Sean McHugh

Peace be with you- there are many paths to God and Maharishi helped millions of people; I've practiced TM since 94 and though don't see him as perfect his translations and commentaries are extremely fine. It's always a shame to see different perspectives on the Veda getting antagonistic- that's not the Hindu way, needless to say: he was one of many great Indian spiritual leaders.

Of course it doesn't. Art and aesthetics is next to divinity, whereas intellectual transparency is next to rationality and outward, superficial understanding.

Great stuff you folks. I notice there's plenty of Prabhupada's rather literal Gita commentary cited here. I'd always draw attention to the Maharishi equivalent, which only extends through chapters 1-6 but which is surely the most poetic, ravishingly beautiful and hence faithful translation...

Many many thanks for those details replies, which I've read with much interest. An attachment to the ebb and flow of the relative material world is a mistake and instead, operation from a transcendent position is needed. However my question is this- that liberated operation has a logic, indeed is based on absolute truth, not discursively understandable or perspicuous truth but a truth concerned with more intuitive movement and necessary rightness. And this movement is the movement of the gunas, unless I'm mistaken. For instance if someone is cold or sad, you will intuitively try to warm or cheer them: needless to say we do not rise to a position beyond the dualities of the relative world altogether- we are still in it, just not of it. We act under the gunas of nature but perfectly, because our relation with them is now transcendental and not fruitive: we don't help the person because of any reason, except that they need help. So we can say that divine action is based on the gunas, or nature, or the logic or dynamic of the Self? Yes?

I wonder if you can add anything to this. Gita 2:45 of course says 'be without the three gunas', these being the three basic forms or tendencies of relative, material nature. However once we are established in divine consciousness, separated from the realm of the gunas doing its own thing beneath us, our thought and action comes from Nature- which is expressed by the gunas. My understanding is that the distinction here is between an affected and unaffected relation with the gunas, perhaps either maya or one-pointedness. 4:20 speaks of even in the midst of activity 'he does not act at all'- ie being on the level of the gunas of Nature action is necessarily perfect, but if the Self is attached to the senses and lost in their objects, we need to 'be without' the gunas.

Hi Murali, well no there's no summary. It's part of a longer project, but how can you summarise any Vedic-influenced thought? Summaries are concerned with hierarchies rather than the whole.

I live on the same road as this temple- it's a fabulous place, very active and well run, and increasingly luxurious and impressive. I contributed to the Wiki article (Venkateswara Balaji temple, Tividale), inc a few photos links.

