here’s hoping
Change and Permanence
I asked a friend of mine at this 65th birthday what wisdom he had acquired over the years. He said; “While it seems all things are changing, in the end, they are always the same.” My initial reaction was a disappointment in such a shallow remark, but he explained. “How we remember things that happened in our lives is always being revised and changed. We see our life events differently from different viewpoints in our lives: youth, middle age, and aged. One event can take on many meanings in our lives and the storyline around it may change significantly, but, in the end, it always ends the same for everyone – death.” His words, while not presented in a morose manner, still knocked the philosophical wind out of me. I nodded sagely but pondered the thought that life was nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on our personal Titanic.
When in doubt, write it out. Surely there must be some missing piece to life’s puzzle, some meaningful point to all the energy and suffering one experiences daily and why we choose to take the next breath. There has to be some dynamic of the spirit or soul involved to make it all worth while. Is life really no more than an illusion – a series of dreams until the dreamer becomes but a dream? How do we make sense of life and find something real within the illusion? How do we turn illusion into something we can sense, touch, taste, feel, and embrace? How do we make sense of the madness of modern life? Perhaps Fritz Perz, father of Gestalt psychotherapy, was right, “we have to lose our minds to come to our senses.”
The new spiritual buzzword “mindfulness” seems to fill in the empty gap of my friend’s timeline. Personally, I feel that is a misnomer in that mindfulness really involves much more than our conscious mind and it generally means turning down our mind’s volume so we can focus on more subtle and deeper aspects of our existence. “Soulfulness”, I believe would actually be a better term, but someone else beat me to the naming game and our culture is always suspicious of things out of consciousness’s bounds. I define being mindful as being integrated into mind, body, and spirit.
Abraham Maslow gives us a roadmap with his concept of a “hierarchy of needs” based upon the Vedic concept of energy chakras ranging from basic survival needs to what Maslow called “self-actualization” where one is aware and capable of experiencing and comprehending a vast array of life’s experiences. He used the phrase, “peak experiences” to describe what is characterized as “a highly valued experience of such intensity of perception, depth of feeling, or sense of profound significance as to cause it to stand out, in one’s mind, in more or less permanent contrast to the experiences that surround it in time and space.” Peak experiences have been identified as sharing three key characteristics:
• Significance: Peak experiences lead to an increase in personal awareness and understanding and can serve as a turning point in a person’s life.
• Fulfillment: Peak experiences generate positive emotions and are intrinsically rewarding.
• Spiritual: During a peak experience, people feel at one with the world and often experience a sense of losing track of time.
Maslow suggested that one can think of peak experiences as the most wonderful experiences of your life. Those moments of ecstasy and complete and utter happiness. Being in love is one example of a peak experience. Such moments may also occur when you are in a creative moment or when reading a book or listening to a music. You might feel a sense of “being hit” by a particular creative work in a way that strikes an emotional chord inside of yourself. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the feeling of a peak experience as “flow”, a state of mind during which you become so involved in an activity that the world seems to fade away and nothing else seems to matter. “When in a state of flow, time seems to fly by, our focus of mind becomes sharp, and we experience a loss of self-consciousness.”
One does not have to be self-actualized to experience peak experiences, but those who hang around the peak of the pyramid do tend to have a greater ability to “flow”. Peak experiences tend to occur during artistic, athletic or religious experiences. Peak moments in nature or during intimate moments with family or friends were also common. Achieving an important goal, either a personal or collective one could also lead to a peak experience or when an individual helps another person in need or after overcoming some type of adversity. Love and compassion seem to be integral components of “peaking”.
I like the phrase, “strike an emotional chord”. My friend’s rather bleak assessment of life had only two notes: dream, die. Coincidently there were children and grandchildren present at the celebration and I could see them naturally expressing a discordant symphony of uninhibited peak experiences. They were intensely focused on whatever they were doing and innocently open to all the experiences of the moment. Yes, it was an improvisation, but music none the less. Perhaps it is these full chord peak notes flowing together that provide the background music for our life drama? Maybe we are not “beings” but love songs to a lost Lover, an enchanted chant? The joyous shrieks and giggles of the children held more wisdom than my friend’s sage words and the heavens listened intently to their chants of joy. ❤ ~ John Hardman
“The soul is filled throughout with discord and dissonance and so its first need is poetic madness. That way through musical sounds we can awaken what is dormant, through sweet harmonies calm what is turbulent, and through the blending of various elements quell the discord and temper the different parts of the soul.” ~ Marsilio Ficino
always and ever
we hold eternity in the palm of our hand
life can be found
within the milky way
or within a grain of sand
life is ever revolving into death into life
the music never ends
always and ever
ever and always
we hold eternity in the palm of our hand
💞
Amy Lloyd
life: acoustic & amplified 