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Post by Don on Mar 30, 2011 16:28:08 GMT -5
Jeffrey, I felt a deep sense of hopelessness today, I contemplated the fact that I would one day die, and it made so much of what I am grasping at at this time - money, education, recognition, reading books, theory, having a relationship, 'friends' - seem so worthless and depressing, amplified by the fact that I am approaching mid life now, losing my hair, and I guess just beginning to feel old. What am I going to do with my life, continue from where I found success and recognition in the past, through art? I feel so disconnected from people, it seems in every direction I have gone I have managed poor relationships, failed at teaching, and found nothing sustainable there. I don't know how to bring what is most meaningful in my life - spiritual attainment and music - into harmony with a larger community of people who care about these things. So there is a feeling of isolation and I suppose fear of not knowing what will come, I feel this is a transitional phase, and perhaps just a bad day...
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Post by jhananda on Mar 31, 2011 9:30:54 GMT -5
Congratulations Don, you are now fully in a spiritual crisis. The spiritual crises are excellent times to review one's life and rededicate to the spiritual/contemplative life. Music is actually an excellent vehicle to the first contemplation (jhana), this is why so many religions use sacred music. The problem is few religions recognize there is any level of spiritual attainment that is beyond the first contemplation.
One must practice meditation to get to deeper levels of contemplation. So, one of my aspirations is to team up with one or more musicians to offer music as a vehicle to the first contemplation as an introduction to meditation that leads to deeper levels of contemplation. Maybe you and I can work on that project?
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Post by don on Mar 31, 2011 18:26:56 GMT -5
Thank you Jeffrey for those kind words of encouragement and yes I would most certainly be interested in collaboration on a contemplative music project.
These bouts often dont last very long and I find they are triggered by fatigue and often some negative experience, but what a pleasure to hear a response that reverses the negativity of the experience like you did Jeffrey.
Its good to let things out because then it is possible to see the fluctuating nature of the up and down emotional world of a dualistic experience of reality, and as you say take the opportunity to reassess our practice and the importance of that.
I dont think I failed as a teacher, but that I have just too slowly let go of what has been an enormous source of stress and anxiety in my life. I said my age to myself a number of times today and realized that I have not been very aware that I am getting to a different stage of life now, and haven't embraced any of the consensus traditions of society. Never been married, and no interest in that, I have very few friends, in fact I would almost say now that I have none. Perhaps a good position for a contemplative!
There is a lot of music written already to bring one to spiritual states, and that after most concerts in my past I would leave in some low level contemplative state, noticeably feeling a heightened sense of awareness. Much of the music we were discussing from the 60's-70's, in particular from America, was designed for that purpose: la monte young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Reilly, David Behrman, John Cage, Eliane Radigue, Robert Ashley (and his son Sam Ashley who specifically refers to himself as a musical 'shaman', writing music to invoke ecstatic states), but as you know all of that music was wrapped around the use of narcotics to 'help' attain the states. Or there is culture traditions of work also intended for spiritual awakening such as Indian raga, Indonesian Gamelan, free jazz, many traditions, the correlative core of which is, as Derek Baily points out, is improvisation. A very interesting observation because improvisation in its truest form arises as a spontaneous combustion between spirits (I would say...which is always beautiful to witness).
So perhaps it might be worth while to compile 'listening lists' of this sort of music, with the simple observation that this music may assist to bring one to first Jhana. I also found Yoga Nidra to be helpful in bringing one to first, and second Jhana. Simple but not an observation that anyone has ever made (that I know of).
It is interesting the shift in the 20th century I would say was really a shift from the representation of experience, to the co-creative participatory creation of experience itself.
I think one thing that I am interested in, like when reading about Sam Ashley write about what he does, is to unpack those implicit assumptions that are being made about the contemplative life in so writing music that is meant to induce an 'altered state'. Basically, this isn't good enough to simply say that the music brings about some sort of altered state, and that drugs will help you have an even better 'trip'. This is garbage, and as you have said Jeffrey, it does the issues they are dealing with a 'dis-service', emasculating the richness of a genuine contemplative life. They are taking on the role of someone who 'knows' how to produce a good trip completely devoid of a complete spiritual path. So perhaps these people are easy targets, and I should not reduce there work as being the work of deluded well meaning artists, but there needs to be some clarity about what exactly is meant if they are going to take on the role of a guide to leading a contemplative life.
