The Mysticism of Sound and Music

I had high hopes for Hazrat Inayat Khan's "modern classic".  And it certainly had many inspiring ideas as well as interesting insights and beautiful passages.  But ultimately this book is neither one I will come back to nor especially recommend.  I think this disappointment mainly stems from the fact that I was looking for a book about music that happened to be written by a mystic, whereas Khan is a mystic who happens to write about music.  

As a musician and musicologist himself, music is of course central to Inayat Khan's Sufi mysticism.  This is, however, really only because music stands as the most obvious experience we have of the vibrations which are, for Inanyat Khan, the ultimate nature of the universe.  Rhythm and tone are thus simply the most abstract form of a cycle, a succession of opposites, which in the end always symbolizes the synthesis of these opposites into a harmonious unity.  Music expresses the divine harmony of the universe.  It's one of the great wonders of the world that the formless and abstract world of music holds such intense emotional power for us.  Here is a 'cosmic vibration' that we can feel directly, both in its intellectual and sensual beauty.  In fact, given the Islamic penchant for a purely geometric art, I think one would naturally expect a similar use of music.  After all, it's hard to think of a better or more moving metaphor for the non-idolatrous worship of the 'face' of God.  Indeed, this seems to be precisely the Sufi position on the matter, even though apparently this makes them quite the minority in the Islamic world. 

Now, I would hardly object either to mysticism or to the use of music as an analogy in a mystical context.  Unfortunately, lifting music up to this metaphysical plane can tend to rob it of its specificity.  This is one of the problems that besets any articulation of mysticism.  Since all things and all practices converge on the ineffable divine, the distinctions between them tend to dissolve and the starting points to become relatively meaningless.  This can be either feature or bug, depending on your perspective.  On the one hand, the divine is always only one step away.  On the other hand, every step we take becomes in some sense the same.  From the latter perspective, mystical thinking can become a bit repetitive, and that is certainly one of the things that made this book less enjoyable.  Part of this repetitiveness stems from the fact that it was not written as a book but is merely a collection of unrelated public lectures for general audiences that Inayat Khan gave in the mid 1920's.  But part of it is inherent to the nature of his mystical beliefs, which center on the omnipresent, unified, and unique nature of God.  Since all doors necessarily open to a single divinity, the particular resonance of music with that divine can fade into the background. 

The Ware Tetralogy

A while back, Rudy Rucker's massive four novel Ware series migrated out of the cat bookstore and onto my shelf, likely because I saw it had won the Philip K. Dick award.  Remind me that not all awards are created equal.  It's not that the first two novels in the series (Software and Wetware) aren't fairly entertaining sci-fi on the Philip K. Dick cyberpunk model -- but award winning?  They just didn't seem to me to have that much going for them either in the domain of unexpected ideas or in terms of writing craft.  I mean, our brains are just software, man!  Maybe kinda prescient in 1982?  But not an idea that's explored here from a philosophical angle.  And while the very PKD concept of describing futuristic drug highs is interesting in concept, it turns out that describing any drug high is actually kinda boring.  Just ask your stoner friends to tell you about their last epic trip.  Let me guess, it was crazy!  So crazy they spent the whole time giggling on the couch.  Getting high might be fun, but reading about it isn't.  More interesting would be the action of the second novel, where the 'bopper' robots are killed off by a strain of "chipmold" that decimates all silicon before creating a newly intelligent symbiotic fusion with a type of plastic called 'moldies'.  Wetware is surely the high point of the collection, and has the most interesting characters and twists and turns.  

After that, things go downhill in pretty much every way.  I have the impression that after his earlier success, Rucker decided he was 'a writer', and so when he returns ten years later to continue the saga, we find a less interesting story saddled with much more florid prose and a bunch of irrelevant gossip that I suppose one would file under 'character development'.  Rucker should have stuck with his hardboiled pulp fiction style all the way.  Judging from the first two books, the results might still have been of uneven quality, but at least this would have fit with the spirit of the award. 

