Wednesday 6 April 2016

New Vision




 New Vision





My journey to the heart, for those who have been following my blogs and journeys, has been a long one. That, however, is not a bad thing as far as I am concerned. A slow comfortable ride is, for me, always the best way to travel because you get to take in the scenery and really enjoy the whole process in a relaxed and contemplative manner. Anything I can do that brings me in to my body rather than into my head, or out of my body, I see as a step in the right direction.
As a musician, I have always been more interested in the aural responses in life rather than the visual. This, I feel, has kind of put me at odds with the rest of the world. Technology has highlighted this very clearly. If we look at our mobile phones every aspect involving the eye has got higher and higher in its specifications. Our cameras have more and more pixels, more than my ageing eyes would be able to notice as things become ever more blurry for me. On the other side, our music has become more and more squashed and the bandwidth narrower and narrower so the quality is hardly worth bothering with unless you’re prepared to use high-quality streaming in exchange for storage. I would go for that every time. If we look at our meeting places, in our bars, cafes etc., the decor has slowly been changing. Before we had comfortable soft furnishings that soak up the sound and make the room relaxed and easy to talk and hear what is going on. Now the carpets have been replaced with bare floors the furniture has lost the cushioning and every surface is a hard one. The sound clatters around like a ping pong ball and everyone has to speak louder and louder to be heard, creating a stressful and very unrelaxing atmosphere.
Why is this? About ten years ago I read two books by Joachim- Ernst Berendt called The World is Sound Nada Brahma and The Third Ear, on Listening to the World that explained this for me. Berebndt explains that the eye works with the masculine energy. It is the creative light that travels in a straight line from the eye out to the exterior world. From this we have created television and computers etc which takes ourselves out of our own ability to create and imagine and replaces it with outside images. As our journey into the left, masculine part of our brain pushes us to an out of kilter state, the separation from ourselves and each other grows year on year. The ear, conversely is the least understood part of the body. The cochlea is spiral in shape and reflects the life force that is all around us. It works with the fibonacci series, a mathematical formula, from which all life grows from leaves to trees to our bodies to galaxies. This is the feminine aspect of ourselves and brings us into our inner world. The spiral energy takes us from the third dimension in which we reside and spirals up through the sound, through the harmonics which are held within each note and raises our energy into the higher dimensions. 
It is in this place that we find who we truly are and here we can find peace. To close down this aspect of ourselves goes against our nature and creates a society of angry and unhappy people. I keep coming back to the toad in the boiling water analogy but only because it is so true. (For those who haven’t heard it, it is the scenario where if you put a toad in boiling water it will immediately jump out. If you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat it will sit there slowly adjusting to the increase in temperature until it dies. So far I believe we are that toad still happy to adjust to the worsening circumstances in which we allow ourselves to be in.) So I ask at what point are we going to decide that the heat is unbearable and make the necessary changes to choose to leap out of the boiling water. I know we have the ability we just need the desire and the awareness that things need and can change. If we continue to buy into what we are continually being sold, things which truly do not serve us, that make our traumatised egos feel better but our souls weep, will we ever change? I believe so. 
While so many are blind to this story (and of course it is only my story, well not just mine) I am ever hopeful that the blindness will somehow shift to a state of inner vision. This is where the truth can be found and I find it fascinating how the irony is playing itself out here.
Just the other day I decided to turn on the television; a rare occurrence in my house and went to the Ted Talks channel. I was just looking for some inspiration and came across a talk by a scientist who was speaking on behalf of the people who found the gravity wave. Apparently a scientist, 40 years ago, had the foresight to believe this could be achieved and managed to get the project funded all that time ago. It took till last September for the machine to be turned on and within weeks, I believe, they got their first result. How amazing is that. 
What was more amazing for me, and for them of course, is that they realised that they would never be able to see this event, however amazing their technology was, as they understood that that the cameras and our eyes are too limited. Firstly there is simply too much in the way between us and the event and secondly they know that the eye is far inferior to the ear as we can only see about ten percentage compared to what we can hear. So when the result came through it was of course as in an aural not a visual form. It sounded much like a whoop! I found this very amusing and very beautiful as indeed did the scientist and it showed me that, I believe, we are on our way home. We’ve a long way yet to go but I feel these are the first signs of our scientists recognising the importance of the ear over the eye and therefore the heart over the head. 
I am doing my best to listen more and rely less on my sight. When my partner took this picture of me last month, neither of us knew why we took it and no one offered us any insight. But there was the answer right in front of me. I am proposing an enquiry into the world where our ears become king rather than our eyes; where we listen first and judge second. The eye has so much room for error, (optical illusions are a classic case here; we have no phases like this for our ears) yet our ears are far more accurate and sensitive. 
I am working on a year-long of course of meditations and today’s is based on the idea that everything we see is only a reflection, this is a known truth that when we look at something we are only seeing the light and colours in reflection. What I hadn’t thought of before today is that it is only a reflection of our own inner light. Could this help us to see more clearly?
I would like to leave you with that insight. Any reflections on that would be gratefully received.

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