the lyre of experience

The lyre of experience

In a Past, so long ago it haunts our Future, even the immortals wished for sleep.

Who/What/Why/Where/When, asks the old breaking news? Are we a mystery – we “human” beings?

Perhaps a temporarily embodied immortal node of conscious experience, or so held the ancients.

In a universe, which is just an inside/outside inversion of background and foreground, we began as Stars, and to Stars we will once again return.

Pause, reset the attention … listen, … do you hear the lyre? We see the lyre, – the visual maze of all our groundhog days. The lyre also shouts from television ads, and noisy freeway traffic.

We seek, as children, to turn down the auditory aspect of the song of experience, natural to our industrial civilization, as it drives itself into magnificent wreckage. When we hear the screams of metal on metal, metal on flesh, even in so common a scream as is connected to cutting our hand while making dinner.

If we only knew what “stuff” was, we might be ashamed of how we have been taught to experience it, as without soul, without an interior life such as we have.

Click-clack goes the keyboard. Swish-swish goes the digital cone from which sound comes out of my Alexa. Spend a day listing to all the little sounds. Savor their tones. Notice the song your fork and knife make as you cut and eat your food. Or the yelp of a cabinet door slammed too hard. The tinkle of pans on the stove. The rumble of a wheeled cart going by your cubical.

We have “stuff” because of the sacrifices of conscious entities. In Gurdjiff’s wonderful book: “Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson”, there is described a whole class of beings, who during the creation-process choose to be completely passive. Could be acted upon, but had sacrificed being able to return the favor.

In the lyre of experience is a world we have been schooled by materialism to imagine without either an interior life, or any independent will. Consider shifting your imagination into moment-to-moment gear, and just notice all that we use/see/hear, but may not yet recognize as kin. All sounds have meaning, for in essence they present just themselves. Human’s gave names such as Thor to the Lightening. But when you see and hear, on the lyre of experience, those tones are how immortals name themselves. Even the Elementals, the little folk, without which there would be nothing to see, hear, or touch

This every poet knows. The Sky names itself, and any ode, however long and well created, is only a vague chimera when set beside how the Thunder touches us, with sight and sound, and roars, and rushes of winds that tear buildings into dust.

Just consider the Sphinx. A stark testament to the impermanence of material existence. Plus, on the good side, when we die it just might really not be so dark and empty as too many fancy. Do you not return from the gentle unconsciousness of sleep? After a few too many years in the material world, we need a longer rest, and so we can dare the adventure of surrender to the “what’s next”.

We are the artists and players of the lyre of experience.