Happy International Jazz Day!

You can wake up early in the morning with a bad head ache and lower back pain thinking of what next, to make breakfast and take away food for the kids going to work, do the laundry, feed the cat and the birds outside or simply just lay back down and continue to vegetate. Nah laying back down is not an option and doing a little meditation with a good breathing exercise would help to start off the day like it has always done. Ate some Quaker oats with resins and a banana mixed into it and topped up with full cream milk. Breakfast of champions? Hardly, just something to fill up an empty tummy, to avoid getting gastric attacks from an empty stomach. No matter how hard you try to maintain that you are the master of the Body, Speech and Mind, your physical body will continue towards its breakdown as you age in one way or another, The decadence of the mind follows sooth as you become less and less mindful and more and more resentful of the outcome of your life thus far, wishing and feeling that there is always more to it. 

I am fortunate that I am always woken up at precisely fine am by Furby my cat by scratching the mattress until i responded and in my state of aches and pains I would have to walk to the kitchen and fill up her bowls. Often my body refuses to bend down to pick up the bowl from the floor for fear of throwing out my lower back with muscle twist, happened many times in the past. By the time I got the dishes done and started to cook I notice often enough that all my aches and pains simply disappear. After all that is needed to be done has been done, I then turn on the computer to see what the world is up to out there, what good or bad news lay in store this morning and discovered that today is Jazz Day and a video hosted by the Master Jazz Artist, Herbie Hancock, was on the the Face Book post. It is a beautifully done Video honoring Jazz artists all over the world. I was introduced to Jazz music at the age of twelve onward by my eldest Brother who had a collection of Jazz Albums in his home.  I got to know Cannon Ball, Ramsey Lewis, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Satchmore Amstrong, Ray Charles and many others at an early age and I still fancy Jazz as the most influential music in my life.

Then I turned on You Tube to see what gives and found The Maharaj Sri Nisargadatta talks on, 'Prior to Consciousness,' could not let that slip by and so listened to part of it telling me again and again that I am the Para Brahman, the ultimate, primordial state of Pure awareness. I realized the truth of the matter that the Guru has been telling me while listening to his talks time and again over the past years, but to embrace such a revelation in totality is a bigger challenge, it is like dropping off the ego if not the self itself, the Buddha's final leap of faith, in letting go. Complete detachment from, the body, mind and finally the spirit itself or that which I would consider to me my true nature; that which existed prior to the 'I' consciousness. Scary! It is definitely not for the weak at heart or weak in spirituality to grasp fully, however the Maharaj talks has moved me to a whole higher level of my understanding of who 'I AM' or what am I.  I do not claim to fully understand what the Guru has explained, however from as much as I could comprehend, I must say not teaching thus far has brought me to the edge; Sri Nirgasardatta is of the contemporary Buddha of our time or should I say a fully enlightened Being of our age.

And now half the day has passed, i feel like its nap time. My salute to all the Jazz masters who have taken music to a whole different realm of creative evolution.