I am stealing the seed for this thread (okay, the strand for this thread) (okay, the keynote for this chord) (oh fuck me) from Smiling Stone's home retreat practice log. I don't think he'll mind, as he is a Bodhisattva. A nod to Olivier here as well, who was present at the creation, and will have to find other reasons to forgive me.

so the keynote for this is thus:

And another stolen ingredient for this brew, from Olivier's reply to the smiling stoner:


I feel that as a working thief, I've accomplished enough for the moment with this haul. Now all I need is a good fence, and we're in business.

<p>One etymological point first : what is the connection between the words <em>mele</em> (as in <em>melody</em>)<em>&nbsp;</em>and the word <em>melete (</em>which is where the term<em> meditation </em>comes from) ? I haven&#39;t been able to find if there is one. I ask because Aristotle spoke of<em> ta mele ta kathartika</em>, a &quot;cathartic melody&quot;, a purifying melody, in other words. This from a time where possession by the god was seem as a pretty routine thing (see Plato, the oracle of Delphes, etc.). I&#39;ve often wondered what that was, and if it could be compared with any of the music we now have ? The first thing that comes to mind for me is : Keith Jarrett.<br />
<br />
And what were these strange, ancient musical modes come from the east, which Plato mentions in a dialogue, which were reputed to possess a specific ethos, an atmosphere, an existential atmosphere, something I could almost construe as a realm of existence in the way that some people describe the Jhanas to be ?<br />
<br />
Good night.<br />
<br />



Ok, I will say a bit more about that music/mathematics thing.</p>

<p>So, Galileo said that the universe was a book, the language of which was mathematics.&nbsp;That has become a pretty common view. The idea was that, if we could give a correct description of the world through symbolic means, mathematics, that that would be the truth, the only reliable truth that humans can access. Yes ? Truth becomes a &quot;judgment&quot;, and ultimately, a correct proposition about the &quot;real physical world&quot; out there. This is the basis of all the natural sciences : there is a way that things are in an absolute sense, and that is nature, and the way to know that is through scientific experimentations, finding points of invariance, formalizing those, testing theories by confronting our predictions with actual phenomeny, modifying theories according to novel observations, possibly revising paradigms if need be (Kuhn). But there is a way that things are and there is a perfect description of it and sciences progresses in such a way that its end goal will be the perfect adequation of its theories and of realities. All mysteries will be resolved, all problems solved, all knowledge had, everything proven, in the sense that we can now &quot;prove&quot; that enlightenment is real by finding stuff in the brain of meditators, etc. etc. ^^ I guess we could say that this is kind of a Hegelian view of history, although I&#39;ve only read secondary stuff about this guy.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Anyways. This conception of truth as something that only rationality can derive from the field of empiria, experience, emerged around the XVIth century, we can say, and found its culmination in 18th edit : 19th ! century positivism. Before that, in europe at least, truth was God. Philosophers in the XXth century started to really question the scientific views, Husserl for instance, who reversed the Cartesian method (well, that is arguable, but anyways), and said the only thing that was for sure was appearances, phenomena, and nothing else. He went on to criticize heavily the Galilean view in the book <em>Transcendental philosophy and the crisis of european sciences</em>. Scientific knowledge is <em>derived</em>. There is a utter confusion in thinking that models which are derived can go&nbsp;on to explain something observed. It&#39;s just backwards. Husserl&#39;s student Heidegger pushed the view, and said that ever since Aristotle and Plato, the history of the west started to develop a &quot;naturalistic&quot; view of knowledge and of the world, and lost the original meaning of the word truth : which was, he said, to the pre-socratics, ALETHEIA, a-letheia, non-forgetfulness, an experiential revelation, and not at all a &quot;correct judgment&quot; or &quot;&quot;proposition&quot; about things.<br />
<br />
I think we all know what that means.<br />
<br />
So why this history lesson ? Flawed, at that ? Just to arrive at that point : I believe that if there are laws of the world, they are indiscernible from how things appear. They are the way things unfold. Scientific theories are reflections upon that, they are <em>images of the world</em>, but have absolutely no explanatory power and are derived, not primary. The laws of the world are the way things are observed. They are what makes the world of appearances appear the way it does. They are an absolute mystery. And, they are absolutely indistinguishable from AESTHESIS, from sensitivity, sensitivity being the very awakeness that is always already awake and manifest in all manifestation. This is also true in mathematics : all mathematics is always first and foremost and never not sensitivity.&nbsp;<br />
<br />
So now is time for a preposterous claim.<br />
<br />
Music is what happens when humans are entirely aligned with the laws of the universe. It is what happens when expressivity just expresses itself without a deluded agent intervening. Thus, it is a self-manifestation of the laws of the universe, in a totally direct and incarnate way : not a derived expression of the laws of the universe, as happens when you look at, say, the Schr&ouml;dinger equation and you are focused on the content it is pointing at, but a direct expression. Music is : the laws of the universe - the Absolute flux of pure consciousness as well as the way in which experience is constructed - becoming manifest to itself through the <em>voice </em>of a human for another human.<br />
<br />
A cathartic melody is what happens when there is alignment of the individual&#39;s being with Being and that that gets expressed through sounds.<br />
<br />
Maybe ?&nbsp; I&#39;m not sure. Of course I&#39;m only pretending to have any certainty.&nbsp; For instance,&nbsp;that would mean most of what we call music is actually not music at all but just sonic stuff. Could be. Perhaps also it means that painting can be music, and math can be music too...</p>

