The Music of Life

You are the song you sing. Your music shapes your existence and anything you see, touch and feel. There is a human mass that sings a chant of sorrow and projects a world on the edge of a precipice. There are individuals who sing a chant of love and victory. The vastness of their music shapes destinies and societies, and profoundly affects the roots of the human spirit.

Are you ready to conduct a very interesting experiment? Can you accept being both the scientist of this experiment and at the same time the guinea pig? Well! Just pick out one of your days.  Select any day of your life. Look carefully through it. Explore any detail of it. Notice the words you say. Classify them. Single out those you say more often… Scan the feelings you experience. Classify them. Single out the most frequent ones… Look at your thoughts. Classify them. Single out the most persistent ones, those that appear with a higher frequency. Just as one cell, the smallest unit of life, contains the biological information of your entire organism, so, if your search is sincere and you really want to know about yourself, any one of your days can tell you all about you. That tiny segment of your existence is the epitome, the very synthesis of your life and knows your destiny, buried under thick layers of lies. It is like having the Delphic Oracle at hand. At your disposal. When you want it, if you want it.

We are monotonous beings 
In all likelihood, such a search will make us realize that our words, thoughts, and feelings, are recurring; we just repeat them mechanically, day after day, over and over. We may discover that as a whole we are a quite monotonous being.  Pick out the physical sensations you experience in a day. If you pay a bit of attention, you will realize that there is nothing new in what you sense. Moreover this search will make us aware of our mechanical nature. It will take our breath away at the terrifying discovery that our ‘machine’ is already programmed to feel those sensations, to experience those emotions, to have those thoughts, to pronounce those words. Like a musical instrument that vibrates at a given frequency, and can emit only that sound, we are occupying only a very narrow bandwidth in the infinity of possible keys, vibrations, and sounds.

What song are you singing?
You will realize that every day you sing the same song and that the external world, what you call reality, does nothing but obey to that rhythm, that sound, that vibration. A man’s reality, his ability to do and therefore to have, his degree of happiness as well as his financial destiny, perfectly corresponds to his ‘rate of vibration’. The world is more or less narrow, more or less large according to the wideness of our song. “What song are you singing?” is the same as questioning yourself about your destiny. When you are able to listen to it, when you are more careful with the notes you utter, you will be able to notice it’s mono-tony. If you will realize this, then you will also find the will and the ability to widen the narrow pentagram in which you are living. Like a piano, that with respect to other instruments has such a breadth of octaves to occupy two pentagrams, so there are men who have a wider expressive range than do others.   There exist men who play music that spans three, four, five pentagrams… because their “dream” is too wide to be contained in the narrow bandwidth that suffices for the rest of mankind. Two men conduct business between them because of a fusion of rhythms, a consistency of sounds… a harmony. And a firm takes over another firm for the width of its music; a civilization conquers another civilization and absorbs it for the vastness of its chant, the width of octaves, the quality of sounds, the richness, and the power of its music.

It is easier to move a mountain
Notice how difficult it is to change even a single word of your everyday vocabulary, an accent, a pet phrase; notice the impossibility of changing an attitude, a reaction, of breaking a routine, of going outside of the mechanical repetitiveness of gestures, or of sounds. Just imagine what it could mean to transform a thought, to change an emotion… Notice inside you the impossibility of catching a new idea, to accept it… to dive into the invisible, to think something original, to dream something apparently impossible… to play a single note outside of the pentagram in which you were driven to live. You will realize that it is easier to move a mountain. Every intentional effort, even the smallest, made to modify a repetitive action, a mechanical reaction or to break a habit, is a victory over our monotony, the tripping up of repetitive habits and recurrences of our life. You will realize that the aging, the process of progressive stiffening of your life started long ago, and though you may be young, soon you will no longer be able to reverse it. Rich men and tramps, politicians and employees, Nobel prize winners and ordinary people – everyone carries around his own song. Everybody is locked in self-created prisons of roles, sealed in bubbles of negative emotions, embalmed in their own habits. The greater part of mankind obeys a programmed set at birth, reaffirmed in childhood by parents who can do nothing but transmit the song which they in their turn received from their parents; and reinforced in schools and universities where they learn a hypnotic music taught by bad musicians, tedious teachers, and prophets of misfortune. Throughout the millennia, the traditions of wisdom have devised and transmitted every kind of ‘trick’ to contrast with the rigidity and repetitiveness towards which men inevitably tend. Genuflections towards Mecca five times a day, the fasting ritual of Ramadan in the ninth month of the Islamic lunar year; indeed, the current rituals of every religious tradition, could all be characterized as ‘tripping’ mechanical behaviours. Their function is to nourish mankind’s drowsy intelligence and latent understanding, by the interruption of routine; pushing men to deviate from the rut of deep-rooted habits.

