Harmony
The following is a note based on some ideas of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. None of it is original; all of it is to be treated as derivative work.
Each being has within him certain capacities or abilities. The manifestation of each capacity is like playing a musical note. The challenge that life throws at us is to discover these notes, tune them to perfection, and harmonize them.1 Beethoven perhaps had just one note within him, that of musical creation, but it was a supremely powerful note that has resonated through the ages. It was mathematical creation in the case of Ramanujan, and the patterns that he has left behind continue to remain a source of wonderment to mathematicians. This note of mathematical creation was the sole preoccupation of his life — just as music was to Beethoven — but one of extreme beauty and richness. Ramanujan and Beethoven, both geniuses, were blessed with one ability which they developed to perfection. In this respect, they probably didn’t have to worry about the harmonizing different notes.
Most of us are not geniuses. Moreoever, as the Mother has said, no two human destinies are alike2. In all certainty, most of us do not possess any one skill that we have developed to extreme levels of perfection. But all of us do possess a certain combination of abilities which we can develop and harmonize. Most of us have within ourselves not just a solitary note, but a collection of notes, one or two of them being dominant and the rest being feebler notes that still contribute to the overall harmony. A note has a distinct frequency, a mode of vibration. Taken in this sense, man is a bundle of vibrations. When he perfectly expresses one of these vibratory modes in an activity, he starts resonating with his inner being. This is what it means to be in a state of “flow” or “to be in the zone”.
Expereince shows that such moments of being in the zone are rare. What could be the reasons? One is that we are involved in an activity that doesn’t correspond to one of our principal modes of vibration. It could be that we are forcing ourselves to do something that we are not good at. The other could be a wrong attitude towards the work we do. The motivation could be misplaced. We might be doing something for the wrong reasons. It is not enough to find the right note, it is also important that we learn how to play it. Extending this argument, it is equally important to figure out how to harmonize these notes so as to produce a melody. The most common error is to turn a dominant note into the defining expression of our lives, ignoring every other note in our repertoire, and to keep playing this note ad infinitum. A dull, monotonous life is the result. The other extreme is to jump between notes too frequently, not sounding the depths of any of them, producing a cacophony of discordant notes. That too is inimical to our growth.
How do we discover these notes and harmoize them? The initial period must be one of search, and the fruit of this search is the discovery of the principal modes that govern the being. The second period is one of organization, where we synthesize the various elements to produce the melody that becomes our true identity. The duration of the first phase is crucial. If it draws to a premature close, mostly because of insufficient exploration on our parts, then the second period becomes a mechanical organization of a set of ill-chosen activities that are not the expression of the capacities within us. Or the first period may never end, either because we have failed to find the modes of expression that best correspond to our inner being, or we have overlooked our discovery of them, and continue to search in vain. This would mean that there is no organization, and life is a chaos, an interminable stream of random activities.
There is no guarantee that we will succeed in this endeavor. But we have some pointers to guide us. These periods must not be exclusive of each other: there must be some organization in our lives as we search, and an element of search as we begin to organize the various activities.