<p>Maybe all that is just one aspect of music, one possibility of what you can do with it, the Dharmakaya aspect of music (the singing traditions like in islam or christianity), which also has nirmana and samboghakaya aspects. Cathartic melodies and jarrett could be sambogha, verging on dharmakaya for jarrett. Bob Marley would be nirmanakaya. Rihanna would not qualify ^^&nbsp;<br />
<br />
Would there be a point in establishing a hierarchy of musical practices ? I could see why, as it seems more valuable to develop activities which are aligned with the truth and somehow allow you to touch it and bring into more areas of your existence until all is integrated. Music as an integration practice, too ?<br />
<br />
Another question is : Why would there be a special status to music ? Why could cooking not achieve the same things, if everything is ultimately totally imbued with absolute truth ?<br />
<br />
A fair point. In fact, it makes sense to me to say that thus, one ingredient of music is what I said, only one ingredient, because otherwise all the posts by shargrol would be music, right ? And, in a way they are, but not really. Necessary but not sufficient ?

So, just to finish where I started, in etymological speculation - I have made this point here before and apologise for repeating :&nbsp;music, is muse-ic. Art of the muses. The muses being daughters of Memory and Zeus, and the three original muses being <em>Melete </em>(sounds familiar ?), <em>Aede </em>(song, greek poets were aedes), and <em>mneme</em>, memory. Do we not have all the ingredients there, contemplation/absolute, expressivity, and dependent origination ?</p>

<p>Many ideas here, thank you for the opportunity to express and clarify, and confuse everyone.<br />
<br />
Your solo now !&nbsp;</p>

edited a bit

Olivier, my mind is blown. I would have tried to blow your mind right back, but I have lucked into a sort of spontaneous sesshin in remedial pre-noting for very stupid Catholics, under the guidance and direction of Chris Marti. Having a blown mind seems to help, there, actually. Feel free to stop by and sift through the ongoing wreckage--- i have converted my first post upon returning to DhO this January into my de facto practice log, conveniently located in the dark night neighborhood. You and Matthew were my first two friends there, when i showed up. it's at:

https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/18423271

Anyway, consider this my IOU. I'll either start with Pythagorus, or the primal reverberation of the Sponda in Kashmir Shaivism. There is also a total nut job what has found the hidden musical scores laced throughout Plato's dialogues, and recreated both the Greek and Babylonian musical scales. I will be reading aloud from his collected works, once i remember his name. 

p.s. You had me at:

Strangely enough, in this age of online resources, the best Indo-European root lexicon that i can find is still the appendix in my American
Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which i bought in April, 1996, at a great impact to my little housecleaner’s income, precisely because it had the Indo-European roots. 

