Rules Of Engagement.
I engage with goodwill.
If someone wanders into my world, head placed where sunshine never falls and comments on the weather, good to be prepared for rain.
We are responsible for our comments.
We are accountable for our actions.
We are held publicly accountable for our public actions, including posting and commentary.
We are not asked to passively accept any idea / comment presented to us.
Rather, we are encouraged to test ideas and comments we find surprising: to establish the veracity, or not, for ourselves; and to adopt a position of healthy scepticism while participating in a spirit of critical goodwill.
Opinions are of little value if not drawn from direct experience.
I engage with robust good humour.
1november2024
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Embracing and engaging our common humanity: recognising, acknowledging, affirming.
Attention is all we properly have in life. To give our attention to what is necessary, to direct our attention to what is in front of us that we have to do/discharge/honour, is already a big ask. But where there is necessity, there must be a response. Otherwise, things fall apart. For the performer, it is necessary that they attend to the performance – their performance, their performing with others, engaging the audience, the performance as a whole. Why? Where the performer is a musician, so that Music may enter our world.
When Music walks in the room and the performance comes to life – what is my experience of this? This is no longer music being played by musicians, audients having a good time – this is another world opening to us, where we are somehow the same person.
For anyone reading this thinking - It’s WooWoo Time and cosmic horseshit! – simply consult your experience. Have you been in a musical situation where your life has been re-directed by the inexpressible/inexplicable power that came into your life with Music? If your answer is no, then our conversation is limited. Otherwise…
If this is within your experience then, whatever words we may choose to use, it’s something like Music is a higher power speaking to us. And there is something higher within us that recognises this, resonates with this, and perhaps may even respond. And that this something higher in the Music, and in the musician, is not apart from this something higher in the audient. I am describing the background to musical performance in the 1960s that re-directed my life, and which had a powerful influence in the wider culture – Music can change the world!
What I can say 55 years later, is that this potential for something higher within us all to recognise and see other, brought together by the power of Music, continues on. This recognition, acknowledgment and seeing of what is higher in each of us, sometimes takes the form of – I am Thee, Thee is me. This recognition, acknowledgement and seeing, is of what is higher: Who we really are.
It is not an acknowledgement of what we are, the parts of us that live in the Basement, that have the right to do whatever they want without responsibility, repercussion and the effect on others - It’s all about me! I come first! – that is, the manifestations of what is lower/lowest in us: the manifestations of egotism.
So, what to do when the parts that live in the Basement, that have the right to do whatever they want without responsibility, repercussion and the effect on others, the manifestations of egotism - seek to pull our attention away from what is necessary, from our aspiration for what is higher, from our wish to be? What to do when lower forces become disruptive?
Seeking to be recognised and acknowledged in our terms, is a demand to be seen as we see ourselves: more What-We-Are than Who-We-Are. Who We Are acts on us, but quietly. Without a place of silence within us, these calls are mostly unheard. But part of us know this, leading to distress, anxieties, problems in our dealings with others, mostly of whom are also bumping around. And these are the decent people.
What happens when we bump into the indecent sort?
IMO the overall theme of discussion seems to centre on this: embracing and engaging our common humanity: recognising, acknowledging, affirming.
"Hearing transforms sound into music."
