The Musician Who Could Not Hear Music: Bedtime Story

Hello, loves.

Can you hear the music?

The deepest form of any practice, whether music, meditation, service, or love, requires the willing dissolution of the ego's management. Mastery is the doorway; surrender is the passage through it. What we call inspiration, grace, or the sacred moving through us is not the absence of skill but the skill becoming transparent to something larger than itself. The self does not disappear in such moments. It is expanded into what it was always a part of.

Music generously provided by Sakartvelo.

Transcript

Hello dear ones and welcome to today's story. The musician who could not hear. A story of presence, Surrender. And the music beneath the music. In a city renowned throughout the land for its music. There was a musician named Tariq who was considered by everyone who heard him. To be the finest player of the OOD in his generation. This was not a small thing in that city, Which had produced great musicians for five centuries, And had precise and demanding standards for what constituted as greatness. Tariq had played in the halls of the great houses. He had been summoned to perform at royal occasions. He had studied with two of the three masters who were considered the living authorities on the tradition and both of them had told him in different ways and with varying degrees of willingness that he had surpassed them. He was 40 years old. He was at the height of his powers. He was, By the standards available to him, Complete. And yet. There was something missing. He did not know what it was, Or how to name it. And the not knowing was a private torment that he carried behind the public face of mastery. Audiences wept at his playing. Connoisseurs spoke of him in the language reserved for the rare and excellent. His students idolized him. But when he played. Particularly in the silence after the last note they did. There was a feeling of almost. Of a door that had not quite opened. Of being very close to something, Standing outside it. Technically perfect. And somehow not inside the thing itself. He described this once, Guardedly, To his friend and fellow musician, Leila. She listened carefully. And then Sam. You are playing the music perfectly. That you are not disappearing into it. What do you mean? When you play, She said. I can hear Tariq playing. I can hear the mastery, The choices, The intention. It is beautiful. But the greatest musicians I have heard. There are only two or three in a lifetime. But when they play, You do not hear the musician. You hear only the music. His teacher hearing this second hand through a small world of the musical community. Sent him to a man who was not a musician at all. The man was a Sufi teacher, A sheikh. Who lived in a narrow house in the old quarter of the city and was known for saying things that were either extremely wise or entirely incomprehensible. Depending on where you were standing when you heard them. Tariq went reluctantly, In the way that people go reluctantly to teachers when they have run out of other options. He was a small man. With a beard that appeared to have been growing since early in the previous century, And eyes that were simultaneously very still and very alive. He received Tariq in a room with a single lamp and a mat on the floor. And nothing else except the sound of the city outside. Play something, " the sheik said. Tariq playing. He played a piece he had composed himself. Which was considered by those who had heard it to be a masterwork. He played it with complete technical command. Every ornament precise. Every transition controlled. When he finished. The sheik asked, Who was playing? I was playing, Tariq said. Yes, And that is the problem. Tariq looked at him. You are in the music, The Sheik said. Like a man who is in a room trying to rearrange the furniture. You move everything with great skill. That you are separate from the room. You are the arranger. The music is the thing being arranged. What you have not yet discovered is how to become the room itself. Tariq stayed on. He had not intended to stay more than an afternoon. But there was something in the sheik's manner that made departure seem premature. He returned the next day, And the day after. Until he had been attending for several weeks. The sheik rarely spoke about music directly. He spoke about presents. About the difference between doing something and being done by it. He told the story of a great calligrapher. Who had spent 30 years perfecting his technique, And then spent another 30 years learning to let the brush move without him interfering. The second thirty years, The sheik said, Were harder than the first. Because the first 30 years had built an expert. And the expert is the thing you have to learn to set aside. He spoke about a quality called fama, Which could be translated as annihilation. The dissolution of the individual will in the service of something larger. He said, You cannot achieve farna. You can only create the conditions in which it becomes possible. It is like sleep. You cannot force yourself to sleep. That you can lie down, Close your eyes and allow the conditions that make sleep possible. Tariq asked, What are the conditions that make it possible in music? The Sheik thought for a moment. Then he said, Love. True love of the music. Which is not the love of what the music does for you, Not the love of the applause or the mastery or even the beauty. But