Andrew: I appreciate your time and replies Vineeto!
I have read the “circle a thought” and then meander discussion before. It is lovely to be living it somewhat. Last night it was important to get out of bed and make more notes, as it’s the usual way to forget everything soon enough, and no amount of “circling or stars” will cause me to remember.
FYI, “grunge” was a style of punk rock music which rose to global popularity in the early 1990s, led by a band called Nirvana. It was iconoclastic, as far as the popular music scene was concerned, and defined the generation which was beginning to be called “gen X”, the children of the post war “baby boomers”.
I don’t know if previous generations had names for each other. It’s pretty eye opening to see the generations changing so rapidly with the advent of technology!
Hi Andrew,
You are very welcome. The generations before the baby boomers were ‘the great war generation’, the ‘between the wars generation’ and the ‘2nd world war generation’, followed by a generation instinctive-naturally replenishing the enormous population which was killed in the 2nd world war. (link)
Thank you for explaining what “grunge” stands for. In combination with the music video you posted (GoGo Penguin) (link) I am forming the impression that “gen X” was widely influenced by modern and post-modern buddhistic teachings and practices (such as taught at DhO), and the video you said was “one of my favourites over the last decade” had a somewhat soothing trance-like quality – a single short theme branching out in slight variations and returning to the original theme. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Gotama the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths where ‘Nirvana’ is the name of the Promised Land. It’s worth repeating the core of what seems to have helped shape a whole generation including its art-forms, as a result of the search of the previous generation (especially the first ‘Noble Truth’) –
- Life is fundamentally disappointment and suffering;
- suffering is a result of one’s desires for pleasure, power, and continued existence;
- in order to stop disappointment and suffering one must stop desiring; and
- the way to stop desiring and thus suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path – right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right awareness, and right concentration. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Whatever preference you pick to keep or throw out, it’s certainly time to recognize that this wide-spread religious ‘solution’ has not worked, don’t you think?
Andrew: Which, ironically is what my mind is consumed with these days. Which piece of technology will I purchase to make music! Haha, so very not musical!
There is decades of this drama in me. This “instant masterpiece conundrum” playing out. I feel myself passionately in ‘here’ somewhere. Each time I start to think through the objective of what it is I want to musically achieve, the more money that is going to cost!
Time to get some sticks and an animal skin drum. The modern world is determined I go back to being broke, just to make ‘music’.
It is very much a “put your money where your mouth is” scenario! Whilst the music itself costs nothing and it’s my own belonging to society which causes me to crave the expensive and unnecessary trappings of modern music production.
I have guitars sitting in front of me. Why do I crave recording myself? Well, some of it isn’t egotistical and vainglorious, but rather missing the feeling of creating music with others. I used to be in bands, and had quite a few experiences of transcending myself when playing music. Once in front of around 3000 people! Other times in church, a few times in pubs.
Personally I think you can do a lot better than your favourite band – some fun, some liveliness, an expression of the exuberance and splendour, of the magnificence of the universe and this moment of being alive.
For this exuberance and joie de vivre to be set free, however, requires remembering your recent realisation regarding the nub of the issue – “‘I’/ ‘me’ want to sustain ‘myself’” and to translate it into practice.
The more you act on this realisation, i.e. actively diminish yourself and are consequently more able to enjoy and appreciate being here, the more the quality of your creativity will increasingly express how you experience life. Diminishing your bank account alone by buying equipment won’t be enough.
Andrew: Hmm. I am enjoying this exploration. (link)
Excellent, keep going. There is so much more to come.
Andrew: The idea occurred to me that this fear, the “immediate perfection complex” has to be something that a 2 year old would feel. None of the elaborate stories about art, or anything else can be the source.
If indeed it has anything to do with getting things “perfect” at all!
It could be anything, but it has to be something formed at and before 2 years old.
Potentially some sort of early false self imagination. That in the environment I was, all was scary?
It’s encouraging to simplify it all like this. (link)
I understand that you are curious to find out when it was and what it was which stifled you, but Richard describing his own dealing with ‘his’ childhood hurts may give you some immediate release from it all – if “‘I’/ ‘me’” who wants “to sustain ‘myself’” can give permission to have them released, that is –
Richard: Speaking personally, the feeling-being inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago instantaneously rid ‘himself’ of the bulk of those school-age hurts and slights—whilst sitting out in the sunshine one fine morning, putting pencil to paper in order to finally record those dastardly events for posterity, as per a long-held and cherished ambition to do so at length—via seeing-in-a-flash that, as it was simply not possible to ever physically be a child again (and thus juvenilely susceptible to not only those bully-boys and feisty-femmes but any enabling teachers and principals as well), there was absolutely no need whatsoever to continue nursing them as a carryover grudge. It soon became increasingly apparent, thereafter, how those childhood hurts had been vital to the maintenance of the righteous indignation which fuelled ‘his’ plaints of injustice (a.k.a. ‘unfairness’) and, thus, ‘his’ mission to bring justice (a.k.a. ‘fairness’) to the world.
Also, with the dissolution of those childhood hurts the (deeply felt) need for any aggressive tit-for-tat modus vivendi also vanishes—leaving one free to treat all others as fellow human beings rather than as adversaries to gain dominion over. [emphasis added]. (Richard, Selected Correspondence, Aggression, 21 January 2016).
Cheers Vineeto