Sunday, January 09, 2005

When I was in the ninth standard, our English teacher posed a question to us: What happens when we listen to good music? One of the replies she got was, "We forget ourselves." I had never thought of music that way before (to be fair, I was barely into my teens then -- all the more credit to my friend who was smart enough to come up with this answer). A prime example of Dynamic Quality. This is what you experience before your intellect kicks in and you start thinking about the music at a 'meta' level, i.e. who made the music, what emotions it triggers in your mind, what you think of the musician's decadent lifestyle ;-) and so on. The problem is, the Dynamic Quality component of your listening experience diminishes successively each time you listen to the song, till it becomes practically zero (if this were not so, a great song would probably never fall off the charts).

One of the main goals in the practice of Zen Buddhism is to never let go of the Dynamic Quality (they don't call it that, of course) in each and every action that you undertake. Easier said than done...