Good morning everybody. So some of you know that I'm now
going into the 4th week of doing a physical therapy for my
coronary artery disease and it requires me every morning to lay
on a table with my legs wrapped in these air bladders that
inflict to pump blood back to my heart, counter my heartbeat.
What that means is that I can't lay there and read because my
body is jumping like this for an hour, but I can lay there and
listen to music. So I've been listening to the
Bach Organ Works. Sorry for those of you who are
not into classical music, but this is going to be a baroque
music geek out. As I was laying there one day,
it hit me that truly listening to the Bach Organ Works is very
much like Zazen. By the way, one of the things I
love about now having the song go on my second floor is that
when I forget my coffee, I can run back down with stairs warm
enough is a microwave and bring it back up.
We talked last week about Zazen and about how what it is is
simply being present in the current moment in all of its
Infinity. Not focusing on any one thing,
not being trapped in the past or the future, not being trapped by
anyone thought and allowing it to consume our attention.
But simply sitting present in the moment.
Listening to Bach is very much the same.
And the reason I say that is if you're not familiar with the
organ works, I highly recommend them.
Cameron Carpenter is my current favorite organist.
But when you're listening to them, it's almost impossible to
believe that all of these sounds are being produced by 10 fingers
and two feet playing a single instrument.
The complexity, the the sheer beauty of what you're hearing is
so easy to get lost in. But that's not the parts that
saw Zen, because Zen is not getting lost in the moment, it's
being present in the moment. What is very zazen like about
listening to Bach is that you can't be distracted away from
the entirety of the piece. You can't allow yourself to get
caught listening for the melody, and especially with the organ
works because the melody is going to bounce from one voice
to another, and sometimes it's going to bounce to another voice
and be exactly the same as it was before.
Other times it's going to be transformed so you barely
recognize the melody, but if you allow yourself to sit there and
follow the melody, you lose all of the other stuff that's going
on That makes the peace itself a true whole.
You have to allow the melody simply to be part of what
exists, and I call that horizontal serving tea.
If you remember Suzuki Rashi's poem about zazen, open your
front door and your back door. Let thoughts come and go.
Just don't serve them tea. Well, if you're listening to
Bach and you follow the melody, you're serving tea horizontally.
Because if you're trying to follow one line throughout the
piece. The thing I love about Baroque
music is that it was prior to sorry I'm going to slightly geek
into music theory now, it was prior to chords becoming the way
that music was composed. So in the classical and romantic
heroes, composers wrote chords, and the chords were generally,
well, they were rarely if ever dissonant.
So pieces were composed of chords that went through the
entire piece. In Baroque music, it's lines,
and the lines interact as they transfer through the piece, and
there are moments of real dissonance.
If you were able to break it down and stop at one particular
measure, you might hear beautiful harmony.
You might also hear incredibly weird dissonance, and that's
because there wasn't a a feeling that every moment had to be
perfect in itself. Get where I'm going?
The same is true in life. We have dissonance that runs
through our lives, but they're moments and the common go.
And the thing about Baroque music is that if those very
moments of dissonance that give the beauty and complexity to the
peace, if you don't even notice the dissonance, you notice
something weird and then it comes back and then, oh, wow,
cool, that's those dissonances being resolved.
It's a lot like life, isn't it? If we concentrate on a moment,
yeah, that moment might be very dissonant, but it builds into
the beauty of life as a whole. If we're present in a moment and
that's what we're doing in zazen, that moment might be
dissonant. The thing to remember is that
moment passes and becomes another moment and becomes
another moment. Remember that the Sanskrit word
for mindfulness is sati, which literally translates as
remembrance of the present moment.
And I love that translation because by the time you
recognize the present moment, it's gone.
So in essence, whenever you were living in the present moment,
you're actually living in your remembrance of the present
moment because you're now in the next moment and it just
continues on like that. And so if you get lost in a
particular present moment, I call that vertically serving
tea. Something has trapped you in
that present moment, and you're not allowing yourself to move on
from it into the next present moment.
Like all analogies, this obviously breaks down.
No analogy is is truth, but it's something that struck me while I
was laying there listening to to my music.
And then I started thinking about the other times we
experience or can experience the same sort of non zazen zazen.
And one is forest bathing. If you've never heard of it,
it's actually a an accepted therapy in Japan that can be
prescribed by your doctor and even paid for by your insurance.
To go out into the forest and experience the moment.
Well, that is the same as being immersed in Bach, in that you
don't go there to look at a tree or notice the wind specifically,
or notice the bird saw. You go there to be immersed in
the totality of the forest. Again, it's zazen.
It's simply not sitting on a cushion.
It is allowing yourself the time to experience the present moment
without being trapped by the past, the future, or thoughts
that consume our minds. So I guess my the essence of
what I'm saying today is if you are in a period of your life
where you have trouble sitting Zaza and we all encounter those,
choose another way of doing the same thing.
But remember the the essence of Zaza.
