Doing Both

This morning I was listening to this quirky little lecture by Alan Watts.

He’s quite the controversial figure in the spiritual world due to his alcoholism, heavy smoking, and hyper active sex life.

Yet, you listen to his lectures or read his books and you see what the hypes all about.

The wisdom he shared has helped me, it really has. It soothes me, gives me confidence and occasionally makes me laugh.

It’s done in such a modern way there’s no way not to understand it.

This specific lecture was about something I’ve heard people argue about now, even in these days.

Whether one should take pictures to remember the moment, or simply let it go and “be-in-the-moment”.

I mean who hasn’t had an opinion on this?

Personally I’ve always been the “be-in-the-moment” guy but to be honest, I’m just lazy.

So spoiler alert he’s on both sides. This is spirituality not politics.

The fascinating thing though is he makes a point that our life is memory.

We know we are because of the echo, the resonance, the bounce and jiggle, like a pendulum swinging.

And like darkness and brightness when we go to either extreme they  are both blinding.

“If you get one extreme too much, you don’t know you’re there.”

Put another way you don’t exist because there’s no way for you to know you exist.

Light only knows itself as light, when it encounters darkness.

We see both only when there is a balance.

He thus argues that it is the same for this argument.

This is the tangle of Nirvana and Samsara, Dream and Reality.

It’s like riding a bike, when you notice you’re falling to one side, you balance it.

When you notice, you’re spending too much time remembering, living in the illusion, you step back, find out that there is only this endless moment and nothing else.

“you have to let go of the hang ups and realize there are no possessions, everything’s falling away, all your memories are holding onto illusions.”

Then you rebalance, jump back in, fall in love, buy some clothes, take some pictures, reminisce, but this time you’re free, cause you’re balanced.

If you’re interested in the whole lecture click HERE.

He goes into more detail about sexuality being the major symbolism for this dance in Tibetan Buddhism, the nature of being, and some other stuff.

Now I’d like us to think about children learning music. If they are always being taught, and never given the opportunity to share, teach or lead, then how do they know they are learning?

We let children speak to us before they know how to read or spell or even pronounce some words properly.

So why should music be any different?

We don’t dumb down our speech for them, so why should we dumb down music?

Let them play the way they can, and support anyway we can.

And for god-sake, listen to the crash and the boom and remember this is all some great fireworks show, not some prison sentence, have some fun today.

Yours,

Crescenzo