Fortunately back in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:City><st1:place>Barisal</st1:place></st1:City> to get north to the capital <st1:place>Dhaka</st1:place> there’s a pleasant overnight large ferry boat with a cabin, all for a pittance. I found a KFC restaurant in Dhaka and thought I'd go inside for something familiar and relax for a while- a mistake: a fast food restaurant is an artefact imported from a foreign culture and the kind of driven linear rationality and organisation underlying its operation is quite alien to most non-Westerners; you can see them trying hard to think along these lines and make it work, but it doesn't come naturally at all and there's this unsure and concerned expression on their faces. The food made me quite badly sick, vomit at first plus a temperature for a couple of days, though it may have been just down the ice-cream I had at the end: it was selling well but you shouldn't really eat anything not seen prepared and cooked before you, and ice cream is notorious for having been thawed and refrozen, freezing not killing bacteria anyway. You can never afford to be off your guard in developing countries. Lastly couple of thoughts that come to mind here are the surprising quality of the English speaking <st1:country-region><st1:place>Bangladesh</st1:place></st1:country-region> newspaper and, despite being well disposed to <st1:country-region><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region> for an Islamic country, its very critical, even conspiratorial columns on American foreign policy, way beyond what gets passed for printing in the conditioned British papers. Finally the pollution in <st1:place>Dhaka</st1:place>, like Kolkata, is an experience, a murky haze of partially burned hydrocarbons and construction dust you can feel as you breathe: in the day you can wonder if your glasses have fogged up and at night it's visible in headlights, when vehicles have these, as though there's a thick snowstorm on. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:" /><o:p></o:p> On my return flight to Kolkata (from Thailand) I sat next to a lady in the Hare Krishna movement who was going with a group of mostly white Australians to a festival at a small town a few hours from the city; she suggested I come take a look with them and I provisionally agreed. They seemed really into it, most had Indian attire and had apparently all changed their names to ones in the Vedic tradition; they were also a little defensive when I explained I practiced TM, based on a slightly different interpretation of the Vedic texts. Of course something like this needs good organisation and the fun started soon enough: the head of the group wore long pink robes, spoke Bengali and could cite the Bhagavad Gita at will to me in Sanskrit: it was 1am and he went to get two taxis to take us to a cheap hotel not far from the airport- they'd come from Brisbane with a stopover in Bangkok of a couple of hours, exhausted and jet lagged, 6am for them. The taxi drivers didn't care either way for his language skills and smilingly saw the situation in an instant: they soon got out of him the group's travel plans to drive to the festival town in the morning, and were then on going to do all they possibly could to take us there that night- they could see the passengers were disorientated, meek unworldly foreigners and there was no way they were going to let them regroup, get better taxis with roof racks for their over packed baggage, consider taking the train, or of course sort the right price the next day. I realised later, when I got the bus to the city the next day, they’d ignored from the start the instructions to go to the hotel he had in mind and immediately began droving out of town: as the buildings thinned out and the roads darkened the chances of hotels passing would lessen and it'd seem the drivers were indeed right that there weren't many, or were all full or closed- the standard two excuses. The sight of dusty quiet roads lit by little fires in urban India looks more than a little sinister and scary if you're unused to it; they took us to two places, the first of which indeed shut or too dilapidated, and the second in collusion with the drivers to lie at length to the leader, saying they didn't have the required three rooms. Throughout this I explained to him exactly what was happening and got out at the hotels to bounce around, look down the street for others and tell people, to the drivers' faces, that we were deliberately being taken to useless hotels and it was ridiculous suggesting there was no accommodation in the city- there would have been dozens of places between the airport and the centre, where there are then always rooms at the travellers area around Sudder street, and indeed where I'd stayed at on two separate occasions in recent weeks. We could have told the drivers they had to take us or they wouldn't be paid, but the leader just said he'd talk to them. I'm not sure how much they asked for to drive to the town but it was enough to leave the leader pretty shocked and unsure, yet after the second hotel he asked the others again if they wanted to drive through the night. They decided on this, and of course at this point I parted company and stayed at the hotel, which had at least a dozen rooms inside; I had to pay R600 (about 7 pounds) despite protestations and threats to walk off, instead of R200 what it was worth- but it could have been worse, and I hadn't paid the drivers anything. The other passengers were also reticent and of course lamely sided with the majority and what seemed superficially to be right: it's quite interesting that on several occasions before that this sort of thing's arisen with others, they've also ignored me, even when they know I'm experienced and know what's going on, and telling them explicitly- and instead they go with the outward flow and propriety of things: they certainly have a great propensity to stay in a sheep-like majority-led position and to think it's me who's crazy. They'd have been in some trouble. Firstly driving at night is never to be attempted unless essential because of the accident rate with the road surface, hazardous traffic conditions and poor or non-existent street and other vehicle lighting. There's also risk of robbery, especially coming direct from the airport with baggage, computers (ridiculous) and cash, and of course possible collusion of the drivers in this, being 'surprised' of course running into an ambush. The two women were being poorly looked after- they'd had enough and like the rest had no refreshments or washroom break: they didn't need the leader to ask them if they wanted to find a hotel. And it wouldn't stop when they got to their destination, they'd be faced with every possible piece of deception the drivers could think of to get them to another hotel for a commission, which would charge them as much as they'd be stupid and dazed enough to pay: it’s hard to imagine the drivers agreeing to take them to their intended destination, in the middle of the night in an unknown environment where they have little choice and a lot of pressure can be applied, or even admit they knew where it was, and goodness knows what extra night charges, bogus travel agents, shops, and other scams there'd be. There's an idea that if you can deceive a fool out of what they have then it becomes yours, and the Indians are 120% on this side of the argument. By the way the bus to the city was R7, 9 pence, which I hailed after asking several bus doormen for their destinations all while taxi drivers next to me lied about there being no bus and wanting to charge R250.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Varanasi is said to be the holiest Hindu city and a place where people come to live their last days- cremations on the Ganges are held throughout the day and night here; it’s built along one side of the river with ghats or steps down to the water where the faithful bathe and wash clothes and their buffaloes, and the atmosphere is intense. The river at present is only a third or less of its width after the rains- last time I came it was hard to see the opposite shore but now hundreds of meters of sanded plain stretch out before jungle on the far side. The architecture stacked down the river front is chaotic and dilapidated of course but has immense passion, complimented by the beautiful haze, array of light colours and magical detail stretching off into the distance; I took a short boat trip to see it better with a couple of other travellers.