The Holiest Sound In the World
Ram Dass Here and Now is a podcast of teachings that Ram Dass gave during the eighties and nineties. If you forego the long introductions by a sincere gentleman named Ragu Marcus (you have to skip the first ten minutes or so), it’s an amazing trip into Ram Dass’ wisdom.
There’s a poem that he reads at the end of his “Playing With Reality” episode. It’s by Kabir (a fifteenth century Indian mystic poet and saint), and it stopped me in my tracks. Here are the lines that smacked me in the heart:
“Have you heard the music
that no fingers enter into?
…
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines
but inside there is no music, then what?”
Up until about seven or eight years ago, I’ve been a musician. Singer songwriter, and composer lyricist for musical theatre. (Here’s a rough, kind of sweet example.) In the nineties, I made three CDs. In 2007, I graduated from Tisch School of the Arts with a Masters Degree in Musical Theatre Writing.
And then the well just dried up and it all went away. All at once.
I’d been doing yoga most of my life, and finally became a yoga teacher in 2012. So that’s what I concentrated on from then until last year. It’s remotely possible that during that time, I was ‘scrubbing my ethical skin’ until it shined…forgetting that inside there might be music I couldn’t hear, because I was ignoring it.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved teaching yoga, and I might return to it someday. But I think I superimposed an “either/or” template on the places that music and yoga held in my life. And I don’t need to do that.
So the words of this poem immediately triggered a song that I’m writing. I’ll share it when it’s ripe.
But the bigger point I want to make here is that maybe we all place way too much importance on polishing our image, the one the world sees…which dulls our inner hearing, leaving us deaf to the “music that no fingers enter into.”
The music inside us. Which might not be ‘music’ at all. It might be carpentry, or coding or quilting. But whatever it…