But it is to live in the present, to accept the reality
of the present, not to be lost in what we want it to be, and
then to move from there into acting to make the future a
better present for all beings. Before we can make that movement
into action, we have to 1st sit in the present moment, whether
it's on a cushion in the forest or listening to, for me, Bach.
Maybe you have another composer who does that for you, but find
a way. Oh, bringing yourself into the
present moment and out of all of the distractions that trap us.
Hey Glenn, thanks so much for a classical music talk.
You know, I'm a classical musician, so this one really
landed. Thank you.
It's interesting you brought up Bach specifically is working for
you in this way because Bach is a little bit unique in the well,
to talk about him, I have to talk about another guy who's a
monk named Johann Fuchs. He in like the early 1700s wrote
down rules of music theory that have become the basis for
Western music and ever since, and they're like 10 or 12 of
them, not a lot, but essentially what he was doing was listening
to music and saying this sounds right.
So it is the truth of music and this also sounds right.
And so it is the truth of music and that became very accepted by
Western musicians. And Bach is a little unique in
that he looked at Spooks rules and said, great, I have them, I
will operate within them and I will never deviate from them.
Other composers looked at them and said, great, I like them in
95% of all musical situations, but I will choose to deviate
from them as part of my unique composition and artistry.
What that means for us as Western listeners is that Bach
is very, very easy on our brains.
He operates within the rules that we want to hear as
Westerners. And to try and strengthen your
analogy a little bit, I think that's kind of like the
eightfold path, right? Where we have these things are
not rules per SE, but they're, you know, certainly pretty
awesome guidelines. And we can use to adhere to
those as strictly as we want, or we can choose to deviate from
them situationally or whatever. But they are there, just like
these rules of music theory are. And yeah, I think that's about
all I can say about that. But again, thank you for the
classical music. That was wonderful.
Thanks, Maggie, and thanks for that Apple amplification though.
Yeah, I agree. Bach used the rules exactly.
And and you're right, that's that's what makes him, I think,
so easy for us to listen to. But at the same time, he showed
that, and I think this actually applies to your continuation of
it, of the analogy to the fateful path.
He showed that adhering to the rules doesn't necessarily
require a a monolithic, in his case sound, or in the case of
the 8 fold path, a monolithic action.
Because if you go from the organ works to the coral works to
other pieces, there's really nothing that necessarily.
Ties them together. There's there's not a common
sound. So he was able to make all of
these different compositions, all following the rules, but all
totally different. I think the same is true of
following the eight fold path. And that's why Buddhism has
never gone the road of dogmatic Thou shalt and thou shalt not.
We have the Eightfold Path. But if your interpretation of
appropriate livelihood is different than mine, so be it.
If you're truly are following the Eightfold path and choosing
this as appropriate livelihood, right?
Just because I would not have chosen that livelihood doesn't
make it wrong. The same for meditation,
concentration, thoughts, actions, speech.
Just because I do things a certain way and feel that I am
expressing the eightfold path and you do things a different
way and feel that you are expressing the full path.
If we are honest, if we can turn that damned mirror rigorous self
honesty on ourselves than on our actions and thoughts and say
yes, I am following the full path, then it doesn't matter
that we do it differently. We're following the same
guidance. So thank you for that, Maggie.
It was a really nice amplification.
This is just an observation. When you talk about music and
the rules, I think it's kind of funny that punk rock was born
out of breaking the rules and then that became a rule of being
a pump rocker. Yeah I always loved the non
conformist too criticize freak people for being conformist but
if I was not conforming then I would be conforming to your non
conformity. So one of the things that came
to mind when you were talking about this force bathing and was
interpretation of the DABE chain that I've read.
And I'm glad my students aren't here because they roll their
eyes right now, but that as human beings we get, we tend to
focus on on one particular aspect of the thing.
Like, so in music, it's like, OK, well, what is the trumpet
sound like or what is the bass sound like or the vocalist sound
like or whatever. And what's 1 of the things that
Buddhism and Zazen are really good at is being like, OK, well,
how does that fit into the field?
Like how can you where, where does that?
Because if you look at whatever punk or classical or whatever,
the magic doesn't happen in whatever individual piece that
you're trying to focus on. The magic happens when you step
back and look at it as a field. Same with like the forest.
It's if you focus on the chipmunks or this wind or the
thing, you're missing the field. And when you, when you can feel
work become with the field of things, then something happens
that is different from the way that we normally operate in our
day-to-day lives. And so that that'd be able to
shift between the focus and the field and then doing both is, I
think something that is a vital component of what we do in Zasa.
In the way that we appreciate music or culture or society or
families, or I mean, how often Thanksgiving being a thing, how
often just one little thing happened and you're like, man,
I'm just going to focus on that because that is what is, you
know, as opposed to being like, OK, well that thing happened,
but it's part of this greater thing.
And this greater thing is pretty awesome.
So don't let the dissidents. So let the dissonance rule the
field that the field inform the distance.
Yeah, yeah, by the way, that really love Bach obviously I
actually have drawn even more and Maggie you'll know what I'm
talking about here to prior to him to Renaissance then press.
