Just a word about the music and meditation connexion : I also believe there is something profound going on there.
Music is muse-ic, it is (was) the art of the muses. The three original muses were mneme, memory, aede, "song", and méletè. The word méletè is the greek equivalent to latin meditatio.
I don't think music is anymore about achieving specific results - in the sense of being able to play such piece at such speed in such a way... blabla... - than meditation. I don't think it's only about "external" objects ... Music is not about sounds.
Although, this is what it has become to mean in most music schools . But the same could be said with meditation : the burmese train in fruition and other things in systematic ways that could definitely be described as practice of the kind we imagine when talking about music training (repetition, frequency, duration, precision, timing, etc.)
Remember that music, in the west, was the central part of religious practice for centuries (millenia ?). It was what brought people to the brink of transcendance, in christian liturgies. These men sang all day long, they sang music composed by masters who had in mind the goal of allowing others to also access the experience of the absolute. High culture was about that, art was about that, and music was the primary means of achieving illumination. Sure, all this took part in a very different culture and worldview than our own. We can also bring into question what was actually happening to these guys talking about the stupor, and admiratio which was brought about by music. But some people, very probably, actually became awakened, awakened to the truth, through these practices. Art was always considered as the way to express truth, culture as a whole was in essence the preserved, collective memory of how to access the truth.
This has really really not been true in the recent past... Knowledge in our culture means "objective", scientific knowledge. Today there is little "high" art. But some people still exist who preserve these connections. Like Keith Jarrett, Marcel Pérès, people like famed conductor Celibidache, who would say that music is meditation. I sometimes think the converse is also true. When the buddha gives the image of tuning an instrument for balancing the spiritual faculties, I don't think the image was simply because his interlocutor was a musician. There is something in meditation about being in tune, about some centering and balance of the being, a rightness which is like existential justness.
I suspect this is also the essence of music...
But something that music allows for is intersubjectivity, which is absent from what we here would call meditation, I think. And that would be an interesting topic to discuss ! Could it be that, through individual voices (aede), meditation (méletè) can go from being an individual affair to being a collective experience through the virtues of memory (mneme) which allows us to create forms, signs, and just about everything which pertains to human culture ? The act of making this happen is music ? Music includes meditation but meditation doesn't include music ?
Well, I'll stop rambling, curious to hear what you think.
Kind regards,
Olivier
I want to joke (and this is kinda mean, so understand I really enjoyed the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but still there are some problems with that book...) that the professor would go into catatonic withdrawal and say that the experience was a spiritual insight.
