When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.
This is a difficult notion for the Western mind to grasp — too easy to mistake for the psychopathology of codependence, too quick to slip into the tyrannical Romantic ideal of merging.
At its heart is something else altogether: a kind of transcendent ego-dissolution under which the self ceases to be and becomes Being.
That is what Ram Dass (April 6, 1931–December 22, 2019) explores in his landmark 1971 book Be Here Now (public library), largely responsible for introducing ancient Eastern teachings to the modern West.
Ram Dass
He considers the paradox of our ordinary experience of loving:
When we speak of falling in love, we might find that a slight restatement of the experience would help clarify our direction. For when you say “I fell in love” with him or her you are saying that he or she was the key that unlocked your heart — the place within yourself where you are love. When the experience is mutual, you can see that the psychic chemistry of the situation allows both partners to “fall in love” or to “awake into love” or to “come into the Spirit.” Since love is a state of being — and the Divine state at that — the state to which we all yearn to return, we wish to possess love. At best we can try to possess the key to our hearts — our beloved — but sooner or later we find that even that is impossible. To possess the key is to lose it.
A remedy for this paradox comes from a central concept in bhakti yoga: the non-dualistic merging of lover and beloved into a single totality of being, a great universal One — a notion best articulated by the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba (February 25, 1894–January 31, 1969), whom Ram Dass quotes:
Love has to spring spontaneously from within: and it is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together: but though love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened in him through love itself. Love is essentially self-communicative: Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.
Complement with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s abiding wisdom on how to love, then, for a Western counterpart, revisit the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm on our greatest obstacle to love.
We are makers of our own myths, but the more we live into them, the more we risk becoming their captives. All creativity rests upon unbelieving our own myths — seeing the world and our place in it afresh over and over, so that we may go on making what has not been made before, remaking ourselves in the process. Burnout is simply what a creative person experiences when they have begun believing their own myth too much. E.E. Cummings hinted at this in his exquisite observation that “the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.” Because the work of self-knowledge is never-ending, to trap ourselves into a static myth of who we are and what we do is to doom ourselves to creative death.
Herbie Hancock was thirty-two and just beginning to inhabit his powers, just beginning to make his myth, when he discovered Nichiren Buddhism — a spiritual tradition based on the teachings of the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren. For decades to come, he would practice daily and devotedly. His Buddhist practice, he tells interviewer Paul Zollo in More Songwriters on Songwriting (public library), became his antidote to burnout — it gave him an ever-unfolding “new vision” for himself and the winking assurance that “seventy is the new forty.”
Herbie Hancock, 1976
Hancock reflects:
I’m really fortunate I was able to discover Buddhism. It helped me develop a clearer idea of my relationship with the environment. My personal relationship with everything that’s outside of my personal self. Which includes the people and circumstances that manifest themselves externally. Buddhism really helps you to understand what that is. And in doing so, you have a much better chance. If you recognize something, you stand a fighting chance of dealing with it in a more positive way. It’s when something blindsides you and you don’t see it coming, then you can be knocked over and defeated. So I continue to chant. That is where I went this morning. I went and chanted for an hour at a center that’s near here. In Buddhism we practice and we chant every day.
But the gift of his practice is something more than resilience — something closer to continual regeneration, made possible by the fundamental Buddhist attitude of non-attachment and non-identification with the self. Hancock observes:
We usually define ourselves by what we do: I’m a writer. Or I’m a doctor. Or I’m a dancer. Whatever it is. Or I do construction. That’s usually how we define ourselves. There’s a big trip with all of that.
[…]
Buddhism really promotes the truth and the fact that the human being really has limitless possibilities. And that the core of what we are is not that thing that we normally define ourselves as. The core of what we are is a human being. And when we define ourselves as a human being, it changes everything. So music now, I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being and use that as the foundation. And then I use what I do to translate what initiates from my humanity into musical terms. That’s why I’m able to make every record be different from every other record.
Complement this fragment of More Songwriters on Songwriting — which also gave us Patti Smith on listening to the creative impulse — with John Lennon on the value of meditation and Bob Dylan’s favorite rabbi teaching, then revisit John Coltrane on perseverance against rejection and David Bowie’s advice to artists.
A decade ago, several years after I started writing The Marginalian (under the outgrown name Brain Pickings, in my twenties, while working four jobs), a musician friend gave me a book she said captured the animating spirit of my labor of love: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (public library) by the poet Lewis Hyde, published a year before I was born.
Like a generation of creative people, I devoured it with a rare and rapturous sense of being seen in the elemental strata of my being. Here was shimmering affirmation that creative work gives something which cannot be quantified or commodified. Here was assurance that those whose lives it touches can give back to its makers in a way that is not a transaction but a bow of mutual appreciation, mutual respect, mutual cherishment. At the center of Hyde’s premise is that idea that creative works exist simultaneously in a market economy and a gift economy. “Only one of these,” Hyde writes, “is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.”
I found myself thinking about The Gift anew recently in the context of music and the abyssal disconnect between how much we value it in our lives and how much it has been devalued by the market economy we inhabit.
Music by Maria Popova. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
“Without music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche declared. But set his characteristic drama aside and ask people across ages and cultures what art-form most helps them live their lives, and they will overwhelmingly point to music. It is, quite literally, the soundtrack to our lives — to our fallings in love, to our seasons of grief, to our workouts and our commutes and our parties and our most private moments. It is the sacrament we reach for when we want to feel what we feel more deeply, the daily pulsebeat that helps us move through even our most challenging days with more composure and resilience. It is the sunshine of the spirit. “This indeed is music,” Whitman exulted. “[It] whirls me wider than Uranus flies, it wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them.” Music, the most abstract of the arts, is the most concrete in how it unlocks us to ourselves, how it “opens a path into the realm of silence.”
Music is also something people make — living people, who put a foot on the floor each morning and set about making day: food and love and laundry. People who have a gift, in both senses of the word, and give if freely because making music is a lifeline for them — a fundament of who they are and why they live.
We know this. We feel it the moment we pause to reflect on the inner life of creative labor. And yet we have been complicit in allowing Silicon Valley — that handmaiden of late-stage capitalism — to make of this elemental sacrament a market commodity of lesser value than a latte, so that the artists who make it are the least rewarded creative laborers of our time.
Revisiting The Gift, I was delighted to discover a new foreword by Margaret Atwood, in which she shines a sobering gleam on this astonishing asymmetry between value and worth, inviting us to reconsider it.
Margaret Atwood
Observing that “gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot,” she writes:
Gifts create bonds and obligations, and not everyone wants these or understands them… If you’ve got something out of it, as we say — if you’ve treated it as a gift, which by its nature has spiritual worth but no monetary value, being priceless — what do you owe its creator, who has been the instrument through which it has arrived in your hands? Your gratitude, via a word of thanks? Your serious attention? The price of a latte deposited in a beggar’s bowl e-tip jar?
The answer is never “nothing.”
So, today, this day, think of a musician or two whose music you cherish, whose gift has touched your life and helps you live it. Find their website. Find their BandCamp. Find the “donate” button on their Spotify. And give back not-nothing. It might help them put food on the table. It will help them feel the radiance we all live for — the sense that we matter, that we belong in the great scheme of beauty and understanding. It will help you feel like something more than the consumer, the “user,” to which Silicon Valley has endeavored to reduce you.
Without the gift of music, life would be sub-life.
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