Ego and offering

On the TV series 'The Piano' amateur pianists play in public train stations and are selected for a concert. Often they seemed chosen for the way they illustrate the healing, enriching or transformative power of music. Sometimes, the two professional musicians and judges described the way a player gave themselves over to the music, was a sort of servant or channel for the music. This is a description that resonates with spirituality. Across world religions and in many spiritual practices a wholeness or oneness with something bigger is described, usually requiring the letting go of the self, of the ego.

It is a fine line. Performance can be a one way street. You do your thing and that’s it. Sharing requires a connection with the audience. Offerings between people are better when there is compatibility. An offering of meat to vegetarians or vegetables to carnivores, or of flowers to a hayfever sufferer might be understood as well intentioned but is not ideal. Clearly, in these cases compatibility and understanding are absent. Incidentally, did you see the recent news that like humans and many other animals, flamingos prefer compatible buddies?

A musician at a folk evening said: that listening is joining in. He said too I think that it was necessary for musicians, not just to listen to each other, but that for musicians, people listening to them is as important as their playing for people, like two sides of a coin. On the website of a heart-led yoga teacher recently I discovered a quote by Ursula Le Guin that distills this idea: 

“Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection.”

Perhaps it is through sharing, rather than mere performance that we arrive at connection. Hearing is passive whereas listening is an active process, which is almost by definition a reaching out for connection; that may not necessarily to the creator(s), but to something created or made accessible in the surroundings, with others or within oneself. When there is that lessening of ego by musician and listener alike that permits connection to the music, to other people, to something bigger, then it is a joy and a pleasure to listen.  Except you are not, at these times merely listening, because even if you are not playing or singing, you are somehow participating.  Perhaps the listener receives the offering of the music, of the invitation to share. A mere performance, in contrast is more akin to leaving the offering at an empty altar or to an unreceptive god.

Last night, after writing the above I came by chance upon the passage in East of Eden, where Samuel and Adam are naming Adam's twins and fall to discussing Cain and Abel.

"And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.  And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell."  (Genesis 4:1-15)

Somehow Abel who, you will recall, was the tiller of the earth, connected well with God who received his offering but the offering of Cain, the shepherd was not accepted and from there things went very badly.  

Adam said, “I remember being a little outraged at God. Both Cain and Abel gave what they had, and God accepted Abel and rejected Cain. I never thought that was a just thing. I never understood it. Do you?” 

Samuel tries to explain God reaction to Cain's offering and Cain's response to God.  Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding, a failure of communication and connection.

“There’s an advantage to listening to the words. God did not condemn Cain at all. Even God can have a preference, can’t he? Let’s suppose God liked lamb better than vegetables. I think I do myself. Cain brought him a bunch of carrots maybe. And God said, ‘I don’t like this. Try again. Bring me something I like and I’ll set you up alongside your brother.’ But Cain got mad. His feelings were hurt. And when a man’s feelings are hurt he wants to strike at something, and Abel was in the way of his anger.”

Whatever went wrong, Cain's big mistake was his reaction: pride and humiliation and anger. 

He kills his brother and suddenly we are back to Down in the earth you hold your breath and eat the damage of your deeds.  We are back to a failure to connect, anger and conflict and wounding and the need to heal.  It is like some great circle of suffering from which we surely want to break free.  And the ego is at the heart of it all. 

Surely the most interesting part in this story is the changing weather of Cain's emotions.  Many artists choose to focus on the murder, but the visionary William Blake chose a tumultuous point in that weather, Cain's realisation of what his ego had done.

Is it enough to make the offering?  Does what we offer and how we offer matter?  Do we just walk in and leave it or do we try to connect with whomever the offering is for? And how do we do that?  What is necessary for that connection?