Like a jammed gramophone 

There are grandiose musicians, visionary individuals who sweep through the pentagrams of existence, who create and catch their music from immensity, from above, and there is a human mass resigned to their sad and flickering existence, men and women similar to a jammed gramophone repeating their whining, mournful theme learned since childhood and never modified. Their life is an elementary, basic song played by pressing few keys with just a finger. If we bothered to pay the slightest attention to our movements, we would discover how mechanical and repetitive our lives are. Every morning we set out with scrupulous rigour on a series of actions which are always the same: we get out of bed with the same foot, we start shaving from the same side, we clean our teeth repeating the same number of movements, in the same fashion, and always with the same facial expression. We have settled habits; we express received ideas with the same gestures, words and inflections we have always used. Even our emotions are predictable, like conditioned reflexes of the soul. In the ordinary man, the will is buried. His behaviour is the reflection of a mechanical intelligence and could be studied more profitably by sciences like ethology or robotics than by psychology.Once he has understood this, a man can have no other aim in life but to escape from this narrow bandwidth where all mankind is kept prisoner – to escape from his own music’s monotony and poverty. There is no greater project, no holier war than contrasting one’s limits and raising one’s own chant. The cast out of Eden of Adam and Eve, the original sin, the paradise lost doesn’t occur once upon a time but every moment that humanity raises a chant of fear and sorrow and keeps singing it over and over. The world is such because you are such.

Change your music
This hellish song springing from a black hole in man’s soul, accounts for the all the conflicts, poverty, criminality and any moral and material disease of the planet, including humanity’s millenary curse of aging, getting sick and dying. If you want to change your reality, change your music, and devote yourself to widening your ‘dream’. The dream is the most real thing there is. It is the dream that creates reality. And only the dream can rescue us out of this tight position of Being, out of our chant’s monotony that becomes pain in our bodies, fear in our feelings and doubt in our minds.

One day our being will be so wide to be able to listen not only to our, but also to others’ songs… the sounds others utter… the profoundness and the height of their octaves… their notes’ colour, timbre, rhythm. When we are ready to stand up to the responsibility of this truth, we will find out that humanity thinks and feels negatively; it sings a song of misfortune, of sorrow, of doubt and fear. The whole world is in your head, like the music you play, the song you sing inside. And your fate is recorded like in the grooves of an LP.

Dream a beautiful dream
If you study yourself, if you observe yourself, you will know more about yourself and day-by-day you will be able to broaden your dream, creating and singing a new melody. Every day you will realize more and more that ‘the dream’ is more real than our illusion of acting in life. Through dreaming you will create relationships, solve problems, and enter inaccessible worlds. You will learn how to dive into the invisible. Reality will follow, and will take the shape and dimension of your dream. Knowing ourselves is discovering that man is alone in the universe, solely responsible for anything happening to him. Life is as you dream it. Your song shapes your existence. You can live in paradise or in hell. It is up to you. Have the courage to dream a beautiful dream. Have the courage to sing a unique melody, outside of the chorus, like a solitary bird. Be an individual and conquer all that is possible to conquer… inside your head.