Day 46
3/13/2006
It's a long road behind me.
It's a long road ahead.
If you follow every dream, you might get lost.
If you follow every dream,
you might...
get...
lost.
-- Neil Young, The Painter
When I learn a piece of music, I play it over and over, in the most self
conscious way imaginable. Every movement, every nuance of angle, attack --
it is a most pedestrian activity. Repetitive, radically self conscious. The
goal of such radical self consciousness is that one day the music, as it
were, plays itself, and I am gone. The music plays itself. That is the goal
of radical self consciousness, that the music plays itself; I am gone. How
did I get gone? Through radical self consciousness, a kind of training for
the self to dispense of self, training for the time when self recedes and the
purity of the action only remains. The purity of the action only. First
there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain.
The purity of action only remains.
-- Rabbi James Stone Goodman
The journey begins in innocence.
The mountain looks immense in the distance.
Soon, one is well down the path with trees blocking the view of the mountain.
The path goes up, and down, and farther up again.
With each turn of the path, new connections of experience are forged.
One discovers that the mountain does not exist; only the journey is real.
Your are led beyond the treeline, and you again see the mountain-top above.
When you have integrated your existence below the mountain (youth) and travelling
up its side (middle-age), you can know non-mountain and mountain together (elder wisdom).
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