Has any of you ever done meditation? As the elementary intro of the album points out, this is a spiritual album, a spiritual journey. 'Observing the river' is a metaphor for meditation, and 'the ocean' is a well-known image for enlightenment. We are kept from enlightenment by our swirling thoughts, our daydreaming, our ego's and the tug of our serious problems, like that abortion. Our lives are dominated by craving and aversion, we are never satisfied. We want new friends, new music, and we want MORE. We long for the past and fear the future, while the present is slipping by unobserved. Meditation is about letting go of all that, about seeing the world as it IS, about silencing our obtrusive ego's, stopping our daydreaming, and staying in the PRESENT, the only place and time where we can find happiness. Oberst clearly has seen glimpses of that state, like fragments, feeling like something he's never touched. He knows it's there, and wants to find it again. But in order to be able to find it he must accept reality, everything in it, ripe ánd rotten, as reality always contains two sides. If he surrenders to that truth, only then he can step into the woods of the unknown and find liberation from suffering. Everyone who can consider this state as 'home' is very lucky, as he rightly points out. And we should turn to it NOW, as 'there will never be a time more opportune'. The song is about the difference between a life of suffering, as we all know it, and enlightenment, or at least the willingness to enter the path to enlightenment. I think the old lime tree refers to the Bodhi tree, under whose eaves Buddha found enlightenment.
Has any of you ever done meditation? As the elementary intro of the album points out, this is a spiritual album, a spiritual journey. 'Observing the river' is a metaphor for meditation, and 'the ocean' is a well-known image for enlightenment. We are kept from enlightenment by our swirling thoughts, our daydreaming, our ego's and the tug of our serious problems, like that abortion. Our lives are dominated by craving and aversion, we are never satisfied. We want new friends, new music, and we want MORE. We long for the past and fear the future, while the present is slipping by unobserved. Meditation is about letting go of all that, about seeing the world as it IS, about silencing our obtrusive ego's, stopping our daydreaming, and staying in the PRESENT, the only place and time where we can find happiness. Oberst clearly has seen glimpses of that state, like fragments, feeling like something he's never touched. He knows it's there, and wants to find it again. But in order to be able to find it he must accept reality, everything in it, ripe ánd rotten, as reality always contains two sides. If he surrenders to that truth, only then he can step into the woods of the unknown and find liberation from suffering. Everyone who can consider this state as 'home' is very lucky, as he rightly points out. And we should turn to it NOW, as 'there will never be a time more opportune'. The song is about the difference between a life of suffering, as we all know it, and enlightenment, or at least the willingness to enter the path to enlightenment. I think the old lime tree refers to the Bodhi tree, under whose eaves Buddha found enlightenment.