So, starting from the first part of the Greek compound word, μελῳδίᾱ, with μέλος (mélos, “musical phrase”), i find that the Indo-Eurpean root for that is mel3--- there are seven variations of the mel root in Indo-European, any one of the side paths offering vastly different routes to translation, but let’s just play this simple and stick to the standard prevailing conventional wisdom that we are dealing with mel3 here.
 
mel3  is “a limb”. The Greek μέλος in its more radical usage is a literal limb, and thus the figurative leap to a musical “member” or phrase; hence, music, song, melody. cf. Melisma, dulcimer, melody, melodrama.
the entry has also an abbreviated reference to Julius Pkorny’s Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch of 1959, the standard work on this: the American Heritage entry is based on “[Pok. 4. mel- 720].

Now  i’ve learned that i can probably use Pokorny on-line and just do copy-cut-paste, rather than laboriously retyping all this shit like a fucking office temp.
 
this is probably as far as i can get today; the sky is already gray outside, and shit will begin hitting fans soon as all my beloved ones wake up and look around to see what kind of trouble we can stir up today. But i’m in this work-in-progress, Olivier. I love it. You are one dense motherfucker, even after cutting away all the stuff that is simply phonological and typological coding and get to the meat of your stuff. I’ve spent most of a work morning on the first clause of your first sentence. This is going to take eons. I’m up for it!

love, tim

For something fun in practice, it's cool to tune into the inner ear noise and see what music happens that way. It works way better if you have earplugs in, to filter out some of the noise happening "externally" (cars, birds, etc). You can use the inner ear noise, that sorta high pitched hum that streams endlessly (Buddhists call it the nada sound), your heart beat, and the sound of the breath. The inner ear sound is basically a ton of different frequencies modulating. The movement/fluxing of all these produces a sense of rhythm or flow that you can really ride and tune into. 

I asked my husband, who is a musician, more about the inner ear noise and here's how he explained it. In this description the nada sound/inner noise is equivalent to what is termed "operating noise" in the description.

Your ear has both an input and an output. The sound of the world hitting your ear and resonating your ear drum is the input. The output is the connection between the ear and the brain. Anything with an output is going to produce operating noise that can be detected. Operating noise is the result of the interaction of all of the components in a device that interact to synthesize and produce the audible information. Operating noise only exists in an analog domain, meaning it's produced by voltages. The voltages interacting with one another produce the noise. The body is full of electricity, which are the voltages. 

Hi Tim, great to see you are interested in etymology too ! I use Pokorny too, so I'm more interested in the info that's in your book ! Of course that approach has its limits but can yield serious insights. I'm very curious to see what you come up with. 

Sorry for the formatting, there seems to have been a problem at the time I posted, another one of my message had this happen a little bit afterwards.

So, taking into consideration Steph's answer : First I must say I have a huge dislike for the cognitivist stance considering experience as a emerging from "sensory input" and "processed" by the brain. I find it terribly disrespectful and take personal offense ^^. Sounds are not frequencies. Frequencies are a symbolic description of some qualities of sounds. The brain explains nothing to the mystery of experience and IMO is a conceptual construct similar to the notion of a creator god, the contemporary materialist version of a personal god (not meaning to bash on deeper conceptions of god here, just on the "entity" one, the aristotelian primary motor/first cause thing, let's say).

Anyways, meditating on sound is interesting for sure. Interestingly, there are pages by the founder of phenomenology, Husserl, where he examines in detail time perception and comes to a conclusion that time is a construct and that sound itself in fact is "the pure flux of absolute consciousness", or something like that (in Lessons for a phenomenology of intimate time consciousness, approximately). Somehow reminiscent of Augustine.