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The dead are carried through the streets on stretchers in the air, wrapped in gold, pink and red shrouds, then through the tangle of alleyways to one of two burning ghats, all accompanied by chanting. Huge piles of logs supply several bonfires, only large enough to consume the body on top, and which can be overlooked nearby, though photography of course is to be avoided; the skull is always broken by a pole, and bones not reduced to ash thrown into the river. It’s certainly one of the most alien of places, providing some good culture shock.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The sacred cows are in great numbers and are strewn down the streets in the traffic, the alleys, inside open fronted shops, sleeping and eating whatever they can find on the street (how they eat enough I’m not sure): dung is everywhere. There are also a great many monkeys, sometimes aggressive and crawling all over the hotels no matter how high they are, along with dogs, one sick and rabid-looking one being chased past me by a group of men with sticks trying to kill it.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The town is perhaps marginally less filthy than I remember, with the occasional sweepers around, but there are surely even more people- India is truly clogged and overflowing with them, and needs to take some action to slow the population growth and thence raise living standards. There are frequent accidents on the street and a high level of awareness is needed just to walk along, though there are fewer large vehicles in the central area and mostly cycle and auto-rickshaws. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> West of Jaipur on the way to <st1:City><st1:place>Jodhpur</st1:place></st1:City> and Jaiselmer, the landscape from the train window changes from green agricultural fields to the dry brown <st1:place>Thar Desert</st1:place>, alternating periodically from little weird bare trees to little weird bushes, evenly spaced going off to the distance, also featuring gigantic flooded areas bordered with pink purple sand. To my great surprise the train becomes almost empty, a rarity where locals have to book up most routes months in advance.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Some thoughts on the travellers out here- there are plenty in their twenties, a bit unsure about themselves and the world and come to <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> for an escape from materialistic thought and for some kind of spiritual guidance. There are many who take up entirely traditional Indian clothes- Gandhi-style flowing peasant robes, sandals or no footwear, long hair, stick and Shiva/Vishnu makeup, but most exude an air of lost identity and naivety. On the train from <st1:City><st1:place>Varanasi</st1:place></st1:City> for instance there was a couple of Japanese travellers, both with the usual contradictory and fearfully acquisitive gigantic backpacks that hindered them even walking down the aisle of the train, a sight in itself: one was learning Hindi and the other had great long hair and beard. He told me he’d got so sick in Varanasi he had to stay there for a month recovering, then got off the train at a local station to buy some food and drink, as I did, then got back on to find his passport and camera etc stolen, causing huge problems. This is completely crazy- of course you take your bag with you if you depart the train and have vigilance on it at all times, especially when it stops and there’s a movement of people, and chaining the bag up next to you when you sleep.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Also in an internet cafe in <st1:City><st1:place>Varanasi</st1:place></st1:City> a young Japanese or Korean at the computer to my left passed out, falling into the street. I helped him along with others, but they sat him back up which I knew was wrong and he soon passed out again, banging his head and knees badly, very nasty- I should have put him in the recovery position. He’d been taking too much bhang or whatever the stupid stuff’s called and was coming out of him in all directions: but I had sympathy for him, young and clueless, he comes to <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> for something in his life.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Photography is a moral and sensitive issue in developing countries, especially concerning things related to different living standards: you don't want to walk up to families living in little filthy tents on the street for instance, standing there composing your picture with your expensive camera, treating them as objects of curiosity to amuse others back in the land of plenty. Many photos should only be taken quickly, from a distance or not at all.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The developed world has not only norms of goal-directed rationality and articulation, providing division of labour, customer service and so on, all essential for profit, investment and raising of material standards, but along with this good norms of social interaction. Other peoples think nothing of squashing up to the next person, endlessly engaging and interfering with them, pointing out the obvious, repeating themselves and assuming no structured knowledge in them: society provides less support in terms of rules and organised ways in which to make sense of the world that people can rely on others having internalised. There’s little queuing for instance, just a mass of people around ticket counters, and even when there is the few people at the front of the line don’t have the control to keep to their place and instead form a little bunch to either side of the person trying to get served: a moment’s hesitation in the conversation between them and the counter and they’ll interrupt to try to get what they want from the official- who will serve them. Throughout the whole process there’s incessant straining, barging, mistrust of others and intense and anxious staring ahead to see what’s happening, even though it’s nothing to do with anyone else. It’s stressful and exhausting just trying to keep your place- instead of accepted procedures it’s an every-man-for-himself society. Also all stall vendors when busy serve several customers at once.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Where there’s a line and you leave more than a person’s body width so that someone pushes in front, they don’t really understand if you complain, because there are no rules they’re breaking and they just feel happy about you being stupid enough not physically keeping them out. Of course though, most Westerners similarly don’t keep to their position because of a moral awareness of fairness towards others, but because of rules or norms and the peer pressure from them.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Touts, beggars and creeps rarely take no for an answer: even with the strongest put-down that no Westerner would bother with again they return a few moments later, senselessly asking you again to their shop, rickshaw, shine shoes, to follow you or whatever. You have to say no several times then really shout, then restate it all again, then just think about getting away from them: their idea seems to be that you might always change your mind, a thought perhaps not without interest and contrasting with linear American thinking, where an answer may be listened to closely and accepted immediately. The cohesion between people and the constant freshness of the moment is a tonic, especially coming from socially backward little England, but of course it’s used unfairly to gain advantage over many travellers and one becomes increasingly harsh with them in response, anticipating their lies and shifts: you need a chip of ice in your heart to survive the place yourself. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> However the cheerfully chaotic interrelations between people in <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> are a reminder of how repressed and alienated Western societies can be: ‘modernisation’ processes in the West have become one-sided as Apollonian individuation replaces Dionysian community: the unity of life underneath smoothly operating joints making us materially rich is forgotten and barriers and disjunctions arise where really there are none.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p>

