You may remember about this morning I described the situation as follows. I'm talking to you and you understand what my words mean. Situation A. Situation B is taking situation A as a whole, my talking to you and you understanding what I mean, what does that situation mean? And we find it doesn't mean anything. This could be a way, when we say something is meaningless, it's a way of putting it down. But on the other hand, when you consider a mountain, or a cloud, or a tree, and ask what does it mean, and you realize it's not a word, it's simply an authentic existence in its own right, it doesn't mean anything, but it's great. And so in this way the nearest thing in that kind of achievement, that nature does all the time, in human activities is music. Once when Gustav Holst was giving a lecture on music, he started out this way, he said, music is a natural and universal language. He took a step backwards and said, that's so important I'm going to say it again, music is a natural and universal language, but nobody knows what it's about. Sometimes we say music represents emotions, but a great deal of music, although it has a very strong feeling quality, does not represent specific emotions. Inferior music copies natural noises. So that you hear the sound of water, the thunder of the hooves of horses, or in that dreadful composition the 1812 Overture of Tchaikovsky, you hear Napoleon's armies retreating from Moscow, or in some of the bad work of Debussy, like La Cathédrale en Blouty, makes noises like bells tolling from under the water. But our very great musicians of the West, Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart and so on, they don't do anything with the music except create elaborate patterns of sound. Bach is very mathematical, and yet curiously, despite his tremendously developed intellect, the music has a very strong feeling quality, joyous and exuberant. But it's all pure play with sound. And therefore one might say that the communication that you make with music is in a curious way the most important kind of communication you can make, even though you're saying nothing. The music delivers no information, but what a form of communication. And so it is also with dancing with somebody. All you are saying with dancing is I love you, if you're delivering any message at all. I want to play with you. All I really want to do is baby be friends with you. What does it mean, what is the content of friendship? You can't say, what is the content of love? I want to screw you. That's a sort of a part of it, it's incidental, it's a way of saying very strongly yes I do want to be with you. But basically love is something we can't put our finger on at all. We say, we use such words as warmth, tenderness, all these things they don't really get to the point. When you're loving somebody you are simply delighting in that person as such, as if another human organism in its mental and its physical aspects, where a piece of music or a work of art or a glorious morning that you were just enjoying every inch of it. And you go over another person's physical form and look at it from every possible point of view and play with it and tickle it. And that's what it's about, it's the adoration of the form of a human being. And you do that adoring in terms of physical contacts that are say dancing with your fingers across the skin or whatever it may be. But this is the nitty gritty, the nub of love, it is not that I here and now solemnly undertake to support you for the rest of your life. That's a delusion of the West, you think you don't really love me unless you will sign on the dotted line here and give me this contract and then I know I can rely on you always. What did you want it for? Why did you want the contract? Just to be fed indefinitely? Just to be supported indefinitely? What at all? One wants something much more than that, you want to be played with indefinitely. That's more like it. To have this vibrancy going through you. And this then is why music of all the arts is the most meaningless art. You could regard as a matter of fact we could scare the entire American public by writing up music as a form of dangerous addiction. After all music is a major industry in the United States. The money invested in orchestras and operas in the recording business is fantastic. Horse racing is a very great industry but music I think is probably absorbs more millions than horse racing. And you could make a case that this was a complete dissipation. It solves no useful purpose, it doesn't help anyone to survive. It is a noise, meaningless noise, endless meaningless noise going down the drain. And all these energies, orchestras are all a power of electronics that delivers this. It's total waste. And people get hooked on it. They get a thing called Chorditis which is addiction to harmonics. And they have to have this repeated day after day. Some people get up in the morning and they can't function till they've had a cup of coffee. But many more people get up in the morning and can't function till they've turned on the radio and got some music. They are hopelessly hooked on narcotic music. And what would you say then of a culture which took this standpoint? Music not allowed. Music is a diversion from reality. You can imagine the sort of state of mind going on in red China