Not too Tight and Not too Loose

“There is a story regarding the Buddha which recounts how he once gave teaching to a famous sitar player who wanted to study meditation. The musician asked, “Should I control my mind or should I completely let go?” The Buddha answered, “Since you are a great musician, tell me how you would tune the strings of your instrument.” The musician said, “I would make them not too tight and not too loose.” “Likewise,” said the Buddha, “in your meditation practice you should not impose anything too forcefully on your mind, nor should you let it wander.” That is the teaching of letting the mind be in a very open way, of feeling the flow of energy without trying to subdue it and without letting it get out of control, of going with the energy pattern of mind. This is meditation practice…
Labeling phenomena creates a feeling of a solid definite world of “things.” Such a solid world reassures us that we are a solid, continuous thing as well. The world exists, therefore I, the perceiver of the world, exist. Meditation involves seeing the transparency of concepts, so that labeling no longer serves as a way of solidifying our world and our image of self. Labeling becomes simply the act of discrimination…
There is no need to struggle to be free; the absence of struggle is in itself freedom. This egoless state is the attainment of Buddhahood. The process of transforming the material of mind from expressions of ego’s ambition into expressions of basic sanity and enlightenment through the practice of meditation—this might be said to be the true spiritual path.
Such practice is necessary generally because our thinking pattern, our conceptualized way of conducting our life in the world, is either too manipulative, imposing itself upon the world, or else runs completely wild and uncontrolled. Therefore, our meditation practice must begin with ego’s outermost layer, the discursive thoughts which continually run through our minds, our mental gossip."
~ Chögyam Trungpa, Introduction to CUTTING THROUGH SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM
Photo ~ Ravi Shankar (right) in Los Angeles in 1967 with George Harrison Photo: AP
"For Ravi Shankar, for whom playing the sitar was a spiritual calling as well as a musical one, it was a cause of evident unhappiness to find the instrument he loved in lesser hands, and played in a bastardised form as a lazy musical shorthand for a wigged-out psychedelic experience. So distressed was he by the way his music was – as he saw it – misunderstood by pop audiences that after Woodstock he decided to “cleanse” himself by performing only in concert halls.
Shankar’s father was an eminent Bengali pandit and lawyer, who favoured Savile Row suits and English mistresses, and abandoned the family shortly after Ravi’s birth. Shankar would not meet him until he was eight years old. More influential was his elder brother Uday, a dancer and choreographer who established the first Indian dance troupe to perform in the West. The young Ravi toured Europe as a dancer and musician – acquiring his father’s taste for dapper attire, expensive hotels and female company on the way – before returning to India to study the sitar under the master Allaudin Khan, and eventually emerging as the foremost virtuoso of the instrument.
He could be a man of baffling contradictions, whose outward appearance of humility and spirituality could disguise a certain hauteur. Reflecting fondly on his faithful and long-serving tabla-player, Alla Rakha, who accompanied him for 27 years, Shankar once observed that he was finally obliged to dispense with his services; not because Rakha was “rather fond of a drink or two”, not even because of his strange obsession with Bonanza and Hawaii Five-O, but because “I needed someone younger, not only as an accompanist but to carry all my shoulder bags.”
Shankar always resented the Western tendency of “segregating off” Indian classical music as “ethnic” music, and therefore less deserving of serious consideration. But his mastery carried all before it. His death comes just six days after he earned his most recent Grammy Award nomination for Best World Music Album for his 2012 recording, The Living Room Sessions, Part 1.
Of course, the category would not have existed but for Shankar. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a revolutionary – and always an uncompromising one. A few years ago, I saw him perform at Womad, the Mecca of world music. At the beginning of his performance he felt it necessary once more to reprimand the audience, for making too much noise. He was trying to tune up."
~ Mick Brown, The Telegraph