Already Free

I don't remember how I heard about Bruce Tift, but I've long been interested in the intersection contained in his book's subtitle, "Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation".  Tift is both a practicing individual and couples therapist, as well as a long time student of Chögyam Trungpa's Vajrayna Buddhism, so I imagined he would be drawing parallels between the two approaches.  Since we've already seen a couple of books that discuss psychotherapy almost as if it were a spiritual path in its own right, one that the authors seem to take as almost perfectly parallel to Buddhism, I was a bit surprised when Tift began his discussion by suggesting that perhaps the two cannot be unified.  

While it sounds provocative at first, Tift hardly thinks that Buddhism and psychotherapy are incompatible.  What he wants to point out is that they have distinctly different aims.  Very roughly speaking, psychotherapy aims to give you a better, more adult, self, while Buddhism aims to let go of the self entirely.  Tift thinks that both the "developmental view" of psychotherapy and the "fruitional view" of Buddhism are valuable and can be effectively pursued in sequence or in alternation, but he wants to first emphasize how these different paths with different aims.  Rather than merging the two, his conception of their relationship actually reminded me more of Tucker's mantra "process when you can, content when you have to".  If we are able to step back and see the process by which our sense of self and its problems arise and pass away, then these phenomena suddenly become much less sticky and problematic just through the opening of this space of Awareness.  However, we are not always able to do this, and in these cases, we need to work directly with the problematic content to try and uncover exactly where the problem lies.  In the book, Tift mostly treats the relationship between the two approaches as a sequence of development.  He outlines a map that moves from a pre-personal phase through personal and interpersonal phases before culminating in the nonpersonal.  But it would probably be a mistake to interpret the map as exclusively linear, and if we recognize that we are all still in the pre-personal phase with some things some of the time, the whole schema may not different substantially from process when you can, content when you have to.

Naturally, the book contains much more than this simple thesis about the relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy.  In truth, it's more of a dharma book that you value for its many little nuggets of insight than a traditional non-fiction book that you value for its information.  Which perhaps somewhat excuses the fact that it felt a bit repetitive and could have easily been half as long.  Some of the things that will most stick with me are simple but powerful ideas that Tift repeated many times -- don't be aggressive towards your experience, don't try to make it change, don't look for the source of problems outside yourself but try to uncover an internal fear or need that converts an experience into a problem.  All these fit well with my current practice of expanding the scope of receptive awareness to include and even love more and more unwanted and disturbing (in the sense of disequilibrating) content.  

The other bit of the book I found particularly useful were the two chapters devoted to Tift's reflections on how our intimate relationships can be powerful vehicles for waking up.  For a couples therapist, he presents a surprising view of relationships as fundamentally disturbing.  These are encounters where we find our buttons pushed hard and repeatedly, which, if we let go of the idea that the aim of intimacy is a harmonious calm, makes it the perfect place to apply our spiritual practices.  In fact, Tift almost treats being part of a couple as a form of exposure therapy -- through it we widen our tolerance for feeling anxious, misunderstood, suffocated, and alone (as well as sometimes delighted and comforted).  This seems like a powerful reorientation to what's 'problematic' in our lives.  Take my wife ... please.  If she doesn't kill me, she'll make me stronger!  Just kidding honey.

The Subtle Body

Let me keep this short.  Cyndi Dale's Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy is gobbledygook.  

I've been working with 'energy' in my meditation practice for a while now.  I can't tell you what energy is, but I can tell you that it is as real as any other phenomenon -- it has a repeatable structure independent of my whims that has a reciprocal impact on other structures I habitually take to be real like my thoughts and body.  To affect and be affected is pretty much the definition of reality as far as I'm concerned. So I don't think the book is bafflegab (op. cit.) because I think energy is bunk.  I picked it up in hopes of, well, better understanding my energetic anatomy. 