or somewhere like that where everybody has to be tremendously realistic and face facts and get up every morning and do exercises for your physical improvement. You know that kind of awful utilitarian attitude. But really one of the basic things you see that we live for. What makes it worth surviving and going on is there can be such a thing as music. There can be dancing. In other words that we can do things that are absolutely irrelevant so far as mere survival is concerned. Now we have the proverb that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All for work. And people who play so that they shall be able to work for a living, justifying their play by making it a means to that end, those people never play. Because you don't really play until you get so absorbed in the music or the dancing or the whatever, the making the part or doing the calligraphy, until you get so absorbed in it that there is no reason for it other than what you are doing. The sheer delight of that. Then because you are absorbed in something for which there is no ulterior motive and which is pure play, this by way of a by-product produces sanity. In other words if you play in order to be healthy, in order to be sane, you are not playing. But if you play just to play, then as a by-product, as something you couldn't aim at directly, you are sane. And so a culture which allows for this, which allows for this sort of goofiness, is a healthy culture. This is not the culture that we live in very healthy. Because it is extremely anxious about play. Everybody when they play they have to find an excuse for it. They say well this is culture. You try and persuade the city of San Francisco to support its opera. What sort of propaganda do you have to use? You can't say we should have a good opera house here because we dislike going to the opera. Say this improves the city's image. After all they have it in New York and wouldn't you think that San Francisco could equal New York? It's a matter of prestige and therefore the city should support the opera. And then finally you get this terrible racket that all kinds of people belong on the committee and it's a matter of social one-upmanship as to whether you get on the committee, how much money you contribute to it and so on and so on. It has nothing to do with the symphony or the opera at all. And that is because we do not allow ourselves the idea that life is not serious. Because somehow you feel if you aren't engaged in something serious you are a loafer. You are not contributing to the social welfare. And so in this way the artist has a peculiar role in this society. Very very interesting. Because the artist is a very deceptive fellow. He appears to be the supreme luxury, the irrelevant fellow. You can afford an artist, you can afford to buy paintings if you have surplus money. That's a luxury. So you can support an artist and we call it fine arts. The completely useless person who makes paintings which are sort of big labels or posters that you stick on your utilitarian walls to decorate them. And as if to say around here we can afford frittery. But on the other hand the artist is the man who shows you the future long before everybody else sees it. The artist is the eye-opener. Just because the artist is distinct in role from the preacher and the philosopher. The artist can get away with all sorts of things. For example in our culture if you are a university professor, a doctor or a minister. Take these three professions, teacher, doctor, minister. You have to be very careful about your private life. Because the moment you have any alliances that are not quite regular, people's tongues begin to wag. And why do they wag? Because they say the way you behave is inconsistent with your profession, with what you profess. You are teaching people the good life, the healthy life. And you live in this disreputable way. You have a mistress, you have something or other going on. But the moment an artist should take a mistress this is what is expected of him. Everybody says oh he is an artist. In other words he doesn't matter, he is irrelevant. He is an entertainer, some sort of clown. But on the other hand if you belong to high culture you patronize artists. So the role of the artist is very fascinating. Because he appears to be the clown, the jester, the absolutely unimportant and irrelevant person. And yet it is actually through the artist that we learn how to live. Not through the preacher, not through the philosopher, not through the professor. It is the artist who teaches us whether he does it visually with painting or sculpture, tactually or with above all with music. So a man like Mozart who could well claim to be the greatest man in European history was a kind of a gay happy go lucky fellow with problems, money, illness etc. But what a songbird, what a nightingale. And so then to this day listening to Mozart in England at the Glyndebourne Opera this is about the farthest out fashionable aristocratic thing you can do. Go to this lovely country house in Sussex and hear the Mozart operas. It is as much a matter of status as going to church, almost more so. You should read if you can get hold of it. An interview with George Harrison, one of the Beatles, in a recent issue of the East Village Other where he explains the deep philosophy of music that