the love of the music for its own sake. Which means a willingness to serve it at the cost of your position as its master. And if I do not know how to love it that way? And practice listening. Not listening to what you are producing. Listening to what is trying to come through you. They are different directions. Most musicians face outward toward the sound they are making. The musicians who disappear into the music face inward. Toward the silence from which the music arises. They serve the silence. The music is only what the silence becomes when it passes through a human being with a willing heart. Three months into his time with the sheep, Tariq was invited to play at a private gathering in the house of a merchant. It was a stormy night. The city was full of the sound of rain on stone and wind in the narrow streets. The gathering was small, 12 or 15 people. The merchant and his family, And a few friends, None of them musicians. Simply people who loved music and had been fortunate enough to secure Tariq's presence for an evening. He sat with the oud and prepared to play. And in the moment before he began, He heard the Sheik's voice in his memory. Listen for what is trying to come through. He sat in that for a moment. He did not begin to play. He listened inwardly, With the same quality of attention he would give to a faint sound in a distant room. Something was there. Not a melody exactly, More like the feeling of a melody. The emotion of something that wanted to be expressed. He followed it rather than leading it. His fingers move. But more slowly than usual. More as followers than as the initiating intelligence The music that came out was not the music he had planned to play. It was quieter. Less technically elaborate. There were spaces in it. Pauses, Where before he would have filled every gap with ornaments. At some point he lost track of the rune. This had never happened to him before. He was always, During performances, Acutely aware of his audience, Monitoring their responses, Calibrating his playing. But the awareness of the audience simply fell away. Not because he had stopped caring. But because he himself had gone somewhere deeper than that. He was not performing for them. He was playing. And they were listening. And both activities were serving the same thing, The music. Which was not his and not theirs. That was moving through the room, The way the wind moved through the street outside. Belonging to no one and available to everyone. He did not know how long he played. When he stopped, There was a silence in the room. No one moved for a full minute. Then the merchant's elderly mother, Who had not been expected to be present. Who had been helped downstairs by her granddaughter. Because she had heard the music beginning from her room above. Wept silently into her hands now. Tariq went to the sheet the next morning and tried to describe what had happened. The Sheik listened without interrupting. When Tawik finished, The Sheikh said, And where were you while all this was happening? To wreak thought for a long moment. Present, He said, Finally. More present than I have ever been. But not in front of the music. Not between the music and the audience. I was inside it. No, That's not right either. More as if the distinction between inside and outside had. He stopped, Unable to find the words. I was afraid, Tariq said. Before it happened when I sat with the silence and something began to come. I was afraid it would not be as good as what I had planned. That it would be less. And it was not less, It was more. That's a different kind of more, Not more impressive. That more true. The sheep poured tea. This is the thing that cannot be taught, He said. Only pointed at. The self that is afraid of losing control. The expert self. The performing self. That self believes it is the source of the music. It believes that without its management and expertise, The music would be less. What last night showed you is that the opposite is true. When that self steps aside something larger can flow through. You do not become less when you disappear into the music. You become the music's best sound. How do I find it again? You cannot find it, The sheik said. It finds you. Each time when you have made yourself available to it. The practice is not the achievement. The practice is making available. You play and you listen. And you love the music more than you love your version of it. And sometimes, Not always, Sometimes, The door opens. Tariq played for another 30 years. He became, In the estimation of those who heard him across that time, A musician of an entirely different order from what he had been. Though all the technique was still there, All the craft intact. What was different was much harder to articulate. Ipul said his playing have the quality of inevitability. As though the music were not being created in real time, But remembered from somewhere else. As though he was not a musician playing music. But rather music finding its way through a musician who had, At some point, Learned the art of being translucent. He told his students near the end of his life. The mastery is in service of the surrender. All the years of technique. All the scales and the theory and the discipline, They are not the destination. They are what you bring to the threshold. What happens at the threshold. That is not yours to control. Your job is to be worthy of the crossing. And to cross. You have to be willing to disappear.