I agree. Silencing the mind and gently observing can do wonders.

Here is an interesting thing that happened to me recently. I was at a music performance of a friend of mine. We discussed the whole thing afterwards and I compared the way everyone has experienced the event.

The performer thought it was ok for the time they had to prepare, he was also having some stage fever, although I could see he merged himself with the music quite well.

One of my friends had the task to record with a camera, so most of the time he just concentrated the camera on our musician friend and not that much on the rest of orchestra. He was very pissed about a woman who was in front him moving and spoiling the pics.

Another friend of mine concentrated on finding things that were wrong with the performance, like the music selection, the behavior of one of the musicians, the clothes that a guy wore.

Initially, I was perceiving the performance visually. I just sat there watching the musicians as they played, looking at them and not hearing much. I also felt a bit uneasy on my seat, because I haven't been invited to watch young (20+) musicians perform and was not sure how to naturally react to show support. I wasn't too interested apart for showing up and listening to my friend. But soon all that changed. I stopped looking and set my eyes to rest at a mid point of the stage and let my ears take over. I shut down any thoughts and just listened. The music was fantastic and everybody was in good synchronicity with it. They played several pieces.

When I was looking with my mind on, I saw there was a girl that I though was irritating because of her stage behavior, her moving was too much, she was making all kinds of faces. But when I silenced my mind, I understood she was really experiencing the music and this was just her body moving along. One of the pieces they played was rather lengthy and boring, but then I saw how the four pianists perfectly fit the parts of the melody. The fidgeting girl played the lively part as if she was that musical tone, the other serious guy was playing the more monotonous part. Everything was perfect, everything was merged in one.

I wasn't looking at the performance nor was I listening to it anymore, I was experiencing something else. With a quiet mind another kind of observer came out to look at the performance and saw a truly indescribable event.