they understand and follow. How the very nature of sound reveals the meaning of the world and why because of this he regards himself as a Hindu. In Hinduism the fundamental source of life is called Vak. Vak in Sanskrit means the word to speak but not so much the word that communicates as the sound, the utterance, the flow of tone. So you have in India the use of mantra, the use of chanted words as one of the very basic forms of yoga, understanding the mystery of the world. The Hindus use the word Om which would be spelled out A-U-M because the letter A, A, is in the back of the throat. You push it through the vowel to Aum and M is at the lips. So the word Om comprehends the whole range of sound. It's called the pranava and Aum simply means, well it is the sound. All sounds are basically the sound Aum but varied. And so Aum is the word that not only signifies but also is what there is. Everything is Aum, Aum sweet Aum. The whole universe is Aum. And so this is a very good word because you can use it instead of God. God has all sorts of nasty associations attached to it. The political boss of the world, the preacher, the prig, the nosy parker in charge of everything, the rotten grandfather and all that, the sentimental mother of the world or whatever it is. And the word God therefore is a distasteful word now to most westerners. But Aum has no associations with it. You might have encountered it in a Vedanta society and associated it with swamis in yellow robes or something. But on the whole Aum has no association. So it is a clean, a clean word and it has no meaning except it is the very pulse of life. So I'm spreading a rumor. In Buddhism you know there is a mantra Aum Mani Padme Hum. And Aum means nothing except everything. Mani means a jewel. Padme is a lotus. Hum is hurray. So the jewel and the lotus. In other words imagine a mandala you see which is a lotus flower with all those petals spreading out from it. And right down in the middle of that there is a little crystal ball or a diamond. And you look into that and it contains the reflection of everything. You go way way way into that thing down down down down. And that's the ultimate turn on. So Aum and at the end Hum or H-U-M you can say Hum in English. Hum Hum you Hum. Now there is a new religion existing called Hum. And this religion has no hierarchy, no organization, no doctrines whatsoever. No words. Only music and ritual. And we will find in a little while that Hum is really what most people belong to. And but you can't pin it down. There is no address to write to. There is nothing to join. It's just something that people do. Like they shave and brush their teeth and eat breakfast. So they Hum. So now it's very very fascinating for purposes of understanding music as communication to look for a moment at different fundamental differences between western and oriental music. Many westerners listen to oriental music. They have funny reactions. I know a very very great musicologist who thoroughly understands the world of Bach and Beethoven and is one of the greatest scholars in music I've ever run into. But when to his ear Hindu music is childish and he sees no subtlety in it. He's quite deaf. But when it comes to Chinese and Japanese music most westerners are flabbergasted. They can't make any sense of it at all because it sounds as if somebody were making the most ridiculous noises. So when it's a Japanese no drama singer comes on. We think he's sounding as if he's being strangled. But he's giving sounds of passionate love. But they are. Yes that's deplorable. You can't do things like that and have people pay to come and listen. You know but we want to give examples of love. That feels that we really have said we are in love. Now talking of nightingales. Do you know this is an apart from the seminar this is just a little piece of information. Mockingbirds in California can do half of the routine of a nightingale. And the reason is that Respighi's The Birds has been played by people on their patios and it has half of the routine of the nightingale in it and the mockingbirds have picked it up. Yes down in the south. And I had an altercation with a mockingbird one night in Santa Barbara. Very funny you can whistle to them and they will play back your whistle and do all sorts of funny things. They are wonderful to play with. But well you say well what's it all about. Well now here is the thing in western music when we study music the first thing we learn is notation. We have most people begin with the piano or at any rate some instrument where the important thing is to be able to read the music and then do the stuff from the written paper. Now this limits you in a curious way because our notation first of all is based on the chromatic scale and secondly it has fixed rhythmic intervals. You have you see your whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note and you can change the value of those notes by dotting them to give them half their value. And you tend to write in bars four four times, three eight or whatever it may be. And when an oriental listens to our music it doesn't matter whether it's a love song or a grandiose tune of praise or whatever. All of it sounds like a military march. Because it's that one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, one two three four five