People sell themselves cheap
If there were two lines of music, just two lines – no chords – which had no connection with each other, he couldn’t do it. It can’t be done, sight-reading two. It’s because the chords and the full activity of the hands is integrated, it forms a unity. The pianist can look along these two lines and he can see the whole thing as a unity, and he plays it as a unity and so he can do it. In the same way the teacher says through your meditation, if it is done well, it will often come that you begin to see life as a unity. When you begin to see life as a unity, you will be able to play your part in it, even if it is very difficult and it requires a lot of activities. Or if there’s just one line, you’ll be able to play that, he says, when you begin to see unity. Otherwise, when life is a number of quite separate things, with different activities required for each, then you can’t do it.
He said people today and always sell themselves cheap. Someone is always saying, “I’m no good”. They won’t try at anything, because “… things are always going wrong for me – and if I do succeed in something it’s never appreciated. It always goes badly – and is life worth living anyway?” They’re selling themselves cheap. They have a treasure in them. The Koran verses: “I am a treasure concealed, and I desire to be revealed.” There’s a treasure within and they sold themselves cheap. He said Napolean sold himself cheap – the Emperor of Europe but what was within him was worth much more than that. He said, of the people of the world, the most successful and the most unsuccessful and despairing, they’re all selling themselves cheap. They’re worth more than that.
He says, people want to see a miracle, but they don’t know that if they saw a miracle, it would upset them and might paralyse them for life. You see this sometimes in people who are superstitious, who believe in lucky and unlucky days very strongly. They become paralysed, because on unlucky days it’s no use trying to do anything, it’s unlucky; but on lucky days, there’s no need. Don’t do anything – it’s going to turn out well. So he said we make a mistake in looking for the miracle. One example that’s given on these lines [is to hear a well-known extract from a piece by Wagner] and we can predict what the next note will be. So we feel, “Well, there’s nothing miraculous about that, because we know what the next note will be. It’s like dropping a ball, we know what’s going to happen.”
But we ourselves know, that’s quite a wrong view. Every note of this is a free action by the members of the orchestra. The miracle is that they do all play together. You don’t need a miracle where one cymbal bashes someone over the head just to show that he can. The miracle is that Siegfried’s journey to the Rhine is put reliably on this tape, and through this tiny machine it can be reproduced, but not perfectly. We fail to see that’s the miracle, so we fail to see the miracle of life around us. Something is holding the things in order. They don’t hold themselves in order. The notes follow – if you’ve got the score you can predict what will happen, but it’s not mechanical. In the same way he said we fail to see the miracle of life.
Nowadays some of the scientists are saying the world is uniquely adapted for human life and experience. There are too many coincidences to overlook – the distance from the sun and gravity; if it’s a little bit stronger all the stars would be blue giants, and if a little bit weaker all the stars would be red dwarfs, and no possibility of life. There are too many fine coincidences making life possible. He said, this is the miracle and if we open our eyes and look, we will see the miracle, and we will see our own part in it.
[Going back to the use of numerals], in the Middle Ages, before the Indian numerals were introduced, to multiply 7 x 7 was thought to be too difficult, even for professional accountants to work out. They knew their tables up to 5 x 5, but no human being could be expected to learn them beyond 5 x 5 – it was ridiculous. So they had them painted up on the walls and, if they were separated from their little lists, they had methods of calculating [on their hands]. Now, everybody can do this [in their heads], the faculty’s been brought out. We no longer think, “You’ve got to be quite someone to know that!” and in the same way in the Middle Ages and quite a bit beyond (and this applied to other parts of the world too) they could only read by verbalising. That was the only way they could read – they couldn’t read silently. No human being could do that. St Augustine was a genius because he could do that (another great saint, of course). Now everybody can do it; and we have to ask ourselves, the spiritual qualities that we think are so impossible, steadiness in meditation, detachment from these different magnetic pulls – are they so impossible? They seem to be. People say, “I can’t, I get interrupted in my meditation, you see. I can’t concentrate.” “Oh, what a shame, you can’t concentrate.” But you put that person in front of a television, and somebody comes in with something important and ‘Shush!’. They say, “It’s something important’ – “Shut up!” They can concentrate then. The teachers give us these little examples; they’re only little examples, but they can be quite helpful.
Titles in this series are:
1. Penetrate deeply into truth
3. Kobo Daishi made a new alphabet
4. People sell themselves cheap
The full talk is: Notes and Anecdotes 1989
© Trevor Leggett