I realize #39

The intellect, all that we call knowledge, and the cultivation thereof is but the means by which we play a very interesting game in our life, a very interesting act, but which however is not totality of life, but only a part of it for indeed it arises from it. Therefore we must not succumb to the confusion of identifying with this game of intellectual pursuit, of discussions and debates, of playing hide and seek by placing big distances between what we 'know' and what we 'don't know'... This game is just like any other game that is played for the pure enjoyment thereof, because it is interesting - and in that sense it is also significant. This game is not something serious, for it arises from thought and thought is immaterial and in constant flux, it has no substance except in relation to this game and other thoughts. Take it too seriously and we become blind to the fact of its non-importance, out of which its very sense of importance arises, as if to justify itself. Play it, and play it well by enjoy yourself while doing it, always remembering that if it ceases to be a game and becomes something 'serious', something terribly important, something which in one way or another IS life, then it loses all its potency and becomes a drag, makes one anxious and hopelessly stuck.

Feldman's words of wisdom

MF: One of the tragedies of music education is that it doesn't produce composers. I turned down a very good job a year or two ago, because my idea of teaching just isn't what's happening in departments. I didn't want my students involved in performance groups, or in writing music for performance. [...] The trouble with music composition as taught in colleges is that what you're learning has only one word: analysis. You're given models, and the implication is that there's a secret to learn that will help you compose. That's the first tragic assumption.

Q: But haven't developments in music always taken place in response to previous developments? It would have been impossible for Beethoven to write as he did without knowing what had been done by Mozart and Haydn.

MF: I don't feel that Beethoven really emerged from Mozart and Haydn.

Q: Well, let's just say that he took forms from them; whatever he did was on the basis of forms which had been developed in the past.

MF: But forms are tricky things - there are so few of them in music. You sound much more realistic than me: of course, how could I have developed if I didn't have Webern and if I didn't have Varèse? But I never consciously used them as models.

Q: So what should music education be doing?

MF: I think it should just be for performers; I don't think composition should be taught. It's interesting that the four most influential composers in America today - myself, Earle and Cage, and Christian Wolff really because he's a classicist - had no connections and no training in music departments. So my attitude is: keep everything as human as possible, create a sense of proportion, good atmosphere to work, quietude, fantastic people there to help when they need them, and let them quietly get discouraged and get out of this tentative commitment they made; rather than creating some kind of Utopia.

Arunachala Ramana's last words

“Take no position.

Be happy.”

Alan Watts' words of wisdom

“You don't need to try to be God, you are! But if you try to be God it means you don't know you are, and therefore you try to know and dominate the future, and you believe prophets and things like that. Well, prophecy is simply contaminating the future with the past, projecting what we know upon the unknown. And that's why, really, things like Astrology, although interesting, are rather ridiculous. Because if you know the future there's no surprise for you. A completely known future is past, you've had it. ”

- Alan Watts

Alan Watts : Beat Zen

“[...]the Westerner who is attracted by Zen and who would understand it deeply must have one indispensable qualification: he must understand his own culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its premises unconsciously. He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear or rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either "beat" or "square," either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability. For Zen is above all the Liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adopting foreign conventions, on the other.”

“The point is simply that people who feel a profound need to justify themselves have difficulty in understanding the viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who created Zen were the same kind of people as Lao-Tzu, who, centuries before, said, "Those who justify themselves do not convince." For the urge to make or prove oneself right has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous, since as both Confucians and Taoists-however different these philosophies in other ways-they have invariably appreciated the man who can "come off it." ”

Article

Zen: Words #1

“For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death is only one instance of a more general problem, dualistic thinking. Why is dualistic thinking a problem? We differentiate between good and evil, success and failure, life and death, and so forth because we want to keep the one and reject the other. But we cannot have one without the other because they are interdependent: affirming one half also maintains the other. Living a "pure" life thus requires a preoccupation with impurity, and our hope for success will be proportional to our fear of failure. We discriminate between life and death in order to affirm one and deny the other, and, as we have seen, our tragedy lies in the paradox that these two opposites are so interdependent: there is no life without death and--what we are more likely to overlook--there is no death without life. This means our problem is not death but life-and-death.”

Dōgen, Soto Zen Founder (1200 - 1253 AD)

I realize #38

Enlightenment = En+Light = With Light = Being light as a feather

Cling on and you lose it.. Let go and you have it!

Alan Watts on Self

“Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”

“Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, "Why, that's me!" And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.”

Shunryu Suzuki: Study Yourself

From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Seek the seeker

“You are the Self, nothing but the Self. Anything else is just imagination. So be the Self, here and now. There is no need to run off to a forest or shut oneself in a room. Carry on with your essential activities but free yourself from the association with the 'doer' of them. Self is the witness; You Are That.”

- Sri Ramana Maharshi