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Practicing music is a microcosm of life itself. We can observe how we experience and live our musical life in direct comparison to how we live our everyday life. How we deal with the ups and downs of musical practice has parallels in how we understand and navigate our life away from the instrument.
In this essay, we will explore the teachings of the Lokavipatti Sutta, which describes the eight worldly concerns in the practice of music. We will pay particular attention to gain and loss in our daily practice.
Examining the eight worldly concerns
The eight worldly concerns are described as the experiences which affect the equilibrium of serenity and peacefulness. If we imagine the glassy surface of a morning lake, we have a sense of what equanimity is. Imagining how blowing wind or splashing fish will cause disturbance on the lake illustrates the gain and loss of equilibrium. The lake in this example illustrates the mind, and the wind or jumping fish illustrates our worldly concerns.
The worldly concerns are gain and loss, praise and blame, good and bad reputation, and pleasure and pain. These eight concerns are unavoidable aspects of life that can affect how we feel. Through becoming aware of these disturbances, we can incorporate them into our practice in life and use them as a way to gain insight and a greater sense of contact with the world. Recognizing the eight worldly concerns allows us to become familiar with them and not be taken by surprise when they appear.
Experiencing Gain and Loss
The first of the worldly concerns that affect our experience is gain and loss. As we practice and play each day, we devote ourselves to learning something new, polishing and mastering an endeavor so that it can shine as brightly as possible. We are all familiar with the plateaus that are common to practicing music. We can work on some skills for weeks or months with little change when suddenly a massive shift takes place in our learning.
Change often is not experienced gradually but rather suddenly. When the shift occurs, when we find ourselves on a new plateau, we find a reason to rejoice. So much work and discipline have preceded the moment of arrival that we can feel elated.
Sometimes we slide backward, and the skill we worked so hard to achieve seems to be gone. Over time, the skill becomes habitual and settles in as part of what we can do with little effort. The more we experience how this process unfolds in our lives, the less baffled we are by the ebbs and flows that form it.
This is an example of gain and loss in the eight worldly concerns. As practicing musicians, we understand that gain or mastery is something that comes over a long period of time and is not always on our schedule but seems to have a life of its own. We must trust that if we work towards it, in its own time, it will arrive in our lives. Once it has arrived, we must nurture and care for it so that it remains in our life. For example, we cultivate a new piece of music into our repertoire and then keep it fresh in our minds by maintaining it as part of our weekly practice. If we neglect the new piece, it will eventually become foreign to us again.
Becoming aware that loss and gain are essential aspects of the musical experience, and appreciating both as part of the experience and not as good or bad days, allows us to better appreciate the process of being a musician. Not categorizing our practice as good or bad also permits us to enjoy the process without self-persecution. Guilt and persecution have no place in artistry. Teachers who demonstrate this attitude towards their students are suffering from their own disturbances and should be treated as poisonous.
Gaining the ability to play a certain passage or piece feels good. Losing the ability to play that piece feels bad. Taking the experience of loss and gain as signs of what we must do to cultivate or maintain, rather than as moral judgments about ourselves as musicians, is a subtle change of perspective that can transform our experience of ourselves as musicians. Suddenly a moral judgment of self-worth (I am not good enough) becomes a simple indication of the need to change our engagement with the task.
Through this awareness, we come to learn to be patient and gentle with ourselves and with others. We trust that, through daily practice, the skill we seek to cultivate will come into our lives. This is an appreciation for the necessary ups and downs of the process of learning and mastering.
Think of a wave flowing across the ocean. One cannot comprehend a wave without both crest and trough. Both are essential to the wave.
In the same way, we embrace loss and gain as both necessary experiences of being a musician. Let go of the moral judgment of good and bad and simply recognize loss and gain as part of the experience of music and life.
