Salinger
11 July 2008
I have certainly found spending my life making music to be a path worth walking. I find it to be a path with heart, as Don Juan said. It comes from your heart and it leads you to your heart, causes you to find and explore your heart, and enlarges your heart. In my experience it enlarges your heart by breaking the hard layers you build up around it. It’s not an easy life. The path is as much an inner path through your self and your consciousness as it is an outer path through the world. That’s what makes it so endlessly fascinating. Music and being a musician can be so incredibly sublime, and it’s not difficult to see the reasons why you do it in those instances, but it can be incredibly painful and difficult too. But even in the difficult times, if you treat it like some sort of martial-arts practice meant to train and strengthen you, it doesn’t seem so hard, and you receive benefit from even the most difficult stretches.
Why would you choose such a path, or why did you? If you’re like me, it wasn’t all that much of a conscious choice. You just went along with what seemed like the right way to go, or a fun and enjoyable way to go. Yet, even though you may not have been choosing your path and each twist and turn consciously, those choices were governed by your belief system, your worldview, and your rulebook – all essentially different terms for the same thing. You did, or will do, what seems right according to what you have accepted as real, valid and important in the world. And since all of your choices are basically directed by this level of your consciousness, I think it is worth spending some time exploring some aspects of it.
We human beings find it absolutely necessary to explain and organize the world in order to live in it. We create our own personal rulebooks, as I have said repeatedly. We create cultural stories with which large groups of people identify. And we create competing belief systems that one part of a culture will use as a club with which to bash another who happens to see life a bit differently.