About the Music 6

In the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma says that the only thing that can be said to be inherent is truth which is not conditioned.

On what should everyone in the world concentrate? There are as many answers as there are people. Joseph Campbell and I would have everyone concentrate on what truthfully heals you and makes you happy. Besides an experience of nature and other people, ambassadorship, medicine, literature, music, art, gardening etc... are possible foci.

Concerning relationships with other people, western traditionalists and some conservatives are well networked. They may meet every Sunday in Church, in the board room or at power lunches. Cultural creatives think they're alone and there's nowhere to meet. The Unitarian Universalist church is trying to be everything but they wind up alienating just about everyone.

Many Buddhists and Hindu's want to eliminate all desire for happiness. This is one of the problems of cultural creatives. But if the truth is that gardening makes you happy now, no amount of Buddhist philosophical gynmnastics about it ULTIMATELY not making you happy since it's not eternal is nonsense in my opinion.

What is eternal is this moment we have now which is all there ever is. If what makes you happy changes over time then change. It's not that difficult to do, in fact, its inevitable. Anyway, we don't need to be copying Jesus or Buddha, we just need to live up to our divine nature.

About The Music 5

Traditionalists looking at Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus see only irreconcilable differences which are quite real. We and the other 1/3rd of America see more of the similarities which are also just as real and want to see how Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism will inform western spirituality and how western spirituality can inform the Eastern. And how a relationship with actual Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus can enrich our lives.

I want a musical form that carries the message of open minded dialogue between cultures, faiths and real people which is why I'm attracted to Indochina and Indonesia. India was, of course, Hindu and China has a long history of Buddhism. Indochina has absorbed the best and worst from both of these immensely important cultures.

So, the dialogue between China and India/ Buddhism and Hinduism has been taking place most intensely in Indochina. Also, from a Buddhist perspective, and while standing in Asia, Christianity and Islam look almost identical. This is the kind of perspective required to move forward now and in the future.

Joseph Campbell said that now, the only appropriae in-group is as a world citizen. I believe this is correct.

My music sometimes uses Middle Eastern rhythms because I want to include Middle Eastern peoples in my world and be included by them in theirs not because of a European feeling of exoticism that doesn't know who the musicians that they're appropriating music from are or their histories. I don't want the styles of electronica either that are empty of context and content.

About 1/4th of America, if you believe some estimates, are the cultural creatives. They're not perfect either. Much of the New age faction seems to think that you can toss logic completely out the wind and buy spirituality.

Maybe that's good for my business but I believe that real spirituality comes from relationships with other peole and with nature. So I'm very serious about having a relationship with people who visit my site whether or not they buy anything. What they seem to want to buy is sometimes Hindu iconography and either Hindu or Buddhist ideas.

In the case of hindu mythology, westerners who adopt it are fooling themselves if they think they can graft an alien religion onto themselves, plagued by all the same problems as our own, while cutting off their own root.

About the Music 3

Joseph Campbell said that Christianity is the overinterpreted parochial history and manufactured geneology of a single sub-race of a south-west Asian-semitic people by no means what its own version of the history of the world makes it out to be. What seems reasonable to Christians is nothing more than the sum total of all their prejudices and myopic views. Today there can be no central point on which to concentrate.

Elsewhere, he says, "though empty barrels make the most noise, they are required for new wine and not the uncritically accepted and/or enforced customs of the old wine. Conformity is not now a necessity.

I once read a criticism by a classical music lover's/conservative's criticism of popular music. He said that pop styles were simplistic because they used pentatonic scales whereas classical music had followed a progression to 7 note scales, then to the use of chromaticism in the romatic era and dodecaphony in the postmodern era and used large orchestras of the most difficult to construct instrumnts that could only be played properly by virtuosos.

I submit that a music's worth (or a person's ) is not determined by where it (or they) are placed in a Darwinian evolutionary scale of complexity or by the expense of the instruments but by the philosophical/ spiritual ground from where it grows and therefore by it's usefullness to living people as opposed to meeting the entertainment needs of dead kings and popes as Frank Zappa has said or by carving out an identity for those who are empty and shallow among the rich by attempting to emulate the wealthy aristocracy of a Europe in ages past.

Some of my acquaintances will not like to hear it but the quickest way to make everyone, except the most arrogant of the filthy rich or their wannabe's, feel alienated is to play opera.