in your meeting.

And when you move on to the next situation, or person, or work, you do so without any emotional carry over. And then you make the joyful discovery that the symphony arises there too, playing a different melody in the next situation, and the next, and the next.

Now you will move through life living from one moment to the other, wholly absorbed in the present, carrying with you so little from the past that your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle; as little distracted by the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. You will be attached to no person or thing, for you will have developed a taste for the symphony of life. And you will love life alone with the passionate attachment of your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind and all your strength. You will find yourself travelling unencumbered and free as a bird in the sky, always living in the Eternal Now. And you will have found in your heart the answer to the question, "Master, what is it that I must do to get eternal life?"