This makes me think of another suggestion for you Tim, since you are interested in music and christian : why not start singing ? (Edit : Maybe you already do ?) That was the main praxis of the catholics for centuries and I'm sure it worked as a kind of extremely elaborate and skilfull nada sound exercice in which many things could potentially happen : (1) at a "gross" level, getting infused with the meaning of the sacred texts ; (2) at a subtler level, samadhi ; (3) at a very subtle level, realization of the emptiness of time ; (4) perhaps with that, before, after, while, the realization of the emptiness of the doer (here singer ^^), or said another way, union with god ? edit : since we were on augustine, did you know he said "Singing is like praying twice" ? Here is a fine example of true singers : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_Ez91zGm4Y

In any case, it's an extremely grounding, opening, harmonizing practice with a powerful social component, too, it makes you feel extremely connected with the other people you are singing with, and beyond  Yes, it has a definite mystical power of directly diminishing boundaries.

À bientôt mes amis !

edited

There is a relative and ultimate reality, and both are true. There is an actual scientific explanation for how sound works, which is what I explained. There's also a more "mystical" explanation, which is what you're providing. Both are correct. For what it's worth, I think the universe operates based on an interdependent, fluxing magick, of which science (and many other "things) are a part of. I don't think humans create sound. When it comes to the interplay between "sound", "ears", and "consciousness" you can take a line from a popular sutta - in the heard, there is only the heard... not some brain or ear creating sound, but without a brain or an ear, there wouldn't be sound heard, as they are two parts of an interdependent set of many conditions.

But only sing the Word and my soul shall be healed. . .

How does the scientific "explanation" explain anything ? It is derived. There is phenomena, they get concetualized and theories, models of reality get created, which are then used to describe what is happening. The laws of relative reality are the way things manifest, not the way we model that. Even in relative reality, science doesn't really explain anything, rather it is a way to orient action, but it orients action in a deeply ignorant way, IMO, because it is based on abstraction and negation of subjectivity, and very particular epistemological values which are ... strange. The explanation is always an aposteriori modeling based on the laws of the world which are the appearances manifesting the way they manifest. They are chronologically and causally derived. How could they explain what came before them ? Using the models to orient our action occults the fact that we ARE the laws of relative reality and therefor we know better what should be done than an objective modelling of the phenomenal world can... because the modeling depends on sensitivity and incarnation, which is where all the actual knowledge is... get it ? I'm not making this up. I'm not talking about the absolute or the ultimate where no such things as laws could be conceivable. A couple of years ago I saw a debate on meditation between Michel Bitbol and Antoine Lutz, a leading researcher in neurophenomenology and all that stuff. Bitbol calmly and nicely showed him that neurosciences could not actually add anything, not any new information that we didn't already have, about experience. A bit disconcerting for someone whose work is about that. But Lutz had litterally nothing to respond to his arguments. 

The reason why i'm kind of going on a rant here is that I believe esthetic, spiritual and ethical problems, enormous ones, have occurred because of the credit that has been given to the "natural" sciences in "explaining" the world. The sciences certainly do have an (vvery limited) area of validity, but they should clearly be confined to that, with clear awareness of those limits. But in this case, the "scientific" explanation of how sound works doesn't have anything to do with music which is in essence qualitative. It is the opposite of music and knows nothing of music.

I get really reactive when people start getting scientific when talking about music, partly because there is an outrageous cultural predation going on in my country which institutionally favors this kind of approach. And we find ourselves with a ridiculous institution like IRCAM, with its  "scientific approach" of music, which makes it sound to a lot like the real deal, like they're legit. They are the most funded institution of this kind in france. But what they do is ... clueless ? Is that nice enough ? It's just total non sense.  They're riding the technologically-propelled flight forward of humanity, using the discourse and attitudes which makes it seem like they're aligned with the whole objective scientific progress thing, which means they get a lot of money for aligning with the zeitgeist of a very technocratic europe.  People who are doing actually good things are often reduced to extremely marginal situations (and i'm not even talking about myself here ^^).

