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#2784 -
Nondual Highlights
Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest
violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar
Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito,
outside a bustling Metro stop in
Excerpts and spoiler alert: The whole story
may be read from the Pearls link, and makes more sense there
than the few parts highlighted here. Also, there is an audio link
to his entire 43 minute concert, still good even with the
background noise. You might listen while you read it, that is, if
you can spare the time. You can also see short videos of the
people going by interspersed within the article.
What if he's really good? Do you have time
for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the
moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be
answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the
fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an
indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest
classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most
elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins
ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as
an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as
an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at
an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
[..] It was not until six minutes into the
performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and
listened.
Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour
that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were
doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a
minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a
total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried
by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to
look. [...]
Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements
remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience --
unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking
that he's not really there. A ghost.
Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are
the ghosts.
IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO
It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the
koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and
philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a
measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David
Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state
of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)? [..]
A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A
woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is
walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his
hand.
"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT
director for a federal agency. "I had an
Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.
You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid
in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as
he is being propelled toward the door.
"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my
son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was
rushed for time."
So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body
between Evan's and
"Evan is very smart!"
The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all
babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub
of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said,
life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true
with music, too.
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the
people who stayed to watch
Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator:
"Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He
just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came,
and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.
"People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead.
Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do
you know what I mean?"
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies
Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at
what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about
people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty.
But what about their ability to appreciate life?
We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at
least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de
Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed,
bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were
driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the
accumulation of wealth.
Not much has changed. Pop in a
"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life
out of balance."
In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday
Life, British author
"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane
said.
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment
and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the
best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so
overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that
-- then what else are we missing?
The
Most Important Dimension
of
Human Existence
By
Eckhart Tolle
An
extract from Stillness Amidst the World
We're
here to find that dimension
within
ourselves
that
is deeper than thought.
This teaching isn't based on knowledge, on
new interesting facts, new information. The world is full of that
already. You can push any button on the many devises you have and
get information. You're drowning in information.
And ultimately, what is the point of it all?
More information, more things, more of this, more of that. Are we
going to find the fullness of life through more things and
greater and bigger shopping malls
Are we going to find ourselves through
improving our ability to think and analyze, and accumulate more
information, more stuff? Is "more" going to save the
world?? It's all form.
You can never make it on the level of form.
You can never quite arrange and accumulate all the forms that you
think you need so that you can be yourself fully.
Sometimes you can do it for a brief time
span. You can suddenly find everything working in your life: Your
health is good, your relationship is great, you have money,
possessions, love and respect from other people.
But before long, something starts to crumble
here or there, either the finances or the relationship, your
health or your work or living situation. It is the nature of the
world of form that nothing stays fixed for very long — and
so it starts to fall apart again.
The
voice in the head that never stops speaking
becomes
a civilization that is obsessed with form,
and
therefore knows nothing of the most important
dimension
of human existence:
the
sacred,
the
stillness,
the
formless,
the
divine.
"What
does it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose
yourself?"
It has been said: There are two ways of
being unhappy: not getting what you want, and getting what you
want.
When people attain what the world tells us
is desirable — wealth, recognition, property,
achievement — they're still not happy, at least not for
long. They're not at peace with themselves. They don't have a
true sense of security, a sense of finally having arrived.
Their achievements have not provided them
with what they were really looking for — themselves.
They have not given them the sense of being rooted in life, or as
Jesus calls it, the fullness of life.
The form of this moment is the portal into
the formless dimension. It is the narrow gate that Jesus talks
about that leads to life. Yes, it's very narrow: it's only this
moment.
To find it, you need to roll up the scroll
of your life on which your story is written, past and future.
Before there were books, there were scrolls, and you rolled them
up when you were done with them.
So put your story away. It is not who
you are. People usually live carrying a burden of past and
future, a burden of their personal history, which they hope will
fulfill itself in the future. It won't, so roll up that old
scroll. Be done with it.
You don't solve problems by thinking; you
create problems by thinking. The solution always appears when you
step out of thinking and become still and absolutely present,
even if only for a moment. Then, a little later when thought
comes back, you suddenly have a creative insight that wasn't
there before.
Let go of excessive thinking and see how
everything changes. Your relationships change because you don't
demand that the other person should do something for you to
enhance your sense of self. You don't compare yourself to others
or try to be more than someone else to strengthen your sense of
identity.
You allow everyone to be as they are. You
don't need to change them; you don't need them to behave
differently so that you can be happy.
There's nothing wrong with doing new things,
pursuing activities, exploring new countries, meeting new people,
acquiring knowledge and expertise, developing your physical or
mental abilities, and creating whatever you're called upon to
create in this world.
It is beautiful to create in this world, and
there is always more that you can do.
Now the question is, Are you looking for
yourself in what you do? Are you attempting to add more to
who you think you are? Are you compulsively striving toward the
next moment and the next and the next, hoping to find some sense
of completion and fulfillment?
The preciousness of Being is your true
specialness. What the egoic self had been looking for on the
level of the story
—I want to be special —
obscured the fact that you could not be more
special than you already are now. Not special because you are
better or more wretched than someone else, but because you can
sense a beauty, a preciousness, an aliveness deep within.
When
you are present in this moment,
you
break the continuity of your story, of past and future.
Then
true intelligence arises,
and
also love.
The
only way love can come into your life
is
not through form, but through that inner spaciousness that is
Presence.
Love
has no form.
Reprinted with permission from Eckhart
Tolle's Findhorn Retreat: Stillness Amidst the World, © 2006
by Eckhart Tolle, Eckhart Teachings Inc. www.EckhartTolle.com.
Published by New World Library www.NewWorldLibrary.com.
posted to The Now2