Universal Truth: Epilogue

EXPERIENCE: Our hunger to be part of something larger than ourselves and our equal hunger for social belonging lead us through the doors of the church, temple, mosque or synagogue. It turns out that all of them can be dangerous places to be. Religion, a word derived from the Latin religare, “to bind,” can mean to join together like binding separate sheaves of wheat that will be ground into flour to make a spiritual bread that nourishes our deep soul hunger. Yet far too often it binds us to a dogma or ideology that sets us against each other, that yokes us to deeply flawed human beings who trample our spirit and insist on blind obedience that leads to endless war and strife. It seems our species’ grand tragic flaw that the very urges that began as ways to ennoble and enlarge us make us small, mean and cruel. Just open any history book or newspaper. 

 

“Religion—together we can find a cure” says the whimsical T-Shirt I once saw and it’s no exaggeration to say that each of the world’s major religions has a cancerous history that needs curing. Yet each also has experiential sects that live closer to the founder’s original epiphanies— the Islamic Sufis, the Jewish Kabbalists, the Hindu Yogis, the Christian mystics and the Buddhist Zen Buddhists. The seeds for genuine spiritual awakening are all there, awaiting only our tender care and watering.

 

Zen, Jazz and Orff all serve as models and reminders to refuse blind belief, to greet second-hand knowledge with a healthy distrust, to dedicate oneself to first-hand experience of the sublime, be it through spiritual awakening, wisdom or artistic expression. Having reached some solid ground of what feels unquestionably authentic and true, then to share it. Not as missionaries demanding conversion, but as fellow seekers helping each other find our own solid truths. 

 

Less harmful, but still too narrow, is an education, music and otherwise, that asks us only to replicate previous information and shuts down our urge to discover and express things in our own way, our own voice. When we learn to deepen our direct experience, to trust it, nourish it, cultivate it, shape it, we become less vulnerable to the manipulations of those who wish us and the world harm. We refuse to pass on the inherited toxins from our culture’s ignorances. That is how healing can begin.  

TRANSMISSION: Just as discipline can serve as a thread to connect the days and help us feel part of something meaningful, so does the sense of lineage help us understand that we are connected with something larger than ourselves. We stand at the threshold between the ancestors and the descendants, carrying through the best of human achievement from the past and bringing it forward into the future. We become a link in a grand chain of transmission. As such, it’s our responsibility to consider how to forge something durable as we educate the next generation. 

 

This sense of belonging gives a meaning and weight to the present moment that is far more vibrant then simply being in that moment only. We become like a living pond fed by the fresh flowing spring of the past and feeding out to the river that flows to the ocean. Without that movement, we become muddied and stagnant and swamp-like. 

 

Since healing must begin inside of us, such experiences help contribute to a life lived with meaning that can then imagine and celebrate all lives lived with meaning. It can help us resolve to nurture and protect. 

 

HUMOR: Hope and fear are impossible roommates. So when George R.R. Martin notes that “Laughter is poison to fear.”, he’s suggesting a tried-and-true method for evicting the undesirable one. Humor can be the release valve for all the understandable stress and anxiety we feel about the state of the world, a stress and anxiety that blocks us from any possibility of offering true medicine to an ailing world. 

 

Yet sometimes humor can be cruel and divisive, laughing at someone or at their expense. A fun release for the laugher, but no fun for the laughed-at. The kind of humor that we find in spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu (well-chronicled in Joy,  the movie about their friendship), in the infectious delight of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, in the bubbling laughter of five-year-olds in a playful Orff class, is, in the words of Anne Lammott, “carbonated holiness.”

 

It’s not about making jokes at someone’s expense. It’s more the overflow of an authentical joyful heart able to find the comic element inside of the tragic, the playful inside of the serious, the mischievous inside of moral rectitude. We need humor by our side as we take on the serious work of creating a sustainable planet

 

ORALITY: Orality seems an odd attribute to heal the world’s woes, yet has a part to play. Restoring elders as potential founts of wisdom, for starters. An odd idea in an electronic culture that discards and disdains them and creates “olders” rather than elders, those who simply grow old without a lifetime of the kind of reflection that actual leads to wisdom. Yet those who have done the work of carrying poetry and music and meditative practice in their very bodies and voices, who have lived and considered their lives simultaneously, who have seen the patterns of culture and history rise and fall and circle back around again, indeed have something invaluable to teach us. When the occasion calls for it, they speak the words that need to be spoken without consulting Google, they see the things that can only be seen with long experience, they offer a sagacious counsel that mere peers can’t access. 

 

In my own field of Orff Schulwerk, I am blessed (though every day feeling closer to the edge) with a vibrant healthy 72-year-old body that can still do some sizzling body percussion and teach the Lindy Hop. Yet the true power of my workshops is the stories I tell from almost a half-century of teaching, stories that hit the precise point needed to be made after this or that activity, often infused with poetry or mythological references or psychological/sociological/ cultural references. No young teacher I’ve encountered, no matter how talented, seems to be able to offer the same. 

 

We need such elders in every field of endeavor and we need to grant them the audience they deserve. Even if, at the end of the day, when we look to them to solve our seemingly unsolvable problems, they quote Robert Frost: 

 

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.”

Sometimes we need that simple but profound reminder as we wake up to the next day.