But the greatest difficulty is that when thousands of years pass, people hold onto the past so emphatically that they forget the reality: that that past had been created for some other kind of people, not for you.

So the teachers of Vipassana are still teaching Vipassana without any idea of all that man has gone through in the meanwhile. Storms have passed over him, strong winds have passed over him. So much junk has gathered in him, so much rubbish has accumulated in him, that first it is necessary to clean that out.

So my suggestion is: make Dynamic Meditation your first step. And when you discover that there is nothing more within you to be thrown out, then start Vipassana. Then Vipassana itself will take you toward enlightenment.

The second thing is that you are a musician and you have asked how to practice music with awareness, or how to develop awareness and music together.

This is a little complex because when you are lost in music, you will forget awareness. When you are absorbed in music, who will be left there to become aware? And when you become aware, the music will be fragmented. So in an effort to harmonize two opposing things, you will fall into difficulty. There will be a tremendous push and pull.

Just choose any one of the two and that’s enough. It is not good to board two boats simultaneously; it is of no help to ride two horses simultaneously. You may try it in a million ways, but the danger is unavoidable.

Music is enough; just drown totally. Drown so totally that there remains no awareness in you that there is a musician: only the music remains. And the doors of the eternal will open.

There are many doors to existence. It is very fortunate that there is not just one door, otherwise there would be such a crowd there. And that would be difficult: queues would form, queues that will last for centuries; buddhas will have to wait for centuries at the gate. But existence has an endless number of doors: music is enough.

If one wants to practice awareness, then music cannot be taken to its ultimate depths. You can make music an object for awakening, you can keep awareness over your music, but that awareness will not be able to take the music to its heights or to its depths.

In the West there was a great dancer, Nijinsky. There has probably never been any other such wondrous dancer as he was in the whole history of mankind. A specialty of Nijinsky’s dancing was that while dancing he would take leaps of such height that they went against the laws of gravity. Even those who practice the high jump for the Olympics couldn’t take those kinds of leaps. And Nijinsky was not a practitioner of the high jump, but while he was dancing, moments would come when it was “as if he had grown wings.” He used to take such high leaps that scientists were astonished; such leaps are not ordinarily possible with the gravitation of the earth.