six, one two three four five six, one two three four five six, he hears it all the time. And he hears a mechanism in it. See he hears this absolute regularity. Now in Indian music you'll have bars, a very long measure you can count twenty to the bar sometimes more and when you learn music from a Hindu teacher you don't learn notation. You learn directly from the teacher. In other words he takes the instrument and plays it and you copy him with the same instrument sitting in front of him. And they think you see that notation could never record music. They do use a notation. They use a notation to remember simply themes. There is a certain raag, a certain theme and they can write that down. But they don't play from it. What they do is they according to certain traditional procedures they improvise on the basic forms and you therefore play the instrument and what you're trying to do is to make it as completely as possible responsive to the subtle motions of which a human organism is capable. In other words just as in moving your hand there's an infinity of waves you can put it through so likewise in using your voice there is an infinity of sound that you can produce. Because the same you can with a stringed instrument in moving your finger where there are no rigid stops as there would be on a piano. So on the continuum of a violin you can move your finger and produce an infinity of subtle sound. And what they do is they delight in the infinite possibility of making sound with the human organism and they like instruments which are very easily and directly related to the organism. So the flute, the vena, the drums. These are direct human contact with an instrument. With a piano you've got something interspersed. You've got a hammer mechanism and a rigidly tuned string with a harpsichord the same way the pluck. And when Wanda Landowska, marvellous as she is, plays the harpsichord you get a hurdy gurdy effect. You hear this going on all the time. And the clavichord there is a difference because the clavichord doesn't have a mechanical relationship between the finger and the string. It is a continuous bar so that by every variation of touch you make on a clavichord is represented in the sound. In other words the piano and the harpsichord are like electric typewriters which have a uniform touch whereas the clavichord is more like an old fashioned typewriter where however hard you hit has some effect on the print. So in oriental music that while there is an incredibly subtle discipline and the Hindu drummer can do the most astounding things and you can count it out, he counts it out in his very very elaborate patterns but at the same time there is an attitude about it that is just fascinating. We attended a concert at the De Young Museum a few weeks ago where there was Ali Akbar Khan's orchestra and there was a drummer in this who was just out of this world. And the wonderful thing about it was that as he was playing with the rest of the orchestra they were all talking to each other with their instruments and they made eye contact while they were playing and this guy was just in sheer delight. He was laughing as he was playing and all the other musicians were just loving it. Coming out of their seats. So he was this dead earnest person looking at his music and reading that and doing it. He was joining in with everybody dancing with them. His fingers were like butterflies, hummingbirds better to say just vibrating in the most extraordinary way because it takes years and years and years to learn this. But he was really enjoying it. But what was he saying? They have a language for the drums and they can speak a drum rhythm by using syllables like dit, dee, dit da, dit dee dit da or din, meaning one kind of a hit, din and tin, din, tin, din, tin, din, tin, dit dee dit da, dit dee dit da, dit da, da da da, da da da, da da da, da da da, da da da, da da da. And they explain a rhythm like this sometimes first, they say it and then they play it. But it's all, what's all about? It's all about dit da! I suppose some of you have read a book of mine called The Joyous Cosmology in which I referred to once a very curious experience I had with Hindu music. I happened to have acquired from Timothy Leary some of this extraordinary Mexican mushroom and I was feeling awful. I'd come back from a trip to the East and was tired and I had a sore throat and was just lousy. So I took this thing and at the first it just felt just terrible. Everything turned into mud. You know what you expect of mushrooms, the fungus, everything fungoid and kind of clammy and dark. Well after a while it all changed and I found myself listening to this Hindu music. I didn't know what it was because my host whose house I was at didn't explain anything and I thought when I listened to this, what kind of idiocy is going on? I thought you see my friend with whom I was spending the day is a pretty wild kind of fellow and I thought he'd put on a tape recording of his and his friends antics because they weren't doing anything that anybody's supposed to do. It was like children making faces. You know how they do this, the children love to do something with awful faces and make weird noises. I thought this is just something absolutely absurd going on. Then came this Ditt-Da business in the middle of it. So I said, "Raja, hey