My Own Prison

How does it feel?
To be on ur own,
No direction no home,
Like a complete unknown,
Like a rolling stone....

When I am alone, I feel like I am free. But for how long? Till I feel I am not losing anything by not being with people or till I feel I am not gaining anything by being alone. Why should i feel free?

Happiness is a present attitude, and not a future condition, says Hugh Prather, in "My Struggles to Become a Person". Attitudes are shaped by external factors. If attitudes are shaped by externalities, then happiness is external too. We look for externalities to be happy. Someone has to tell me something to make me happy. Someone has to do something I like for me to be happy. I make an externality a precondition to be happy. When I am dependent on someone or something to come to a happy state of mind, I am placing it in the hands of an external factor, which may or may not respect my stakes, may or may not respect my terms and requirements in the whole thing. We have created a relationship between attitude and happiness.

When I say we have created the relationship, I mean that the conditioning we have been through tells us to be pleasing, to be good by someone else’s standards, and therefore to look for external criteria to satisfy. We never had a choice on this, because the relationship was made when for us the world was our family, when the mom and pop were Gods. My happiness lay in theirs. This relationship is ingrained in our mind, deep. To the point of being the only morally acceptable and known means to be happy.

Doesn’t every religion preach the ideal eternal bliss in the Self? What does it take to have nothing to possess and still be happy?

Every pit I am in, I have dug for myself. Every time I find myself in a pit, I find that I will not get out till I realize that I dug the pit. We created our own prisons.

Music and Beauty

The reason music is so valuable is that it is an incarnation of beauty, for me. A thing is not beautiful because it is beautiful, but it is valuable because it is beautiful. Beauty is value. What better incarnation can be there for beauty than an art?

To show beauty to someone in any form is a supreme effort. If I am feeling the beauty of a song or music, what would it take it to create it?

Beauty is a state of mind, of the creator and the beholder. The creator creates something, when he is in a particular state of mind, so sees beauty in his creation. To appreciate this beauty, the beholder must correspond to this state of mind of the creator. Thus, the two minds must be on a plane that is mutual.

Surely the creator of so much value, that is beauty, must have been one with the divine when it was created. Consorting with the deepest values of his existence, which are brought out in a state of extreme involvement.

This is the emotional level. When the sounds of some string kindle a feeling of love, sadness or even ecstasy, this is like someone holding the strings and I am a puppet.

What joy in helplessness. To ride the wave, to go with the flow. When you know nothing else matters at that moment, what is the point in thinking? A rare moment. Ascetism could lead to this for longer periods of time, or an orgasm for a moment. In all these cases, the thing that stops the mind is beauty, of the mind itself, of our raw instinct, unsaid, yet expressed.

I am listening to this song now, what else exists but Me.