Boredom and the lost art of listening

'A Tantric master, Trungpa, has written that some meditation should be boring, should be as boring as possible, because in intense boredom all our habitual responses and concepts are dissolved. The mind's terror of boredom is the more acute because the mind suspects that through boredom, through its extreme experience, another reality might be reached that would threaten its pretensions, and perhaps even dissolve them altogether.'
Andrew Harvey writes in A Journey in Ladakh. Terry Riley's in C provides the header image and Jeroen van Veen dissolves all habitual responses in an over-dubbed performance using keyboards and samplers in his 9 CD Minimal Piano Collection. The lost art of listening path started here.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Image of Terry Riley's in C from synthopia.com Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Pliable said…
I am also reminded of this quote:

"The space of Muslim spirituality, which rejects all mediations between God and man, is a decentred space. Here, infinity is suggested not by organic integration but by addition and rhythmic repetition."

The source is the out of print Islam; Religion of Beauty by an author who writes well on architecture but otherwise I very much want to keep at arms length, Roger Garaudy.
Anonymous said…
I think that music should, perhaps, try to strike the right balance between dealing with the immediate, the 'here-and-now' experience, and the anticipation of change, self-referential transformation.

This is exactly what I had in mind when working on my Etude #2:

http://algorithmic-concepts.blogspot.com/2011/07/etude-2-visions-fugitives-imitating.html

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