Instead, I got a rambling incoherent explanation of what energy is, filled with dubious metaphysical assumptions, junk science, and confused appeals to renegade 'authorities' (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one).  The most useful part of the book is the chapter entitled "Energy Practices", which lists out every different kind of 'new age' healing modality the author has ever heard of and provides a brief comment about each modality.  While I've only ever tried acupuncture, I'm quite sure that many of the other modalities listed here are very effective.  However, you certainly wouldn't be able to figure out which one is likely to be effective for you from this poorly organized and summary information.  This one is going straight into the cat bookstore pile. 

Underworld

I believe it was a recent NYT article that insisted Underworld was Don DeLillo's masterpiece.  Since I vaguely remembered enjoying White Noise, I thought I would give it a try.  Unfortunately, at 800 pages it felt to me too sprawling and overlong to really fall in love with.  However, there are lots of things to like about the novel.  The writing alone kept me from ever putting it down.  Mid-career DeLillo seems to be completely in command of his craft; at some points the writing is so dense with overlapping voices and textures that it feels almost woven.  The plot too has so many threads and characters that intersect in various ways that, when you don't feel smothered by attempting to reassemble the plan of all this complexity, you can always let yourself drift from one splendidly drawn detail to the next.  There are even certain moments of sublime beauty that will stick with me -- the painting on the B-52s, the climax with George the waiter.  But in many ways I thought the book was a bit ... indulgent, a bit nostalgic and autobiographical in a way reminiscent of Ada.  After a while it becomes like eating too much candy at once.  Or like idly reflecting on the unity, or lack thereof, in our our own lives.  Certainly, there are worse things that indulging the nostalgic daydreams of an aging great writer.  But, then again, perhaps there are better things. 

A Canticle For Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller's retro sci-fi apocalypse arrived in the mail as a birthday gift apparently designed to remind me of my mortality (thanks EA!).  While I don't want to spoil it by giving too much away, I think it's fine to say that it tells the story of how all things pass away from a deeply Catholic perspective -- roughly speaking, the endless cyclic instability of the world is laid at the doorstep of original sin.  That said, one hardly needs to be a Catholic to read or enjoy the book (though some knowledge of Latin would have helped).  It's a well told story with a number of surprising twists that, despite its clear message, does not browbeat the reader like a pedantic allegory.  In fact, in the end, there is even a profoundly weird and rather subversive ray of hope for 'humanity'.  Just don't pick it up with the expectation of feeling comforted about turning 50.

Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree

Ajahn Buddhadasa was a pretty prolific writer, so if you hang around dharma circles long enough, you almost can't avoid hearing about his books.  This one came particularly recommended because it dealt with the always slippery concept of emptiness, or as the translator perfers, voidness.  In fact, though, Buddhadasa has not written a book on suññatā in order to treat some sort of special topic -- in his view emptiness is the very heart of the Buddha's teaching, and the only practice that really matters.  At first, coming from a Theravadan, this sounds surprising.  But as I've gradually learned more about the Thai Forest tradition, I've realized that the common denominator for this school is an emphasis on very open approach to the concept of 'direct experience'.  Unlike the much more systematic Burmese approach which gave us the now popular notion of 'mindfulness', the Thai Forest teachers I've encountered so far seem to be much less obsessed with maps of progress, and much less prescriptive of what you should find when you look at experience.  

Indeed, Buddhadasa's whole book is devoted to what you will not find in experience -- a solid and separate essential self.  For him, emptiness always means emptiness of self, though he makes clear that everything (including objects we don't normally think of as having selves) is empty of self.  The book then gradually unfolds level after level of how we can let go of the craving for "I" and "mine", the craving for self, that causes so much of our suffering.  It's really a wonderful simplification of the Buddha's method, and Buddhadasa's writing has a sort of renegade 'cutting though' edge to it that befits a guy who headed off into the forest to escape the bullshit of monastic politics.  So it's a straightforward book that you can hand to a beginner as a guide to making sense of all this emptiness nonsense.  But at the same time, the topic is so deep that I'll probably end up coming back to this one again for further inspiration.