The thing is, this whole movement, to me, is extremely closely connected to the predicament that life on earth is currently in. To say it clearly : I believe that the current mass extermination of most living species is directly connected with inate necessity for the reduction of esthetic life, or most of its aspects, which forms and instrinsic constituent of the scientific method, and the fact that the final authority and epistemological legitimacy on relative reality has been more and more slanted in the direction of the scientific discourse over the course of the past 4-5 centuries. This general reductionist slanting of western culture has meant that many political decisions of all kinds and processes of all types, have been more and more influenced by what this modelling or reality says things are like or should be. All areas of life have been invaded by this : agriculture, architecture, urban planning, the food we eat, etc. And the result is devastating internally and externally. I'm completely in the relative world here. Said another way : all those animals dying could be an external expression of sensitive life (which means : all life, everything is sensitive) being occulted by the higher authority and realer reality and valider validity of the scientific discourse, or rather by the illusion that the sciences are telling us something more valid about relative reality than other things. 

Now, I'm not saying you are responsible for that This is an are(n)a of reactivity for me somehow ;) 

With metta

Love the quote Tim, I'll look up the reference !

Cheers

Great! Psalm 96 is the one right after Psalm 95.

If i'd known all this, you mad Frenchman, I would have started this thread on the Dharma Battleground! Steph, don't worry, i've got my eye on this flame troll. And he knows it.

I am personally sticking to researching my reply to the second part of the compound Greek word in the first clause of his first question in that post of his so dense that no one else can read at all. Except for Smiling Stone, bowing in that direction three times.

I suggest you tear him a new reductionist asshole, Steph. Or a materialist, realist, pragmatic Dharma new one. Any approach that feels right.

Well, we've managed to use the abstraction and "strange"-ness of science to understand and create some pretty interesting things. I guess those things are also abstract and strange?



But yes, science has a specific domain, broad as that may be, and there are other domains that it doesn't really address well, at least for now?

Shut up, Marti, Olivier is trying to have a decent brawl here with Steph S. Take that diplomatic shit to the bar of last resort and i'll buy you a mixed drink of fatal proportions, guaranteed to break the cycle of birth and death, or the next one's free.

First one's free too, of course. It all happens on one breath anyway. Chug it, and shut up here until blood is drawn or you have something inflammatory of your own to contribute.

I guess I missed the point of the thread, huh?

just sip the drink, Chrissie.You'll love it.

Hello to the music brigade,

I wanted to join here since it was first posted, Tim!
Here are some extracts of my log relating to music with maybe some avenues of exploration. I would like to participate to this live of course, but I am a bit behind on my writing schedule these days, so we'll have to wait a bit.
I won't interfere with the discussion on mele-melete, as it flies a bit high over my head (around the ninth octave maybe). I will share any far out discovery I come across, though...

To Steph: Welcome to the nutty house. My name is Stone, Smiling Stone...
I thoroughly enjoyed your input on the operating noise. It gives another tool to understand the world, it widens our consciousness a tiny bit more, bravo... And (unlike Olivier, who kind of lost it on this one, maybe you don't have tinitus, my friend, from being in classical music from a tender age) I was always curious about a physical explanation, and I find this one quite elegant.

Ok, here it goes:

That's it for now
I love you all
with metta in the mix
smiling stone

Stone's in the House!


that's good, because my method with a mind as dense as Olivier's (by which i mean, you), is to start at the beginning and give each bit the full attention it deserves. There, the mele-melete thing is at present halfway through the bginnings of my response to the first caluse in his first sentence. It was take forever. Thus, the "Bodhisattva Vow" is just a cover story for how long it will take me to complete a proper response to Olivier's entire first sentence.
Exactly! Because, for one thing, in great music, the moment we begin to believe we can detect a predictable pattern in the melody (or lyrics, or whatever) is almost always the moment the great composer surprises us with an unforeseeable move.


love, t

Love it Olivier! Thank you Tim for this discussion! The meditator and musician parts of my mind are having a great jam session. 

Bob Marley is surely a nirmanikaya manifestation of awakening teaching the individual vehicle - “One good thing about music: when it hits you you feel no pain.” This must be hard in France when music comes and gobbles up your loaf of bread. 

