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i find sitting meditations more difficult than more active kinds.
for me, playing piano is a meditative exercize.
but i dont think of it as meditation--it is more a type of activity. the activity is about reaching the zero from the viewpoint of consciousness that is tied to language, but it is not at all about suspending thinking more generally.
it is simply about a different way of thinking.
if you have had the experience of catching a glass as it falls off a table before you register that anything has happened consciously, then you know that there is a segment of mental operation (at least) that precedes and to some extent conditions how your mind interacts with the world.
music can be a device that enables you to extend this kind of interaction.
language as it turns out is slow: your conscious experience--which is mostly a function of memory, which is organized through linguistic structures-is slow. you map affect (feel emotion) across this same organization.
my experience with the zero is one of feeling nothing, loosing time: it is not a space of particular perceptual distortions with reference to my own body simply because it is tied to an activity (playing) and is shaped through that activity.
when i was younger i would have explicit experiences tied to transitions--but as i got older, that stopped. now i dont feel anything.
it is strange...the space playing opens onto is fascinating, but i dont have a meta-level going on within it and so am not checking in with myself to see how i am registering (or having the experience of...) that space. it seems to me that the sense of having an experience gets in the way of the space, that you need to let that go or it will continue to get in the way.
for myself, i learn the outlines of the space opened through the zero from recordings. they are like maps. i listen to them first as a map, then as a guide for refocussing how i am thinking about what i am doing. i think about what i am doing when i am not playing. the trick is to open up ways to shift adjustments that you are thinking about into adjustments in the process. the reason i say trick is only that you cant do it directly.
at least i dont imagine that you can.
in the end, the mechanism of transfer is not important.
experience with the zero is part of a process---where you can get to changes over time--there is no state--you can't reproduce a state, you can't go back, only forward--trying for reproduction will not help you.
this is some of how i think about this kind of space.
i don't find the languages of religion or mysticism aesthetically compelling so i do not think of what i am doing in those terms---the space i am talking about is very abstract, lots of lines and colors and sound--tempermentally, the changing of it all is one of its most lovely features--so it make little sense to me to go the route of more fully articulated traditions, which use set images to focus the attention and set rituals to get to that focus.
all this kind of activity is more ordinary and more bendable than you think.
the reason it seems strange is simply that we operate within a cultural context that does not privilege this kind of activity. so it gets routed through the language of mysticism. and if that language appeals to you, then that's what it is. if it doesn't, then it is something else.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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