What is, is.

What is, is: let that realization change your life.

Well, it can if we keep returning to what it means, the fullness of its implications.  The phrase on its own implies something immediately, and with a rejoinder begins to awaken deeper thoughts.  The full statement should be: “What is, is. What is not, is not.”  So the question rather becomes “what really is?” “What do I know to be certainly true?”  I know that I am standing at my desk typing. I might be concerned about what readers think of my writing, and I might guess at your reactions to my writing. If I do guess, I don’t know your thoughts for certain, so that would definitely be what is not.  What may be may be, but certainty?  Not.  Many, many implications can follow from returning to this nugget of wisdom, and that’s the context of my first encounter with it.

During orientation for my freshman year of college, upper-class students put on skits to show us aspects of life at Davidson.  The skit I remember was about the honored, aging Dr. Abernathy, or Abbo as he was known to us.  Something or other happened in the skit, a student was troubled, so they went to the grand old man for his advice on how to deal with it.  The students in the skit were flummoxed when he told them “What is, is, what is not, is not”.  Others might say “Don’t worry about it.” That’s the kind of answer we look for, but offers nothing actually helpful.  The answer the philosopher gave will last a lifetime, delivering an insight derived from the statement that fits the moment.

Answers like that are very important: we don’t understand them right away!  I will continue to roll such a thought over and over, trying to understand it, much as trying to recall the words to “My Old School” make the song stick in my head for weeks on end.

On the other hand, properly prepared, receiving such a pithy remark can completely upend your world, bringing a flash of insight akin to a Zen awakening.  After college, while I was in school yet again, now for a masters degree, my sister-in-law gave me the gift of the est training.  After two weekends of people sharing about their plight in life, explanations of how we live our lives as if looking in a rear-view mirror, and being deprived of bathroom breaks for hours and hours, the exact, full statement above was delivered.  Bammo!  People were unleashed from social constraints, empowered to follow their dreams.  Not always to good effect, however: those who had no context to place such a radical notion into became cult-like followers of the leader(s).

Fortunately for me, by this time I’d been meditating for a few years, had been exposed to lots of new thinking about habits and assumptions, and was aware especially of the Buddhist notion of the conditionedness of all behavior.  And I had Abbo’s comment in my brain as well, a solid, old-school source that gave the insight at least two legs to stand on, and gave to me a grounding for comprehension.

Of course in this blog I’ll bring everything back to music, and how we deal with music analytically and socially.  For either purpose, analysis or interpersonal relations, it is critically important to stick with reality, what is, as long as possible.  I find that doing so with a group, simply collecting people’s observations of what they heard, constructs a view of a piece of music that is very real, and reflective of each person’s lived experience: “I heard this.” We clearly hear the same source, but already, the what is varies from person to person, and we see interpretation creeping in. It’s easy in such a context to understand that one person’s hearing a conflict and another’s hearing a game is a matter of internal processing of the same series of acoustical signals.  At that level, we can bypass any dispute about one person being right or wrong, for each reports what is true for them.

Extend this concept into larger social arenas, in particular the music of a culture or subculture, and we can dismantle preconceived notions about the groups and their musical styles by focusing on what is rather than the what is not (which is often conjecture about intent, what something means, what we expect to hear in music, etc.)  Listening to music together, discussing it with a focus on what is, is an excellent path for training ourselves to understand where we add our own bias, where we assume intent, and how easy it is to stray from what is into what is not.