Music is a great gateway to samadhi-prajna, what Bill Hamilton called “profound investigation of the present moment.” In fact, one of the 84 Mahasiddhas of Tantric lore was a musician named Vinapa, Tibetan for “the Veena player.” He achieved enlightenment by listening to the sound of his instrument purely, without overlaying any concepts onto the experience

i am finally getting it together enough to post my first sibstantial gear in the wrenches of this discussion among titans of the musical heart and mind. This text is from the Kashmir Shaivite commentary on scripture, The Spanda-karikas, one of the first scriptures i studied as a devotee in tha ashram of my first guru, Baba Muktananda, in the early 1980s:






and 


love, tim

Stoner of the Stonediest, and assembled non-returners and Boddhisattvas alike,

for your esteemed enjoyment, i humbly submit one of the Best Fucking Chants Ever, Krishna Das synthesizing an old hymn from his youth with his mature mastery of the chant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWGRr4D6JUc

I am in a facebook group that specializes in music theory as applied in the case for the canonization of St. Leonard Fucking Cohen, if anyone here is moved to chime in to the chaotic noise of the orchestra tuning there--- 

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/248797815829597/?multi_permalinks=546890076020368&comment_id=546892599353449&notif_id=1588555366587069&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic

Hey you music lovers,

I have listened to the gregorian chants (beautiful indeed) and to the new age-ish rendering of Krishna Das (well, not my cup of tea, but it's a free world), and wanted to participate in this escalating frenzy of sharing the most spiritual music around...

Matthew wrote :
Music is a great gateway to samadhi-prajna, what Bill Hamilton called “profound investigation of the present moment.” In fact, one of the 84 Mahasiddhas of Tantric lore was a musician named Vinapa, Tibetan for “the Veena player.” He achieved enlightenment by listening to the sound of his instrument purely, without overlaying any concepts onto the experience

So I invite you to sit through this (with headphones maybe)... Imagine it's five in the morning and you've been sitting all night for the last four nights, listening to some of the finest performers of Dhrupad, an ancient form of indian classical music, in the holy city of Varanasi. Tonight is Shivaratri, the new moon of february, the celebration of lord Shiva (who is called Bhairav when he is in his wrathful aspect), and comes this guy with his strange instrument...

Carsten Wicke at the Dhrupad Mela 2016 (it is 48 min, Tim, and a bit of talking at the start)

I will come back for the spanda and melete...
with metta
smiling stone

Smiling Stone - there is no actual URL in your link so, alas, we cannot hear the music.

Thanks Chris,
it is fixed!

So, the second part of the compound word “melody” is the day’s object of meditation:  όιδια, “singing”, from αοδειν, to sing. The Indo-European root reference is to wed-2: “To speak. 1. Possible reduplicated form *əwe-ud‑ becoming *awe-ud‑, dissimilated to *aweid‑, with suffixed o-grade form *awoid-o‑, becoming Greek aweid‑, to sing (but more likely from a separate root *ə2weid‑) ode; comedy, epode, hymnody, melody, monody, parody, rhapsody, tragedy, from Greek aeidein (Attic āidein), to sing, and aoidē (Attic ōidē), song, ode, with aoidos (Attic ōidos), a singer, singing.
2. Suffixed o-grade form *wod-o‑. Theravada, from Sanskrit vādaḥ, sound, statement.
[Pokorny 6. au‑ 76.]”
 
Note that “speech” is probably itself from a deeper root indicating sound, as in the (sort of thrilling) Sanskrit variant. Think of what God “says” to initiate the cosmos. Think of that Kashmir Shaivite “sonda,” the sound that does what God does, uttered by Shiva. And note the entwining, so casual and universal that it seems almost to go without saying to anyone who ever spoke a language, of speech and song, from the earliest root evidence.
 
So “Melody”: radically, “a limb of sound.” Metaphorically (all language being a metaphorical play in practice) “a phrase of articulated sound of meaning,” in speech, as in melodic tones, or in the special case of music, “an articulated branching of sound into something (miraculous and mysteriously) that is not words, yet nevertheless conveys potent human meaning in a (my bias here, and Pythagorus's and Plato’s) beautiful way.
 
