piano tuning and the sense of yearning

I used to love to watch piano tuners when I was a kid. We had a piano at home, my father worked in a recording studio, and I went to a music high school, so it seemed like there was always a piano being tuned somewhere.

The tuner would hit each key, over and over, while manipulating the strings to get the false note to match the true one, which existed purely in his memory. With the good tuners there was no use of tuning forks or electronic devices... the notes were there, in existence, and the tuner knew when he'd matched them. Even if you aren't a piano tuner, you can probably hear the difference between a false note and a true one, even if you can't hum the true tone to yourself.

Let's, in this analogy, say that the out-of-tune piano key is the ego, the false self, the temporary, body-identified, threatened, vulnerable sense of me. And let's call the in-tune note the true self, the inner self, the Holy Spirit (in ACIM terms), the presence, what Is.

For each note on the scale of the piano of this dream called life, the in-tune version already exists. Its existence is not threatened by the fact that there is a temporary out-of-tune version existing simultaneously with it. It is not a future version of the false note. It exists side by side with it.

When you begin to realize that life is not delivering to you what you want from it—when the suffering and pain begin to outweigh the fun, and when everything you grasp dissolves in your hand—the yearning for an end to the discordant sense of self begins. What I want you to realize is that the true tone exists NOW. It exists already, the alignment of the temporary false note with the true tone has already happened. It's done. It's already done. But you haven't yet remembered it.

Whatever is experienced in time/space is felt as discordant as long as the false note continues to be struck. When you stop insisting upon the permanent reality of the false note, and you do this by simply withdrawing your attention from it, the piano tuner rings your doorbell and the tuning process begins.

You insist upon the permanent reality of the false note every time you cling to a grievance against anyone or anything. A Course in Miracles calls this "making the dream real." Any time you dwell mentally upon what is wrong with this you prevent the piano tuner from ringing your doorbell. If you prefer the seeking of something other than this, right here, right now, to actually being here—if you want something different and better—that's fine, that's great—but what you need to understand is that the piano of your life cannot be tuned and you cannot have a new experience, until you drop your grievances against the false notes. When you stop struggling, stop seeking, your doorbell rings and the tuning begins, automatically. But you have to DO it. You have to take responsibility for turning your attention away from the frantically seeking thought stream. It is what creates the disharmony.

When you turn your attention away from any grievances against what is, right here and now, you begin to vibrate with the pure note of your being, which is love. At each step, in each moment, you can, if not love what is, at least stop entertaining complaints about it. The alignment has already occurred. The pure note was never touched by the false. That's the atonement.

You cannot experience harmony until you vibrate harmoniously, and the harmony includes every possible note that can be played. Nothing is excluded. The harmony is that in which and from which the piano, the tuner, and the universe that contains them, appear. It is what you essentially are.

Comments

[Aileen]

Thank you for another great analogy, Marian. It's so easy to forget that the correction has already happened and that all we have to do is look beyond grievances to realize it!

[Leslie]

(Dear)God Marian. That is beautiful.
Thank you.