let me see the album." And I got the case and here it says, "Classical Music of India, edited by Anand Danyalu, who is the most scholarly, respectable pundit on the subject of Hindu music." I said, "Somebody's pulling my leg." No, not at all. Here was this just babbling sound. Not only do the Ditt-Da business but they also could use their voices like oboes. You know how that [sounds] you put a clothespin on your nose and do an oboe sound. And it sounded like this, it was just this whole kind of business of children just going out of their heads. Well I listened to this and I suddenly realized that that's what life's all about. And you know it was the most fantastic sudden recognition that everything in this world is gloriously meaningless. And there's curlicues like on phones. We get mixed up about it because sometimes we think that a play that is going on when you see a phone it has first of all the main branch then it has sub-branches and out of these sub-branches come sub-sub-branches and out of the sub-sub-branches come sub-sub-sub-branches and so you get a phone. So now you could number each of these levels on which things are happening and you say well this is a number one level this is a number 42 level this is a number 65 level. And you judge events and say it's good, it's bad it's proper, it's improper but what you don't recognize is that you say something is improper because you thought it was a 63 level whereas really it was a 112. And you didn't know you didn't realize the level the thing was on. So actually the whole play of human life with all its joys and sorrows its tragedies, its evils, its good is just something like a phone. And a phone has diseases on it it has tumors on it that means just simply another clan is making its life there. See a clan of bugs of some kind are living there too and they are doing their stuff they are living off the phone the phone is living off something else we are all leaning on each other in one way or another. And I saw this whole thing as this fantastic play. So in order to get into the can you get into that state you see? You get into it by listening to sound. That's one way in there are lots of ways in but one of the easiest ways in is through concentration on a tone. Because you see this is the easiest way to stop thinking for most people. If you just concentrate on a single sound it's very easy to do it you just ride with that sound and this stops your thoughts in other words it stops you talking to yourself inside your head verbalizing and the important thing is if you want the vision of the world as it really is you have to stop talking at least temporarily. Doesn't mean that talking is a bad thing means it's too much of a good thing. So that if you silence talking and you experience yourself just in the same way as you experience that's what's going on and it may be going on you know in a kind of a way that you call nice which is you know it may be going on that way but so what finally it is that that's what's happening and you we're all taught by our mothers and fathers to put a value on it see when it goes a certain way the rhythm of life goes in a certain way when we say oh watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out because that may be the end what will the end be? clunk clunk clunk clunk what's wrong with that? things that stop have to stop things that go on have to go off and things that go off have to go on but you see we get involved by putting a value on it all right now I could say that's bad you shouldn't do it but at the same time getting involved and putting values on it's all part of the game too getting hung up getting hooked so you don't get unhooked by saying to yourself I shouldn't be attached I shouldn't do this I shouldn't do that all you do is you see that getting hooked on it is simply another form of it more nonsense more jazz but deeper jazz so like you feel you have an ego that's an illusion but it's a very weird illusion see it's a very far out scene a person who you might call a square who's thoroughly committed to the illusions of standard life is a very far out person because he doesn't know where he started he's completely lost but you could say it's a great show to get that far out to get that involved in seriousness so when you look at a square who has this determined, set inflexible attitude you have to say secretly you laugh and say my you're doing a wonderful job how far out could you get so you can learn in this way to love squares and this is the only way that will ever change anything you must never condemn the squares with harsh language because they are very far out people they don't know it involved in other words in the ultimate curlicues it's like a labyrinth see all life is a labyrinth it's a system of tubes and there are tubes within tubes within tubes and upon the very very great fringes of this labyrinth you get all kinds of hot house growths very complicated games so complicated that the people involved in them are lost but that's simply a function of being a long way from the center when a fern or any form of plant expands from its center what is happening is this inside the stems and the stalks and the tubes which constitute this organism they're all little creatures and they're going traveling along and they're getting out