This is why almost everyone runs away from conversations with Olivier. What we have so far is the rough draft of an inadequate reply to the first phrase in the first clause of Olivier’s thesis.

I run toward conversations with Olivier. I am a first responder. I will die in the flames of Olivier.
 
Old sailors shudder in their sleep, dreaming of surviving the endless storms that whirl in the wake of Olivier's melody. The Wandering Jew wanders on, staff in hand, searching the earth for the next word in a reply to Olivier. The stars spins, galaxies are born, and die, waiting for someone who can get through Olivier’s first sentence.

Dearest Tim,

You want to know something ? The name of my first love as a child was Melody !

Very nicely put, i will remember this : “Melody”: radically, “a limb of sound.” Metaphorically (all language being a metaphorical play in practice) “a phrase of articulated sound of meaning,” in speech, as in melodic tones, or in the special case of music, “an articulated branching of sound into something (miraculous and mysteriously) that is not words, yet nevertheless conveys potent human meaning in a (my bias here, and Pythagorus's and Plato’s) beautiful way.

As for the rest of that terribly dense first sentence, don't be disappointed though, but I just figured out that there in fact isn't a connection (etymological anyways) with melete. Melete derives from μέλω, not μέλος. 

So it was just a passing idea, nothing too cosmic ;).

I cracked up at your last envolée lyrique Now, that's a writer's imagination. You remind me of a good friend of mine, Tim... But please, I am no Shams !

I must say for my defense that not everyone runs away from conversations with me, in fact quite the opposite, people even seem to enjoy those, sometimes !!
Point taken, though : I'm too dense. It's sometimes hard to judge what the background of people we're talking to is, especially in this kind of context !! But i can understand how it may feel like I'm not actually trying to really communicate. It's both true and not true, intentionnal and not.

Please don't take my lack of involvement personally, or a lack of care, it's not at all either of those. As you can see I care deeply about these things, but I figured that this kind of format somehow doesn't allow for the depth of explanation, responsiveness and sensitivity recquired for dealing with some things I care about so much. To give you an idea : I'm gonna write a PhD thesis on this very question ! Which can also help to explain th obscurity of my responses sometimes.

A week ago or so I wrote up a pretty long mail explaining all this and concluding that I didn't want to get too involved in discussions like this on this platform for several reasons, two of which being that I felt some things would get misunderstood, and also because I would like to avoid getting too sucked up in discussions which would make me spend even more time on the computer than I already do ! Unfortunately that email was eaten by the system, and I just didn't feel like writing it again (this has happened so many times with this forum, it's like a curse - I keep forgetting to save up when I write  longer response, and about half the time there's a problem, with my connection, with the server, whatever...)

I also have the bad habit of reading mails - or messages - and never responding to them, or way later ! Which must be infuriating, my apologies to anyone I did this to  

Anyways. It's been fun to demistify that first sentence ^^ The true mysteries will remain mysterious upon examination.

xox

Hi Matthew !

I just wrote you a reply which got swallowed by the system ... In which I was basically asking for the reference for the Vina player's story. Which sounds familiar, now that I think of it.... 

Samadhi-prajna, yes, is it a coinage by Hamilton ? I read his S&P book and enjoyed it, it was very clear. I also learned that he was at the source of the dharmaseed website through his tape-recording dharma cassettes business back in his day... We owe this man a lot.

Cheers

ps : Luckily no Marley-like apparition has ever stolen my bread - I think he knows better, however high he might be...

Well, this is what happens when you work on spec. Sometimes gusher, most often dry well.
Shams didn’t get to pick whether he was shams or not, to Rumi. When love turns the lover’s life around, there is neither credit nor blame, just the basics, lover, beloved, and Love, the holy trinity, the three-in-one. So shut the fuck up.
I have drawn my short sword and will commit seppuku at a nod from you, for my shame in having even inadvertently allowed you even for a moment and with all due humor to think that my extravagances and odes to your untouchable discourse in any way implied that you are not among the world’s best and most satisfying conversationalists. Your exchanges with the Bodhisattva Who Makes Even Rocks Beam should be taught in schools as the acme of the art form of civilized discourse between sages and friends.