Maybe its not a question of dismissing the musical work for the weak intentions of the artists, but of ripping up the blue print they used to describe the nature of their work, and taking the liberty of redefining the nature of a music intended to assist with entering contemplative states, what that entails, and the range of territory that that may be able to cover. I agree Jeffrey that music most often may bring one to the first Jhana, however I remember as a teenager entering second Jhana while practicing piano, and not know what had happened to me, why I suddenly was able to play so well...and later entering 3rd Jhana with explosions of energy, but this was practice, not listening.
Thanks again Jeffrey
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Post by don on Mar 31, 2011 18:35:10 GMT -5
Oh my last phrase "this was practice not listening" I think is very wrong, of course it was listening, and practice, combined, which is what I think you are saying Jeffrey, to combine music/listening, as a way to assist some people with entering Jhana. I think if music was taught this way from early years, what a powerful practice that would be...
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Post by jhananda on Apr 1, 2011 8:30:01 GMT -5
Don, you make some excellent points. My point is every religion has its path to the first contemplation, and a few may have a path to the second contemplation; however, no religion today recognizes deeper states of contemplation, but have demonized those states and marginalized those who have attained them.
If the West is going to join the rest of the world in the contemplative arts, then we simply must understand the various stages of contemplation. Once we understand the various stages of contemplation, then we can understand how to achieve them.
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Post by don on Apr 1, 2011 17:22:57 GMT -5
Jeffrey, it seems the illusion of the enlightenment period in history that still dominates mainstream culture and commercialism today is rooted in the dialectal opposition of tension and release, and that art was thought of as a microcosm of this 'tension&release' nature of existence. The romanticized struggle of the artist to over-come these dualities seems to reinforce an existence rooted in the insanity of western dialectical thought and the trials and tribulations of everyday common experience. As insanely fun as a Rachmininoff piano concerto may be, this work requires the listener to buy into the melodrama of existence as a roller coaster ride of highs and lows.
So the shift at the end of the 19th century with people like Satie, late Lizst, the move to abstraction with a focus on color for colors sake - Webern, Debussy, Schoenberg, et al - was a shift the signaled a whole new alignment with spiritual values that you interestingly pointed out with Kandinsky, and the whole theosophist movement in spirituality.
The shift today, which began in the mid-century with people like Cage and Morton Feldman, or earlier with Charles Ives, Henrey Cowel, was turning the 'transcendental' representations of abstraction into actual lived experiences of an immanent spirituality, that depended on the co-creative natural of the work of art as an experience that was lived, and not something 'beyond' us in another world.
While a gross over-simplification, my point is that the wars in the art world over who is right, what is good art, the need for validation and so on, would probably disappear if what you say Jeffrey was something that people could agree on, "that we simply must understand the various stages of contemplation. Once we understand the various stages of contemplation, then we can understand how to achieve them."
It seems plain as day to me that most of those composers we discussed, while doing some great work, don't understand or have a clear overview of "the various stages of contemplation", or " how to achieve them." Nor is their an audience or community of people who know that either. So to talk about trends and whats going on in the art world, it would seem, will always end in nonsense, or a deluded notion of 'what is interesting', always just the opinion of small factions that are at war with other groups over things such as aesthetics or theory.
Isn't the issue always about understanding the various stages of contemplation, so that we can achieve them? It would seem that the division between arts, science, and religious studies, is breaking down, there is a greater emphasis on 'interdisciplinary' arts, however, while it is difficult to get a sense of what is going on, it always seems like more of a mess than anything becoming clearer.
I guess one of the things I struggle with is how to integrate the two, or perhaps the must remain separate practices, complimenting one another by nature that the art will be produced from deeper contemplative states, which would be similar to the drug component of much contemporary art, but I suppose what I want is to be open and public about the necessity of a contemplative practice, as it seems to be what is so lacking in all these web-profiles of people and artists...
This was a cross between a ramble and some ideas that are still forming...
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Post by jhananda on Apr 2, 2011 8:39:50 GMT -5
Hello Don, I found your response most interesting. It caused me to recall the methodology that was employed by many of the avant garde artists was various methods to enter a spontaneous state to produce their art. Many of them used drugs and/or alcohol to get there, and few, if any, practiced meditation.
Another term for this spontaneous state is insight. My experience of these spontaneous states of insight is they require an altered state of consciousness, and I have found the deeper the state of contemplation the more spontaneous, revelatory, intuitive and insightful that states is. However, I have not read that description from a single Buddhist priest or meditation teacher in 21 centuries of Buddhist literature. Why is that?