One of my favorite composers is Thomas Tallis, and they're in
that era, compositions were completely horizontal, so each
line was written as a complete line, but there were some
together. Prior to even Tallis, it was
simply a single line. But with Renaissance music, you
had all these multiple lines. And there you got even more
dissonance being resolved because when you compose by, OK,
here's the soprano line and here's the tenor line, and
here's the baseline, and you're not looking at it vertically,
then. Yeah, they're going to be
sometimes that you listen to your.
Oh. Damn, that's bad.
But then it resolves, and it's so cool to hear those
resolutions. You can always see why the
church banned polyphonic singing for so long, because you did
have those distances and the church wanted conformity and so
Remorian Chap was the way. And that is a single note that
all people say. And when oh phonic music came
along, they were like, oh, oh, oh, we can't have those
dissonances. Failing to hear that the beauty
of it was in the resolution of those dissonances.
Hi, Glenn. It's great to see you.
It's Joe in Philadelphia. Hi.
Joe. How are you?
It's really wonderful to be here.
I'm, I'm actually retired on disability because of a bunch of
autoimmune stuff. So you may see more of me.
Lynn, I really appreciated your your talk and it was nice to sit
with all of you. I'm going to put a picture on
here. Your discussion reminds me of my
sleep last night. I tracked my sleep and I finally
got, you know, more than 7 hours and that's there's my there are
my variations, which you vote. It's interesting that you know
people, you know, serendipity. My parents used to say what look
for yellow Volkswagens when you were driving to the short.
It sort of distract us. And someone said to me, when
you're present and you're open, you don't have to look.
They just appear. So you just appeared today and I
happen to just start reading the gold bug variations by Richard
Powers. And if you're not familiar with
it, based on all the recommendations and the, you
know, the praise it received, just, I'll just real quick give
one the central metaphor box Goldbug variations with its Aria
and 30 variations on a single theme serves it as a structural
conceptual model for the novel's exploration of patterns and
variations. And a lot of what you said.
Do you have any other thoughts on that?
The 30 variations and and maybe my sleep.
It's great to be here with you. It's great to be here with you.
No, I think, I think that's, you know, it is.
I'll be honest, the Goldberg Variations are not one of my
favorite compositions of Bach, but I I get the I get the the
way that they appeal to music theorists, and they do, they do
bring out in us some of that, that same thing that both Joe
and I were talking about, of not being stuck with a single
interpretation. Yeah, you have the original
theme, but then all of these variations include that theme,
but they're different expressions of it.
What more perfect analogy to Buddhism is there?
We follow the Dharma the same as our Tibetan siblings do, but the
expression of it is incredibly different.
I was drawn this week with Pope Leo's trip to Turkey and his
meeting with the Orthodox patriarchs.
And the common theme there was, hey, we're all following the
same teachings. We're just doing it differently
to let us recognize the validity of each, interpret each other's
interpretation. And I think Buddhism has always
done that. I, I always tell people it'll be
an interesting experiment to travel the world and visit
different Christian congregations and different
Buddhist Congress. And if you go into churches in
Korea or Japan or Armenia, or well, I mean, we've got the
Orthodox cause, sorry there, we're not used to that in the
West. But India or wherever else you
go into a Christian Church, you're going to recognize the
service. It's going to be in a different
language, but you're pretty much going to recognize what's going
on. If you'd make that same trip and
go into Buddhist temples or songhouse, your reaction is
going to be what the fuck is this?
This is not Buddhism. No, what are they doing?
But we're all fine with each other because we accept the
variations in the practice and not only accept but recognize
the beauty of those variations. I honestly love going to KTC
now. That and hearing the chanting
and the horns and the music and everything else.
It's great. I wouldn't do it here, but it's
wonderful. So I do think that anything that
allows us to break away from believing that a central theme
has to be expressed the same way in all cases is good.
And honestly, I'd say your your point started with sleep.
I would say the same about sleep trackers.
I hate sleep trackers. I've tried using them and
comparing my sleep pattern to what it's supposed to be, and
I've come to the conclusion that the only definition of what
sleep is supposed to be is how I feel when I get up from it in
the morning. If I feel rested, then it
doesn't matter if my pattern was waking up 15 times during the
night or if my pattern was sleeping straight through.
If I feel rested, I feel rested. So thanks, Joe.
Good to see you. Thank you, I actually woke up
feeling wonderful Even so all those varies and much meta to
you. Lots of love to you.
I appreciate you and everyone here.
The way you feel about sleep checkers is the way I feel about
exercise. We have friends that bike and
Dave and I bike. Dave and I get on our bikes and
go through the forest and enjoy the past and go until we're
tired and then we're done. Whereas my friends, you know,
how many miles and what did my heart rate get to?
And and to me that that makes exercise work and I want it to
just be for pleasure. Well, thank you all for joining
us today. I hope everyone had a good
holiday and we will finish up the day with the Buddhist at the
vowel and for ministrables.