A Reply to Mr. D

I'm guessing this was from you? Anyway, yeah--I agree. Hindsight only appears to be 20/20, but time has a way of warping the past. The only real thing is this moment before us, everything else is unreal. The future is never reached and the past is never what we think it is.

I don't think it's tapes vs. being at a show--each is its own reality, its own separate experience. My greatest Grateful Dead moments were listening to recordings: The great 2-13-70 Dark Star Satori, for instance, or the time I was listening to that Weather Report Suite tape you made for me on my Walkman while walking through afternoon early autumn fields on a sun-drenched day, and again feeling the boundary lines between the "I" and "Everything Else" melt away once more--glorious experiences that not only forever altered my life, but how I viewed reality itself.
I don't think you can put a hierarchy on experience; experience is experience, no matter what you happen to be experiencing. What matters is how you interpret experience. Henry Miller was right when he wrote something to the effect of "every moment is a golden one for the person who has eyes to see it as such." And I do believe that the Eternal lies just beneath the thin veil of the transitory--to see beneath the veil--that is the trick! That to me, is the highest experience life has to to offer--and it's available to us at every moment of life, every breath we take. The holy, if you wish to call it that, is all around us; it permeates our reality. We need only have eyes to see it--to see the world through the right kind of eyes--to open our eyes and see the world as if for the first time. After the world has been glimpsed in such a way, everything falls into place. Life itself is reordered. Everything has changed, utterly, for the gray world of sleep has forever fallen away like a dead husk, and from it, rising like a newborn sun from the darkened horizon of the east, is life--life revealed in all its multitudinous forms, but all life just the same--tributaries all flowing toward the same vast sea--the womb of Being.


Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Wind-Clock Ballet":

Good to see you are still connected. I just finished a great read, THE LAST SEASON. One thing I took away with me was MEMORY IS NEVER EQUAL TO EXPERIENCE. I've been mulling that over for several days. Tapes vs. Being At The Show? Written Recollections vs. The Experiences Themselves? What do you think?