Well, my explanation for this discrepancy requires asking two more questions. Why has not a single Buddhist priest or meditation teacher in the last 21 centuries understood that samadhi is not concentration, but an altered state of consciousness that is characterized by ecstatic and charismatic phenomena, and best described by the English term 'contemplation?' And, why did every Buddhist priest or meditation teacher in the last 21 centuries believe that insight (vipassana) requires not being in contemplation (samadhi)? I can only conclude that no Buddhist priest or meditation teacher in the last 21 centuries has experienced insight (vipassana) because they have not experienced contemplation (samadhi).
OK, so who was the last person on record who described various stages of contemplation? That would be Teresa of Avila. So, it has been 5 centuries since the world has produced a successful contemplative who arrived in the record of contemplative literature. So, if we keep marginalizing our mystics, then it might be another 500 years before another mystic arrives in the record of contemplative literature.
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Post by don on Apr 2, 2011 9:25:06 GMT -5
Jeffrey, I was thinking about this today, while it seems impossible, for the mainstream to become contemplative, the leaders must be mystics, and in a society built upon the values of mysticism, well, the ramifications of that are difficult to imagine.
The mainstream in its current state is a powerful machine, the dismantling of which, again, is difficult to imagine.
But if there is to be change, it must happen from the bottom up, from the 'people', what do you think of this?
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Post by David on Apr 3, 2011 3:01:47 GMT -5
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjmjOZGuMQQ&NR=1Jeffrey, I'm just curious, but what level of contemplation would you say that these two are in? (no they are not on anything...). Did they just pick up there instruments and start doing this? How did they 'learn' how to do what they are doing? Is it just practice, and if it is, what kind of practice were they engaged in? Is it just talent? Then are we born into our talents due to past life experience, karma? Really like this conversation, very interesting...!
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Post by don on Apr 3, 2011 3:40:31 GMT -5
Another term for this spontaneous state is insight. My experience of these spontaneous states of insight is they require an altered state of consciousness, and I have found the deeper the state of contemplation the more spontaneous, revelatory, intuitive and insightful that states is. However, I have not read that description from a single Buddhist priest or meditation teacher in 21 centuries of Buddhist literature. Why is that?Thank you David...Jeffrey, I agree with you, spontaneous self-organization seems to be at the heart of much contemporary thought; Manturana and Varela on 'autopoeisis' comes to mind: www.oikos.org/mariotti.htmSo while there may not be a Buddhist priest in the last 21 centuries who has thought about this, I believe there are other people who have; what I suspect will be missing from those interested in the subject of insight though, which seems very close to the idea of deep levels of contemplative perception, is exactly how to produce a sustainable practice that leads to these states, for everyone, and ultimately a practice which leads to enlightenment in this life time. What I have found while writing music, is that I need to hear something I have written from various states, I mean it has to make sense and sound 'good' from different states. I have found the deeper the contemplative state, the better it usually sounds. But it is intriguing to work from various levels, and most certainly over a period of time. Yes, I would also say that the deeper I go, the more miraculous the intuition is, or the deeper the insight becomes, you hear differently, more detail, you just know what to do. I think most artists would agree with that. Yeah, how many Buddhist priests have to deal with this on a daily basis? I think what this comes back to though, is how to produce the states, a complete picture, and how to make them sustainable (including the support for beginner contemplatives), without any 'additives'. David, I listened to the link you gave, and I know their work, I would have to ask Jeffrey about that too, I dont know the answer to your questions, but I would say free-improv like this is almost closer to a form of shamanism, conjuring a collective spirit that thinks through the music, that invokes the music, where the players lose a sense of self to the spontaneity of the 'moment', which would seem to be a form of revelatory insight I would guess, free of past and future, where there is no attachment to outcomes, only the process of becoming... What do you think Jeffrey?
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Post by Julia on Apr 3, 2011 4:26:43 GMT -5
I may be way off here, and I was going to post about something else I'm reading about that you may be interested in Don, but in response to what you said about a world run by mystics, while that is a nice idea, it does sound a bit like another kind of totalitarianism, how on earth would all those mystics agree to remain in harmony?
Anyways, I just wanted to add, that what we are doing here on this thread, is focusing on a specific community of of people who do art, while thinking about the ramifications of an 'art-based-community' that is organized around the principles of a contemplative life that leads to enlightenment. Probably we could start threads for every 'discipline', then those that would be cross-discipline, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary, and hybrids of those. Where in fact, art, and every other 'discipline' known (and unknown) to wo/man, is the product of leading a contemplative life, which literally springs from the act of being a rigorous contemplative. Every-'thing' is energy vibrating at different levels of intensity, every-thing is 'becoming' something else, is it not? Creativity, beauty, love, and art, come from the highest level of energy we know, the human spirit, in that sense, everything is art, and every art is contemplative by its very nature. The deeper our connection with spirit is, it may be assumed that the 'deeper' our art will be. Does that make sense?
