There Are No Bad Notes
After our kirtan a few nights ago, I stopped to say goodbye to the leader of the band, my teacher and master kirtan wallah. He complimented my harmonium playing, to which I shyly replied that I tried to play quietly sometimes to hide my mistakes.
“There are no bad notes,” he said.
It’s true that the harmonium is a wonderfully forgiving instrument. A fortuitous Euro-Indian hybrid — a marvel of cultural cross-pollination uniquely unsuited for both Western players (“who wants to sit on the floor?”) and Indian classical players (“who wants to play fixed tones?”) while remaining almost universally beloved by devotional musicians — it sounds good almost no matter what you do.
Even if you do strike a bad chord, this is part of the process, the grace of performing arts that require you to bare your heart and be profoundly human in front of a crowd of onlookers as a practice of living in Truth.
But somehow, I felt it wasn’t only black and white keys he was talking about.
Life and Love in Kali Yuga
Among the generally sweet harmonies of my life, a few sour notes caught my attention recently. The residues of childhood trauma, unaddressed and mostly unacknowledged. Anger. Resentment. Loneliness.
“Why this? Why now?” I thought to myself. “Dear Krishna, You are supposed to protect Your devotees. Why do You let so much poison sit in my heart?”
How to trust in life when the evidence of your mind and senses points to the opposite?
To the external eye, we seem to live in a darkening age. In my homeland of the US, amidst dangerous heat and torrential rain, this summer in particular feels like a reckoning, when here in the wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic nation on Earth, the crumbling Roman Empire of the modern world, the chickens of the climate catastrophe have finally come home to roost.
Not a day goes by when I don’t think with horror of our planet’s collapsing ecology and pray for Mother Earth, with that desperate, straight-from-gut way you pray when you have no other recourse.
So how to trust in life?
When you are born and raised into the dominant narrative of our materialistic late-capitalist dystopia, which proposes consumerism and media-driven self-anesthetizing as salve to an underlying nihilistic despair, how to choose to trust in God?
How do you turn around and say, against all odds and all appearances, “Yes, there is love. There is nothing but love.”
How do you look at human life — short, difficult, full of heartbreak — and say, fully and unconditionally, “Yes.”
Perfection without Exception
Looking critically at the material world without acknowledging God will lead to despair, like learning the first two of the Buddha’s Noble Truths (“There is suffering; suffering comes from desire”) without the second two (“There is an end to suffering; there is a path to the end of suffering”).
Only as bodies, as individuals, there really is no satisfaction to be found, just an alternation of pain and pleasure as we struggle to delay our inevitable annihilation for as long as possible.
But the great sages — and your inner heart, the voice of your soul — tell a different story.
They speak of beauty, perfection, Eternity-Consciousness-Bliss beyond the shadowy world of form.
And not only beyond. Divine perfection is present in all of creation and creation is embraced within it. Even more, creation is inseparable from that perfection, of one nature, non-different from it.
If God is perfect, then the world is perfect. And if the world is perfect, then it’s not only classical music and golden sunsets and Fibonacci spirals in a sunflower that are perfect but the whole package. Even traffic jams, even your ex-lover, even war, childhood cancer, and starving polar bears.
It’s hard to go there. Frightening, even; it feels somehow inhuman, and it is. We are used to thinking that “perfect” means “good,” and “good” exists along how “should be/shouldn’t be” spectrum. That’s how our minds work.
But there is no “should be” in God; there is only what is.
So to see with God’s eye, we need to become fully, unconditionally, radically in love with everything, which means to shed all judgment and all fear without losing our discernment and, most importantly, our compassion.
We are in this world as the working fingers of God and we must act as He would, with His love and devotion for all beings, who are His children entrusted to each other’s care.
“Rise Up, Arjuna!”
Back to the scale of a human life. You have suffered. I have too. Let’s not deny it.
Sometimes I’m shaking my head at sweet little baby Krishna. “Really? This is the best You could do for me? Hey Govinda, get Your act together!” But then I still offer Him a ghee lamp and a cookie, knowing He does always arrange the best for me; only my limited perspective can’t see it, blinkered by time, space, and ego-identification.
I know this not from the evidence of my senses or tenets of some philosophy but because I have tasted just enough of Love within my heart to understand that it is infinite and just enough of Truth to know that it is infinitely kind.
As Nisargadatta Maharaj’s guru told him, “Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from the Absolute. Remember it always. You are Absolute, your will alone is done.”
Your suffering is divine. Like everything else in creation, it is perfect by the sheer fact of its existence, with no need for silver linings or accentuated positivities to justify itself. If it is, it should be. This in no way diminishes your right and responsibility to heal the pain — and this goes double for the suffering of others.
Consider Arjuna’s paradox in the Bhagavad Gita. At one point, Krishna reveals His universal form, with all beings emerging from Him and devoured by His mouth of Time. All the people Arjuna is so concerned for are, effectively, dead already. Fate is already written. All things ultimately go to the same end.
And still — “Rise up, Arjuna.” Fulfill your dharma. Why else are you here in this incarnation, faced with the circumstances that appear specifically to you?
You see God’s perfection in the spilled blood but still give your friend a band-aid because this is what love does.
You lament neither for the living nor the dead, but you still cry at funerals, comfort the sick, and help a turtle cross the road, because this is what love does.
Rise up, Arjuna. You are God’s agent on Earth and your one task is to love.
By Naveen Radha Dasi, a Hridaya Yoga teacher serving at our center in Mazunte, Mexico
