Welcoming the Sound

Me, a musician, my whole life…

I, who have spent so many hundreds of hours trying to tame exercises and scales, trying to appropriate the fluid languages of sound aesthetics….
Today I notice that music actually ruins silence.

It provides sound material to auditory consciousness and traps it in a restricted spectrum, when it could embrace the broad spectrum of silence, this sound consciousness is the vector, the provider of consciousness, of the mind. I understand the 6 consciousnesses of Buddhism.
The consciousness of the mind is nourished in the same way as sight, smell…

Obviously, it is not a question of languishing in the darkness, the absence of all sound and all olfactory, gustatory, tactile stimuli…

.But of developping the possibility of welcoming them without letting ourselves be sucked in, without letting the spectrum of consciousness be reduced to the field that these stimuli impose.

Cultivate broad consciousness.

Through practice, we can understand, which is not obvious to a Westerner, that this consciousness (6th sense) is very distinct from each of the other 5 senses and does not constitute, as I have long thought, a super sense, actually encompassing all the others.
(Although a certain hierarchy, a certain production relationship is still possible but not as radically as 5 in 1.)

Thus, awareness of the processes of the mental universe (sense of consciousness) is different, and counter-intuitively, easier to exercise than auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactory awareness.
Each of them has a specific channel through which it comes into contact with a corresponding object.

And each of these channels is a vector of practice in itself.

Our sitting practice allows to ride it for a while and observe the relationships that these expressions of consciousness maintain, the way in which they are linked to each other… and the perspective taken from thoughts which does not extinguish them.

These areas of practice appear to me even more dazzling than that of the mind and constitute a reservoir of observation and knowledge.

©FJ May 2024
Recueils / Participation/ Groupe