Music as a Gateway

Highly educated, rational and intellectual people sometimes have trouble grokking what we're talking about in Zen. Either is sounds to much like fluffy mystical woo-woo, or they think koans are really challenging puzzles to be solved (and I admit, that's what got me interested back in the 1980s). But both perspectives miss the point. We're trying to deal with very concrete reality here. And it's not something esoteric and available only to certain people. It's as plain as the nose on your face. Everyone has glimpsed it. But sometimes it can be helpful to offer some kind of gateway to help people notice what's right in front of them. Usually Zen doesn't "teach" anything. It just throws you into the deep end of the pool, where (hopefully) you discover that you already know how to float freely. But that doesn't work for everyone, and can be wasteful.

Gateway Stories

Some intellectual people seem to need a conceptual framework to make sense of the practice. The danger is that they will cling tightly to this intellectual understanding (since it's so much fun to wrestle with weird ideas), and they never really start the practice of seeing directly for themselves. But the potential payoff is that, once they start walking the path, they'll develop the wisdom to eventually throw away the initial words and conceptual stuff. And hey, at least they're walking now!

An example of a useful gateway story like this:

One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in meditation and we bow to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koan riddles and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans still don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all. Can’t you just tell me what's going on?" "Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. So our objective here is to induce a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like meditation, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse." The student said, “I still don’t understand.” So Roshi said, “A fish!” At that, the student was awakened.

Music

Lately, I've been wondering if music can play a similar gateway role in helping people start on the path. After all, it can be an extremely powerful communicator (I'm assuming we've all experienced the shivers that great music can send up your spine. Or is it down? Or goosebumps. You know what I mean). And music doesn't rely on words (and therefore doesn't have the risk of being too sticky for the conceptual mind to let go of). Clearly music is saying something real to us - but it's not in words or ideas. The place you go when music stirs you - words cannot describe it. It's real. It's meaningful. But it cannot be talked about in its fullness. Language and concepts can only roughly approximate this human experience. Since we've all felt it, I can use words to indirectly point at it, and you'll know what I'm talking about. But these words are not the music itself!

Below are some examples of music I wrote for a Nuit Blanche participative art installation we did  a few years ago. None are particularly great (especially since they were intended to be background music for the event). But maybe listening to one might help someone to remember that their life already contains much more than their thoughts, concepts, beliefs, and "isms" can fully capture. Click the links to see if any are helpful for you:

Surprise - awakening in the morning to birdsong and scent of fir trees in a Haliburton forest.

Joy - an orchestral dance of finding happiness on even the coldest and most overcast November afternoon.

Predictability - the various interruptions of life come and go, but still one thing continues to abide.

Summer Stillness - cicadas in the trees, dappled shade on the hammock, the scent of lunch almost read to be eaten.

Trust - all manner of uncomfortable stuff can bubble up during zazen, and you can sit and be present for it all.