Spiritual leader and author Eckhart Tolle’s belief mirrors mine in many ways. My insight into his philosophy of who we are and our purpose in life can be metaphorically expressed within the music genre of Jazz; the improvisational jazz of musicians such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane ….
As Eckhart Tolle says, “words are so useless …,” and they are, because human beings have not achieved an advancement level in their evolution where we have achieved enough knowledge about consciousness, our spirituality, to develop the symbolic or metaphoric language to explain it adequately.
The following is an excerpted quote by Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now,” taken from an interview by Krista Tippett of American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith.
“I use the word God rarely because it's been misused so much by the human mind. It has made the timeless, eternal, that which cannot be named, the vast mystery of life itself, when you say God you make it into a mental idol. It becomes a thought form. And then you think you know what you're talking about. But of course that's the misuse of the word God. But what ultimately it points to is the essence of who you are and the essence of what everything else is. The underlying essence of all life. Words are so useless when we talk about this.
The ultimate thing is the realization of the formless essence of who you are because if God has any reality in this world, it cannot be separate from who you are in your essence. And finding that in yourself, really, I see as the purpose of human life. And then the external world, the temporary world, the world of forms, also changes as a result of that. But the essence is finding who you are beyond form, beyond time.”
The quintessence of who you are is in fact the essence of what everything else is or whatever can be, because the being of your every here-and-now is in fact of your creation. Just as an artist, a musician or painter create; humans create the universe, world, circumstances, and everything that is in their life. Its profundity contributes to that which is transcendent, our consciousness, and as its extension, our soul.
In jazz, “the essence of who you are and the essence of what everything else is” is metaphorically analogous to a musician who must be conscious of their performance being confluent with each other’s performance. A jazz musician exploits every melody, harmony, tonality, harmonic, counterpoint, rhythmic cadence, and musical nuance in such a way that each musician collectively contribute to the texture, the color, and the flavor of the music. It is the distinct listening, assimilating, evolving and transforming, and then developing through their instruments not only the music in-and-of itself, but also the transcendence of the music. Their performance takes place in their here-and-now, the here-and-now of every other performer, creating and contributing to the here-and-now of everyone in the audience, and in turn the audience to each other. The metaphorical soul of jazz is the essential, evolving, conscious soul of all life: “… finding who you are beyond form, beyond time,” “the underlying essence of all life.”
A jazz performance utilizes a diverse grouping of many instruments, and many different modes of instrumentation. More important than the instrument is the instrumentalist. He or she brings out the qualities of the instrument they play: the quality of the sound, the particular skills they bring to playing their particular instrument and their particular interpretation of the music, phrasing and articulation. In music, as in life, diversity is also an attribute to the soul of the performance.
I believe the heart and soul of jazz, what occurs when jazz musicians are deeply engrossed in an authentic and completely improvised performance, where what is observable by those listening also comes from transcendences of which the audience is not aware, but very much a part of the performance, has similitude with human life.
Our experiences provide the object, and transcendent, forms of life: micro experiences (communication we have with every fundamental particle and every cell in our body -- every unobservable assimilation) to macro experiences (every apprehension, thought, emotion, participation in an event or activity, every one of life’s ups and downs, and every being we encounter in life – every observable experience). These experiential forms contribute to our praxeology, our consciousness, the core of who we are. They have the potential of leading to sea changes in our way of thinking: new ways of thinking about what we symbolically call God, and new ways of thinking about whom we are, our relationships to each other and to the natural world, and of life’s purpose.
As Eckhart Tolle states: “if God has any reality in this world, it cannot be separate from who you are in your essence. And finding that in yourself, really, I see as the purpose of human life.”
The purpose of life is its evolution.
