Electric Light Orchestra - Shangri La

 

Memo 4 - After The Snow The Fragrance

Not to be forgotten: our summer group listening sessions in the early 80's - Music For Zen Meditation And Other Joys (1964 by Tony Scott, Shinichi Yuize, and Hōzan Yamamoto) at Razvan's home; we were five high school students living in an oppressive dictatorship; after those sessions ended we departed free and in meaningful silence. Particularly fond of After The Snow The Fragrance...

 

• Is Not All One
• The Murmuring Sound Of The Mountain Stream
• A Quivering Leaf Ask The Winds
• After The Snow The Fragrance
• To Drift Like Clouds
• Za Zen (Meditation)
• Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya Sutra (Sutra Chant)
• Sanzen (Moment Of Truth)
• Satori (Enlightenment)
  

A masterpiece: The Inner Light (Star Trek TNG)

Star Trek TNG's episode "The Inner Light" (Season 5, Episode 25 - June 1, 1992) was aired today on Heroes and Icons HD. It is a masterpiece, arguably the best Star Trek TNG episode. For the record, I paste here the plot from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) alongside George Harrison's "The Inner Light"

On stardate 45944.1, the Enterprise-D finishes a magnetic wave survey of the Parvenium system and finds an unknown probe. The device rapidly scans the ship and directs an energy beam at Captain Picard, who wakes up to find himself on Kataan, a non-Federation planet. A woman, Eline, tells Picard that he is Kamin, an iron weaver recovering from a fever, and that she is his wife. Picard speaks of his life on the Enterprise but Eline and their close friend Batai try to convince Picard that his memories were only dreams and incorporate him into their society as Kamin. Picard begins living his life as Kamin in his village, Ressik, having children with Eline and learning to play the flute. Kamin spends much time outdoors and with his Dobsonian telescope studying nature. As years pass, he begins to notice that the drought is caused by increased radiation from the planet's sun. He sends reports to the planet's leaders, who seem to ignore his concerns. 

On Enterprise, the crew continues attempts to revive Picard. They try to block the influence of the probe but Picard nearly dies, so they are forced to let it continue. They trace the rocket's trajectory to a system whose sun went nova 1,000 years before, rendering life extinct in the system. 

Years pass and Kamin outlives Eline and Batai. Kamin and his daughter Meribor continue their study of the drought. They find that it is not temporary; the extinction of life on the planet is inevitable. Kamin confronts a government official who privately admits to him that they already know this but keep it secret to avoid panic. The official gravely points out to Kamin that they have only recently launched artificial satellites using primitive rockets: their race simply does not possess the technology to evacuate people before their planet is rendered uninhabitable. 

One day, while playing with his grandson, Kamin is summoned by his adult children to watch the launch of a rocket, which everyone seems to know about except him. As he walks outside into the glaring nova light, Kamin sees Eline and Batai, as young as when he first saw them. They explain that he has already seen the rocket, just before he came there. Knowing that their planet was doomed, the planet's leaders placed memories of their society into a probe and launched it into space, in the hope that it would find someone who could tell others about their species. Picard realizes the context: "Oh, it's me, isn't it?", he says, "I'm the someone... I'm the one it finds", realizing that Kamin was the avatar they chose to represent their race. 

Picard wakes up on the bridge of the Enterprise to discover that while he perceived many decades to have transpired, only 25 minutes have passed. The probe terminates and is brought aboard the Enterprise. Inside, the crew finds a small box. Riker gives the box to Picard, who opens it to find Kamin's flute. Picard, now adept at the instrument, plays a melody he learned during his life as Kamin.

 

Enlightenment

'Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious' ~ Carl G. Jung

Fragmentarium Carmen, Zen moments 2014, 2015

• December 20, 2014 - Carmen replies to a photo from "La page de Maître Zen" shared by Liliana Catanoiu: "Thank you, Liliana. I love Zen Spirit ! To see in the little things the great miracles. Happy Sunday!"
  

• March 21, 2014 - Ravi Chandrasekhar (Carmen's avatar) shared Zen music on Carmen's timeline, with the comment "Un sedativ fara contraindicatii" (relaxing pill without contraindications)
• February 12, 2015 - Ravi Chandrasekhar (Carmen's avatar) shared "Zen and Quantum Psysics with Vincent Keisen Vuillemin and Andrei Dorobanțu" with the mention "A serious gift on Valentine's Day"
  

Czeslaw Milosz - Encounter (zen reading)

Encounter

 (Czeslaw Milosz - 1936)

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

My take: whether intended or not, this is a magnificent artistic representation of the Mahayana Buddhist concept of sunyata (creative emptiness - impermanence), the poetry version of a masterful zen painting, an immersion into the wonder of Buddha-nature.

Agnosticism/atheism and the underlying zen

To be agnostic in the sense of "I don't want to get involved" or "I am sitting on the fence" is not a tenable position. It is incomplete in that it begs for a follow-up. However, most of those claiming an (operational) agnosticism are implicitly pointing out to a (philosophical) atheism. 

Otherwise, only "sitting on a fence" would implicitly recognize a certain region bounded by that fence. 

But there is no fence. 

And here is the zen.

Dzogchen in short

What is Dzogchen with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

 

 

Not finding one who observes, 
Your view is exhausted. 
This is the beginning of Your lucidly clear Awareness.