there they want to go out of course there's always somebody along with them who says now be careful that you get too far out because if you get too far out you spoil the form instead of keeping inside the bounds of the fern you just go off into gas and that would be awful see because you're a fern you're not gas but those little creatures out in the end say man we'd like a gas so they want to get way off but there's something there that says keep out keep out keep out keep it in keep it in keep it in but it is a result of the tension between those little fellows that want to go way out see and the people who want to stay in that you get the outline the clear form of leaf they're working against each other but they are working even though the one thinks it's right and the other thinks it's right they're both right and they're both wrong they're both right and wrong but they do by being both and in a counter position like this they create what we call existence what we call the shape of the leaf the form of the fern so you will find of course that some of them are in fact escaping some of them are going off into gas and some of them are not some of them are staying put and if there weren't some of them going off into gas there would be no energy in the thing you see all energy is a quality of follow through when you hit a golf ball you mustn't stop to hit at the ball you have to go like that see right through so all energies of life are have in them a possibility of an excess of going too far when you bring up your children and you tell your children your various far out ideas and the children suddenly believe in them I'm horrified no all kinds of philosophy I've talked about is being believed by children and they're taking it literally I think oh my god what will they do next but everybody feels that way in regard to the strength of a younger generation that is coming on because this younger generation is mmm energy we think about young people we have terrible ideas we think that we know what life is and that they have to be told that they will learn it from us and be like us we don't take that attitude when we see the new vegetables come up in the spring we don't say the vegetables have to be educated to be vegetables we say hooray at last young vegetables with all the life and energy in them new meals for everything so when we see young people come up say good gracious isn't this great to see the human race is still doing its stuff I wonder what they'll have to teach us because wisdom doesn't come from above down it comes from below up it's where the wisdom is surging into us the old people they have a function but they have it in order to fulfil that function they have to understand first that they can learn from the young sources if they understand that then they can be wise and be teachers if they don't understand that they never can to be wise you have to that's the meaning of saying to enter the kingdom of heaven you have to become again as a child and finally to get back to my point to become as a child means that you do things which adults consider unimportant there is a wonderful Buddhist character his name is Hote in Japanese Putai in Chinese he looks like this (sounds of children playing) (sounds of children playing) (sounds of children playing) (sounds of children playing) (sounds of children playing) (sounds of children playing) (sounds of children playing) And he carries around a bag, an enormous bag, in which he collects rubbish. Every kind of inconsequential rubbish, and gives it away to children. Because children understand the meaning and significance of rubbish. Something which my father, when I was a small boy, once said, "You are a picker up of unconsidered trifles." Because the rubbish is the most wonderful thing in the world, from the point of view of a child. So, once the Zen master was asked, "What is the most valuable thing in the world?" And he answered, "The head of a dead cat." Why? Because no one can put a price on it. So, in this man, you see, who is wandering around picking up rubbish, all the trivialities of life, who sees leaves floating down in the wind and laughs at them, this is becoming again as the child. In other words, from the child's point of view, the things which the adult considers irrelevant to survival, are perfectly important. And so children collect pebbles, and coloured glass, and all sorts of trivia which they consider as precious as diamonds. The adults say, "Oh, frippery." But they really have the secret, you see. Now, the child, as child, doesn't know how to play the adult's game, which is a power game. And so has to be educated to learn the values of the power game, to learn what's what and what is important. But when he has mastered that game, he realizes it has no rewards. That all the things that the adults thought they were gaining by their power game, are after all, not worth having. That's why you can be rich and miserable. So that having learned and having seen through the adult power game, you come back to the point of the child. And so, it said *diblibdiblibibliblib* *clap* *laugh* Well, let's have a brief intermission. We will serve refreshments after seminar. Just a stretch for him. [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 1.46 sec Transcribe: 4339.62 sec Total Time: 4341.73 sec