Yesterday, I was sitting on the porch listening to the street sounds along with a few speaking voices coming from inside the house. I also noticed my thought stream superimposed on top of these sounds, interpreting the sounds I was hearing and automatically creating short mental stories related to them. I closed my eyes and experienced all of this happening at once and was reminded of the following words from Alan Watts:

”The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin listening.
Simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you, listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as you listen to music.”

This experience, right now, can be viewed as a song, no matter what it is, no matter what you are doing, there is a song of This. I am currently experiencing a song that is manifesting as me typing on this computer. While “me typing on this computer” might be a fine description for the sake of communication, it is also extremely limited in terms of what this song is really like, a crude distillation of the fullness of this song. Our thoughts are like a distillation of the fullness of our present moment experience, a filtering, interpreting, and labeling distillation that makes sense of the world.

As I was listening to the general noise on the porch (the song of This), it struck me that my thoughts were like lyrics to This song. Lyrics are an important part of a song, but they are hollow without the rest of the music. Imagine trying to listen to a song by just looking at and reading a transcript of the words, and then getting frustrated as to why you’re not enjoying it as much as others seem to be. I wonder if we may get stuck sometimes living as though the lyrics are more important than the music, and if we might continually experiment with hearing all of the music together.

What is the
song of This
like
right now?

The lyrics
&
the music.

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