Love to all, Julia
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Post by don on Apr 3, 2011 10:06:58 GMT -5
Well thats a nice way to think of it Julia, I'll come back to that, but I just wanted to follow up on a kernel of an idea from my previous post, and maybe you David might know more about this than I, but about the artist who is engaged with the art work on a daily basis, is and must be by the very nature of art itself (as you say Julia), engaged in altered states of consciousness which produce revelatory insight; and when I said 'how many priests do that on a daily basis', well I wasn't thinking that hey yeah, that is really in the nature of great art, is this trans-formative process through which the art takes on the 'aura' of being, I think Heidegger talks about this in "what is the work of art", about the peasant shoes painted by Van Gogh; how being is folded into the work of art through dwelling, entering the altered states where deep cohesion is experienced, we see that in (great) art, that resonance with our being, that taste of another world in this one that we inhabit.
I'm not saying that very well, but I think we do art a serious dis-service to simply dismiss the act of creation as the product of 'alcoholics and drug addicts'. But that is another issue all together I believe, involving being born in a human form at a particular time, with a particular physical constitution in particular social and economical situations that can be and are very often harsh, especially since it may only be this day and age that it is even possible to lead a contemplative life at all without persecution, let alone that contemplative arts are still seriously marginalized for all of the above reasons...
Not very well put but that gets some more ideas out and up for grabs, thanks for the contributions!
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Post by jhananda on Apr 3, 2011 11:02:33 GMT -5
So while there may not be a Buddhist priest in the last 21 centuries who has thought about this, I believe there are other people who have; what I suspect will be missing from those interested in the subject of insight though, which seems very close to the idea of deep levels of contemplative perception, is exactly how to produce a sustainable practice that leads to these states, for everyone, and ultimately a practice which leads to enlightenment in this life time. Well, my findings are that by leading a rigorous, self-aware, contemplative life I have found contemplation and intuitive, revelatory, insight every day all day long. So, that is the lifestyle I recommend. My rigorous, self-aware, contemplative life has started and ended with meditation every morning and evening of everyday for the last 37 years. The meditation practice that I followed was sensitive to relaxing the body, stilling the mind, and the arising of ecstatic and charismatic phenomena, as well as depth. Such a contemplative life often requires a lifestyle change. So, I recommend such a lifestyle.
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Post by david on Apr 3, 2011 23:17:35 GMT -5
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjmjOZGuMQQ&NR=1Jeffrey, I'm just curious, but what level of contemplation would you say that these two are in? (no they are not on anything...). Did they just pick up there instruments and start doing this? How did they 'learn' how to do what they are doing? Is it just practice, and if it is, what kind of practice were they engaged in? Is it just talent? Then are we born into our talents due to past life experience, karma? You wrote a lot in a previous post about the experimental tradition of music in America, so I'm guessing you are an expert on the topic, thanks very much Jeffrey!
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Post by jhananda on Apr 4, 2011 8:47:08 GMT -5
David, it seems to me that they appear to be on the level of consciousness in which some people will listen to their music just because it is weird.
On the larger picture of avant garde art: I believe we should be asking who was responsible for deciding what was avant garde art in the mid-20th century? That would be answered by Peggy Guggenheim. She was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family. At the age of 21 in 1919, Peggy Guggenheim inherited a small fortune of 2.5 million dollars. This would be roughly 20 million in today's money.
She was a clerk in an avant-garde bookstore, the Sunwise Turn, when she first became enamored with the members of the bohemian artistic community. In 1920 she went to live in Paris, France. Once there, she became friendly with avant-garde writers and artists, many of whom were living in poverty in the Montparnasse quarter of the city. Man Ray photographed her, [1] and was, along with Constantin Brâncuşi and Marcel Duchamp, a friend whose art she was eventually to promote. She became close friends with writer Natalie Barney and artist Romaine Brooks, and was a regular at Barney's stylish salon. She met Djuna Barnes during this time, and in time became her friend and patron.
In 1938, she opened a gallery for modern art in London featuring Jean Cocteau and began to collect works of art. After the outbreak of World War II, she purchased as much abstract and Surrealist art as possible.
