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#3581 - Thursday, July 2, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - The first periodical publication on nonduality - Submissions welcome http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
This issue has a few pieces on music and nonduality.
I am new here, so pardon if this topic has
been discussed before. My first experience with nonduality came
about through music. It was this complete loss of self upon
hearing a certain completely instrumental piece of music.
After that brief experience, I became much less interested in
music with words or lyrics, as they somehow split the experience.
Now I hardly ever listen to music with lyrics-- unless forced to
when riding in a car with someone else, etc. Somehow just
"becoming the song" in the moment would be broken by
putting words into the experience. This experience is heightened
even more when I play music on piano, guitar, etc.
Is this odd?
---------------
Hello Rgatess,
No, but I might suggest not keeping a bias for instrumental music
because both fingers playing and or voices singing can tap into
the same deep laws of music that arise from Oneness.
The whole universe is created out of sound and light. The
Earth would not exist without being woven from that sound and
light, nor would human beings or anything else. Also, there
would be no "music" without the exact timings and
spaces of silence.
Om -Bob
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i have heard that creativeness puts one in
the alpha level......so is like
meditation......it keeps one in this moment and gives the mind a
rest....lol...and odd.....is jus a label...eh?.....it
jus.....IS......:).....love inkyONE*:*
The following is a portion of a chapter that never made the final cut in a book I edited, One: Essential Writings on Nonduality. It comes from the book, Dancing With The Void, by Sunyata.
had three music chapters ready for the book, the one by Sunyata, a jazz article by Dustin LindenSmith, and an article on HipHop and nonduality, by Justin Miles. However, the three chapters would have taken up too much space in a book whose size had to be limited.
NONDUALITY AND MUSIC: BEETHOVEN’S FOUR
QUARTETS
SUNYATA
It was in the late 1920’s that I became
familiar with Ludwig van Beethoven’s four quartets. Called
‘the impossible quartets’ in academic circles, at
one time, these were not accepted as technically well crafted.
They were rarely performed until a hundred years after their
composition (at Beethoven’s death centenary), when they were
actually recorded on gramophone and eventually became quite
popular as chamber music and in radio broadcasts. – Sunyata
While these word symbols are bubbling up, I am actually also playing Beethoven’s last quartets. They are ever playing themselves in the Himalayan Silence, in the akasha vastness of Advaita Sunya. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” At present, they are also actually playing themselves by my side on the verandah, to the snowy deva peaks around us, yes, through a gramophone record.
Thus it was my habit in the late 20’s, when I first heard these melodies, that I would let them play themselves while I was writing or doing things. When I am ego-freely alone, there are no clashes in the seeming dual consciousness. The music goes on and is responded to – aye, merged into, by the deeper Ground of consciousness, while the surface play, activities and thoughts, go on co-existingly. There is full conscious awareness and the deeper aware unconsciousness. Wu!
Photo: Sunyata