You are the music

[Guest guest]

Madathil-ji made the following wonderful statements:

 

<<You are quite right. However, I am afraid you missed the point I

was trying to make. Just imagine, you are enjoying your early morning

tea. You are relishing every drop of it because that is the first

cup of tea after a long period of deprivation. The world is very

much around you, your eyes and ears are open, but where are you?

Right in the taste buds! You are very much in the enjoyment of the

tea, nay, you are the very enjoyment. At that moment, there is no

moment, there is no Bhuvaneswarji, there are no taste-buds, there is

no tea and there is no mind. Everything merged into one -

enjoyment. It is only afterwards that all the components and

paraphernalia that merged into the making of that enjoyment fall

apart to present you with an "experience of enjoyment" where you are there

with your enjoyership with a sense of past, present and future. Even the

knowledge that the experience was enjoyed because there was a mind behind it

occurs only later and, mind you, it occurs to the "enjoyer with an

enjoyership".>>

 

Put me in mind of the following from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

 

....But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint--

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.

 

Dennis

[Guest guest]

Dear Dennisji,

 

That indeed was a very wonderful and timely quote from Eliot. I

believe I had read it but with the "Waste Land" image in mind when

the advaitic resonance in it could not have registered on my youthful

extroversion. Now that you are making repeated appearances on the

List with Eliot, I believe it is time I re-read the author and

understood him in the correct perspective.

 

Thanks and regards.

 

Madathil Nair

 

___________________

 

advaitin, "Dennis Waite" <dwaite@a...> wrote in Post #

14767