Peggy Guggenheim opened the gallery Guggenheim Jeune in London in January 1938 — the name being ingeniously chosen to associate the epitome of a gallery, the French Bernheim Jeune, with the name of her own well known family. The gallery on 30 Cork Street, next to Roland Penrose's and E. L. T. Mesens' show-case for the Surrealist movement, the London Gallery, proved to be successful, thanks to many friends who gave advice and who helped run the gallery. Marcel Duchamp, whom she had known since the early 1920s, when she lived in Paris with her first husband Laurence Vail, introduced Peggy Guggenheim to the art world; it was through him that she met many artists during her frequent visits to Paris. He taught her about contemporary art and styles, and he conceived several of the exhibitions held at Guggenheim Jeune.
The gallery's opening show was dedicated to Jean Cocteau. It was followed by exhibitions on Wassily Kandinsky (his first one-man-show in England), Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen and several other well known and some lesser-known artists. Peggy Guggenheim also held group exhibitions of sculpture and collage, with the participation of the now classic moderns Antoine Pevsner, Henry Moore, Henri Laurens, Alexander Calder, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Constantin Brâncuşi, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Kurt Schwitters. She also greatly admired the work of John Tunnard (1900–1971) and is credited with his discovery in mainstream international modernism.
When Peggy Guggenheim realised that her gallery, although well received, had made a loss of £600 in the first year, she decided to spend the money in a more practical way. A museum for contemporary arts was exactly the institution she could see herself supporting. Most certainly on her mind were also the adventures of her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, who, with the help and encouragement of Hilla Rebay, had created the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation two years earlier. The main aim of this foundation had been to collect and to further the production of abstract art, resulting in the opening of the Museum of Non-objective Painting (from 1952: The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum) earlier in 1939 on East 54th Street in Manhattan. Peggy Guggenheim closed Guggenheim Jeune with a farewell party on 22 June 1939, at which colour portrait photographs by Gisèle Freund were projected on the walls. She started making plans for a Museum of Modern Art in London together with the English art historian and art critic Herbert Read. She set aside $40,000 for the museum's running costs. However, these funds were soon overstretched with the organisers' ambitions.
In August 1939, Peggy Guggenheim left for Paris to negotiate loans for the first exhibition. In her luggage was a list drawn up by Herbert Read for this occasion. Shortly after her departure the Second World War broke out, and the events following 1 September 1939 made her abandon the scheme, willingly or not.
She then "decided now to buy paintings by all the painters who were on Herbert Read's list. Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day."[1] When finished, she had acquired ten Picassos, forty Ernsts, eight Mirós, four Magrittes, three Man Rays, three Dalís, one Klee, one Wolfgang Paalen and one Chagall among others. In the meantime, she had also made new plans and in April 1940 had rented a large space in the Place Vendôme as a new home for her museum.
A few days before the Germans reached Paris, Peggy Guggenheim had to abandon her plans for a Paris museum, and fled to the south of France, from where, after months of safeguarding her collection and artist friends, she left Europe for New York in the summer of 1941. There, in the following year, she opened a new gallery which actually was in part a museum. It was called The Art of This Century Gallery. Three of the four galleries were dedicated to Cubist and Abstract art, Surrealism and Kinetic art, with only the fourth, the front room, being a commercial gallery.
As a result of her interest in new artists she was instrumental in advancing the careers of many important modern artists, including the American painter Jackson Pollock and William Congdon, the Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, the sound poet Ada Verdun Howell and the German painter Max Ernst, whom she married in December 1941.
Following World War II — and her 1946 divorce from Max Ernst — she closed The Art of This Century Gallery in 1947, and returned to Europe; deciding to live in Venice, Italy. In 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale and in 1949 established herself in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal.
Her collection became one of the few European collections of modern art to promote a significant amount of works by Americans.
In the 1950s she promoted the art of two local painters, Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani.
By the early 1960s, Peggy Guggenheim had almost stopped collecting art and began to concentrate on presenting what she already owned. She loaned out her collection to museums in Europe and in 1969 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was named after her uncle. Eventually, she decided at this time to donate her home and her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a gift which was concluded inter vivos in 1976, before her death in 1979.
OK, so, now connect the dots. The wealthy decide what is art, and what is not art through their patronage. This has been true all through the ages, and it is just as true about religion. It is the patronage of the wealthy who decides what religion is about.
Are the wealthy any better informed about art and religion than the peasantry? No, the peasants just defer to the wealthy.
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