That is SO NOT my fucking point, O Noble One. I believe my point is that i am afraid i am not dense ENOUGH.
That’s is one reason i chose to come at our exchange on music in the slowest and most grindingly detailed way possible, word by word, in language by language, until the thread disappears in the depths of all rooting. It implied an eternity for us to gauge who we are talking with, mutually. You not trying to communicate! Are you kidding me? That’s all you do. It must be lonely a lot of the time, to be so seldom heard, and even more rarely to hear an adequate response that keeps the conversational volleyball in the air. Again, my strategy was nothing pretty, as far as they goes, just trying to not hit the ball straight into the ground, basically, at any given moment. By the time i got three sentences in, i anticipated being able to set the ball for your spike without you breaking your back to reach for it.
and again, i believe that this thread is the place where both of us can make our stand for the possibility of exchanges of sufficient depth of explanation, responsiveness and sensitivity required for dealing with these issues we both care so much about. Obscurity to me, from you, just means the delight of slowing down enough to let the finer grain you are seeing come into focus. So i do etymology, word by word; Pokorny will be my Virgil, in the circle of hell of tjis format, so be it. At least we’re taking our best shot here. Don’t quit on this, my friend. Admit it, it’s interesting.
I understand, me too. I am getting better at discipling myself to start from a word processing file, saving it, and then transfering it to the DhO post, but shortcut temptation is perennial. On the other hand, the more we have invested in this conversation, the more inclined i am to be minutely scrupulous in every technical aspect.
The roar of cosmic laughter indistinguishable from rage that you hear is from pretty much everyone who has ever known me. I am notorious for vast lapses in communication. Most of the people i love the most are pissed off at me, at any given moment. But i am intuitive about when to write; it sort of takes an act of God, to put it crudely.

indeed. but they get more interesting in their mysteriousness, as the fruit of our examinations.

Quit this any time you feel you’re wasting your precious time, or that it’s not fun. Or take an eon or two just to mull. But i know this is what i was born for, in so many ways, and i am having a shitload of fun.

xox, tim

Tim-san, please accept this wobbly gift. I made it thinking of you ! https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HKS8zeXl5Kq9pwpupJcwZJdaVHapqMAm

i started sobbing, on about the fourth note (beginning of the second phrase), and am paused at six seconds in, to smoke fifteen thousand cigarettes and recover my poise.

The another six seconds, and another, then stretch it out to ten seconds, increasing strength under the unbearable gratitude. 60,000 cigarettes and i'll be almost a full half minute in to this beauty. The kingdom of God will have dawned in the meanwhile. I will continue with this project of my own until i have heard the whole of beauty.

Okay, the only way i can actually listen to it without running out destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, into the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, is to take it as meditation, and cling to a single rosary bead throughout.

I have been looking for a music teacher my whole life. I've tried a million times to learn instruments, and failed. I have a giant portable piano-y thing, electric, sitting right there gathering dust. You don't need to do much, just point me to one step at a time, a bit of homework, a bit of direction. I will sit outside your monastery gate in the snow until i am granted admission.

Man, I just wrote a reply and the thing ate it again !!!!!!!!!!!!!! The worst part is, when i click "go back", the message appears for a flashing second in the box and then disappears. Is there a technique for getting it back ? Chris ?

You have to write on your word processor and paste it always (after you saved it on your computer!!!). there has been problem every day for a week at least, so we NEVER know!
I don't know about getting your messages back but I would not bet on it!

Sorry, I know the feeling!
Beautiful piece of music!
love and metta
smiling stone

Not as far as I can tell, and this happens to me a lot, too, In fact, it just happened as I posted this reply.

What I do:

1) Compose posts in Word and paste them here
2) Compose posts here but save them every so often in the clipboard to preserve them

That's all I can suggest.

Chris, you are a gentleman and a scholar, sir.

Olivier, for God's sake, and the sake of all of your clamoring fans here, listen to what this man says. And remember the source: not i, but Chris in me.