Hearing the Whole Orchestra
Hearing the Whole Orchestra
Thursday of the Third Week of Lent – March 19, 2020
Every human being sees the world in terms of how they have been programmed to experience their world. This is a long process. We’ve been at this our entire lives.
No one wakes up this morning with a world-view that comes from nowhere. Developmentally, we each arrive at where we are today through the process of learning to attend to certain things and block out others.
That means my dispositions and prejudices have been conditioned within me. I have been rewarded for some, and thus have held onto them. I have been punished or ostracized for others. Unless I am a strong person, I likely will let those go.
Spiritually speaking, the nature of attachments is that we learn over time to give out-sized attention to some things, primarily because we view them as essential to our happiness. And we ignore other things because they don’t seem to “make my life better.”
Attachments are not wrong (right or wrong are not appropriate categories here). We are not trying to demolish or eradicate all our attachments.
However, attachments have harmful sway over us when we do not recognize them. When we live blind to our attachments, we are not able to see the truth about ourselves. The invitation of spirituality is to see ourselves as we are, to stop living in illusion, to wake up, so to speak.
Today, Anthony de Mello leans into a couple of analogies in his section on attachments.
Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings.
For life to those who have the ears to hear is a symphony; but very, very rare indeed is the human being who hears the music. Why? Because they are busy listening to the noises that their conditioning and their programming have put into their heads. That and something else — their attachments. An attachment is a major killer of life. To really hear the symphony you must be sensitively attuned to every instrument in the orchestra. When you take pleasure only in the drum, you cease to hear the symphony because the sound of the drum has blotted out the other instruments. You may have your preferences for drum or violin or piano; no harm in these, for a preference does not damage your capacity to hear and enjoy the other instruments. But the moment your preference turns into an attachment, it hardens you to the other sounds, you suddenly undervalue them. And it blinds you to its particular instrument, for you give it a value out of all proportion to its merit.
[Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello, (New York: Doubleday, 1992).]
For Reflection:
o Each person has his or her attachments. We are not spiritual failures because we have attachments. They are a part of our human experience. To have attachments is not “wrong.”
o We do, however, want to recognize our attachments and with intentionality begin to let them go. The attachments we have, in many ways, actually have us.
o I notice today how the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing has tapped into some of my old attachments . . . perhaps my fear, or my tendency to hoard, or my need to find happiness in social interactions. As I notice, I am careful not to judge. I simply notice.
o If possible, I take a few moments today to notice the people and things to which I look to give me happiness. To use de Mello’s analogy, I want to notice which instruments of the orchestra I am listening to, giving them such value that I cannot hear other instruments.
Thursday of the Third Week of Lent – March 19, 2020
Every human being sees the world in terms of how they have been programmed to experience their world. This is a long process. We’ve been at this our entire lives.
No one wakes up this morning with a world-view that comes from nowhere. Developmentally, we each arrive at where we are today through the process of learning to attend to certain things and block out others.
That means my dispositions and prejudices have been conditioned within me. I have been rewarded for some, and thus have held onto them. I have been punished or ostracized for others. Unless I am a strong person, I likely will let those go.
Spiritually speaking, the nature of attachments is that we learn over time to give out-sized attention to some things, primarily because we view them as essential to our happiness. And we ignore other things because they don’t seem to “make my life better.”
Attachments are not wrong (right or wrong are not appropriate categories here). We are not trying to demolish or eradicate all our attachments.
However, attachments have harmful sway over us when we do not recognize them. When we live blind to our attachments, we are not able to see the truth about ourselves. The invitation of spirituality is to see ourselves as we are, to stop living in illusion, to wake up, so to speak.
Today, Anthony de Mello leans into a couple of analogies in his section on attachments.
Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings.
For life to those who have the ears to hear is a symphony; but very, very rare indeed is the human being who hears the music. Why? Because they are busy listening to the noises that their conditioning and their programming have put into their heads. That and something else — their attachments. An attachment is a major killer of life. To really hear the symphony you must be sensitively attuned to every instrument in the orchestra. When you take pleasure only in the drum, you cease to hear the symphony because the sound of the drum has blotted out the other instruments. You may have your preferences for drum or violin or piano; no harm in these, for a preference does not damage your capacity to hear and enjoy the other instruments. But the moment your preference turns into an attachment, it hardens you to the other sounds, you suddenly undervalue them. And it blinds you to its particular instrument, for you give it a value out of all proportion to its merit.
[Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello, (New York: Doubleday, 1992).]
For Reflection:
o Each person has his or her attachments. We are not spiritual failures because we have attachments. They are a part of our human experience. To have attachments is not “wrong.”
o We do, however, want to recognize our attachments and with intentionality begin to let them go. The attachments we have, in many ways, actually have us.
o I notice today how the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing has tapped into some of my old attachments . . . perhaps my fear, or my tendency to hoard, or my need to find happiness in social interactions. As I notice, I am careful not to judge. I simply notice.
o If possible, I take a few moments today to notice the people and things to which I look to give me happiness. To use de Mello’s analogy, I want to notice which instruments of the orchestra I am listening to, giving them such value that I cannot hear other instruments.
Comments
Post a Comment