Chapter 83 Time and Music - from my book Changes

Chapter 83

Time and Music

I was practicing a song on the piano that took a lot of concentration.  I am not a very good piano player, having taken only a couple years of lessons when I was young, but I was taking a few lessons as an adult.

The piece I was working on was a mazurka, which has a lot of fun syncopated lively notes.

The piece was a challenge for me and I spent time going through the scores one hand at a time until I could eventually, slowly, put them together.

Once I had successfully gotten used to the piece and was playing it through, I realized how important is was for me to keep my attention on only the fingering and keys that had to be played at each precise moment in time.  I was only at the skill level that could not anticipate what was coming, or what I had just played.  I had to be focused at all times on the now moment.

What a wild thing to consider, and how amazing that we can, as humans, remember a song that can only be performed and experienced moment by moment, but can also be experienced as we, along with the music, flow through time.

With a song that touches our heart, we simply listen and feel everything through the nuances that come with our own comparative experiences.  We get to feel them through the art of another person’s musical perspective and expression.

Not only that, but we gather in great and small groups to listen to, dance to, and feel the music shared with us by one or a few individuals.  We can come together and experience that artist’s perspective through our countless individual comparative experiences as a group; combining all our energies together, and feeling the music together as a synergistic group!  How wonderful we are!

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In contemplating this for a few days I realize, if this phenomenon; our ability to put moments together to form music; experiencing life happens in the exact same way.  In one way, we live one moment at a time.  But isolated, one moment has nothing but the present, and isolated has no memory.

Without memory there would be no language or ability to know how to do anything.  Being able to live in the past, present, and future all at once is actually how we are able to play music, talk, walk, and live.  In that way, we live at all times at once.  We have the memory of our movement forward from the moments before, and we have the intention of where we are going in future moments.  We get to imagine the whole to gain understanding of the whole, which wouldn’t be possible if we were only capable of living in the present moment.

Being able to let go of the distant past and future in order to be in the present moment has become one of the ways to overcome past trauma and future fears.  I think the key to healing and living our fullest is to be able to warp time to our will - or maybe that is too extreme a way to think of what we can do.

Instead, if we think of our ability as having enough control and personal conscious growth, we can bend, mend, or lessen the influence of negative (or positive) events of our past in our own memory.   

Considering that all living people are capable of this, we all live in a very fluid perceived reality.   

The magic of our minds with this ability can alter our perception of our past, and by doing so, our intention for the future can be drastically or subtly changed too.

Have I just said we can change the past and thereby change the future?  Does this mean we can each individually warp reality?  If so, considering how many people live on this planet, imagine all the ways reality is warped.  I see millions of individual curls, each a person bending reality.  How fluid!

I’m not sure why, but thinking about how time becomes a continuous glide through music and memory reminds me of a completely different meditation I did once.

I was moving though the veils from dark to light, but the veils were basically not distinct.  As I floated along, I realized I had a lot of things piled on me, including people.  If you have ever seen a garbage bug, that what I looked like, carrying all that accumulated debris on my back as I floated through empty space toward the light.

As I moved nearer to the light, I realized I did not want to continue on into the light myself; not right then.  It felt like it was getting hot and the light would burn me up.  The inertia was drawing me along though, so I detached from all that I was carrying and let it continue on into the light to be consumed.  I remained behind, naked, in the nothingness.  I felt like a newborn; an observer; full of wonder.