                    Padmasambhava

Poetry by Ryōkan Taigu (7 Haiku Poems)

Ryōkan Taigu (良寛大愚) (1758–1831) was a quiet and unconventional Sōtō Zen Buddhist monk

Ryōkan Taigu of Japan (18th century), was a quiet, eccentric Zen Buddhist monk whose name means "broad-hearted generous fool", qualities that his life and work embodied. Ryokan didn’t like to be considered a "poet." He once said “When you know that my poems are not poems, Then we can speak of poetry”. The form of poetry Ryokan practiced so perfectly reflected his life - clear, present, simple and disciplined. It is inspired by nature, his daily chores, lonely winters, begging for food and playing with the local village children.

INTERSTELLAR for GREAT PIPE ORGAN — ABSOLUTELY EPIC!

 

Antonino Buschiazzo performs his own epic transcription from Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for INTERSTELLAR

Natsume Soseki - winter haiku

Confined within doors 

A priest is warming himself 

Burning a Buddha statue. 

– Natsume Soseki

 

Dōgen Zenji (1200 - 1253) Soto Zen

 

'

Dōgen Zenji (1200 - 1253) was a Japanese Buddhist priest, writer, poet, philosopher, and founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. 

Originally ordained as a monk in the Tendai School in Kyoto, he was ultimately dissatisfied with its teaching and traveled to China to seek out what he believed to be a more authentic Buddhism. Upon his return to Japan, he began promoting the practice of zazen (sitting meditation) through literary works. He eventually left Kyoto for the mountainous countryside where he founded the monastery Eihei-ji, which remains the head temple of the Sōtō school today. 

Art - Zen Circle by John Rossi 
Music: Zen Shakuhachi - Kyotaku 
Daylight - Shakuhachi, Hang and Gongs

 

"Sitting is the gateway of truth to total liberation" ~Dogen Zenji 

Fixing the trouble with phenomenology

“Not finding one who observes, your view is exhausted. This is the beginning of your lucidly clear Awareness.” 

Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche)

Freedom

"Leave alone whatever arises in the mind. Do not seek to change or alter anything. It is all perfect as it stands" ~Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche (ཆོས་རྒྱལ་ནམ་མཁའི་ནོར་བུ་ 1938-2018)

That could make sense in retrospect, after the fact (of practicing meditation/mindfulness). The practice (sometimes easy, sometimes hard) is illuminated and made meaningful precisely in the evanescent moment of its dissolution, that is the moment when it suddenly evaporates itself in satori, refreshing the meaning of the term the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind (i.e. yoga as featured in Patanjali's Sutra). To leave (the mind) alone is hard (and easy). Real freedom is paradoxical, hard and easy.

Below: Tibetan letter "A", the symbol of body of light (rainbow body).

 

Alice Coltrane: Turiya & Ramakrishna

"Alice Coltrane (née McLeod, August 27, 1937 – January 12, 2007), also known by her adopted Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda or Turiya Alice Coltrane, was an American jazz musician and composer, and in her later years a swamini. One of the few harpists in the history of jazz, she recorded many albums as a bandleader, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Impulse! and other major record labels. She was married to jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, with whom she performed in 1966–67." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Coltrane)

Sam Harris: Mindfulness is Powerful, But Keep Religion Out of It

Diamonds in the rough

A favorite pastime in the high school years: keep wandering along the remote railways and other similarly semi-deserted places in the city. On one hand it was probably the sensation of discovery and adventure because simply put, I was not familiar with the area, so it was sort of wow, that's something new, which way I go now - a state of mind that lasted for hours. On another hand, these long walks presented me the opportunity to became a witness to bits and pieces of the forgotten or abandoned life's puzzle, in the littering thrown around from the trains or by the residents of the communist era housing units. As an added bonus, there were wonderful poppy flowers everywhere. So in a sense there was a great deal diversity along the way. But the most essential thing was that, during each one of those long walks, a sense of undetermined awakening (albeit slow) developed in me - so that everything ended with a promise to come back.

space of thoughts

"In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open.

Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea"

~Shunryu Suzuki

What is the orthogonal complement of the space of thoughts?

A sudden glimpse of it may be an outcome of zazen.

 

3M - mind, math, meditation (not necessarily in that order)

`Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth' 
The Diamond Sutra

I rediscovered this a few minutes ago... and I suddenly realized that it describes not only the essence/nature of meditation, but the essence/root of mathematical discovery as well. 

Mind, matter, universe appear to be grounded in this 'nowhere'/emptiness (often seen as `beginning', but that may not be the case) in that every meditation, every mathematical discovery recreates the otherwise elusive `coming forth', leaving one absolutely surprised by this Planck-scale illumination.

Ancient Love and the imminent self-rediscovery

For me personally Anoushka Shankar's music conveys a feeling of imminent `self-rediscovery', building bridges to a long-lost self. Does the self change? Better yet, can we speak about the self? Is it real? Not clear. Maybe yes and no in the sense of a sort of `quantum superposition' of such states. The paradox is in that even the non-existence of the self is formative. Dechen Palmo's video production is very helpful in said rediscovery.

`Rise, by contrast, incorporated jazz, pop, and pan-ethnic world music textures in an unpredictable melange. At the center of it all are Shankar's sitar expertise and traditional Indian roots.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_(Anoushka_Shankar_album)