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:" /><o:p> </o:p> People here speak English better than anywhere else in India I know, and use it more than Nepali their first language; the Darjeelingites are surprisingly sophisticated and worldly, their personalities with a keen and Western edge. There's a clear Tibetan aspect to the population with <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:City><st1:place>Lhasa</st1:place></st1:City> only a few hundred miles away, flatter and sharper features with lighter skins. Buildings are stacked up on hillsides rising at the steepest angle with narrow walkways and small houses, reminiscent of Andean countries; there are no food stalls so I eat in a restaurant for the first time in nearly two weeks. The place became a popular retreat with Victorian British and is known for fine tea- it contributes only 3% of Indian output but includes some of the world's most expensive grades. I’d like to stay an extra night and relax as it's certainly peaceful, but have to leave the next day as the cold is too severe.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> I made my way east from the chilly <st1:City><st1:place>Darjeeling</st1:place></st1:City> mountainside to Jaigon, still in <st1:place>West Bengal</st1:place> province but not far from <st1:country-region><st1:place>Assam</st1:place></st1:country-region>, with the intention of spending a visa-free day in its neighbouring Bhutanese town of <st1:City><st1:place>Pheuntsholing</st1:place></st1:City>. There's no entry in the guidebook but I find a hotel, where I'm lucky to meet a group of English and Australian travellers in the town for the same reason- but they tell me that Bhutan changed the rules some time ago and the excursion is no longer possible without the full visa, and a requirement to spend $240 per day- some crazy policy to limit tourism to the top end for whatever reason. I have a walk down the road to the boarder and it checks out, so I just take a couple of photos of what I can see and the hills not far away from the top of the hotel. I meet another couple of travellers on the way back and they too were expecting to pass through- the guidebooks are out of date.<o:p></o:p> So I clear off again south to the Bangladesh boarder, hoping to persuade the officials to let me in despite the stupid note on my visa to use the entry east of Kolkata: I'm not sure why they put this on, it might have been with the present uneasy political situation but more likely the officiousness and self-importance at so many embassies, delighting in causing inconvenience. I have to take four buses, about 26 seaters in these parts (carrying about 45), and get late to this tiny village with very little electricity or anything else called Chandrabangha- fortunately there's a dodgy hotel with a few rooms divided up by thin plywood. In the morning I walk through to the chaotic boarder post and of course they query the visa: at first, after a bit of persuasion and waiting for the Bangladeshi side to think it over, they come and tell me I have permission. However I go back to the Indians to stamp me out and they're still not too happy, even though it doesn't really matter to them as there are no exit restrictions, and I also have a multiple entry Indian visa to get back. So the man comes back to the Bangladeshis and explains again to them again what they already understand, and they then phone their boss from a few kilometers down the road: he arrives and he blinking won't let me in- pity as I was almost there as well. Needless to say there's no real logic to any of this nonsense, so often the case with immigration issues- there are plenty of Indians passing and they know I'm a nobody tourist not an international terrorist, but certainly they’re all a bit afraid for themselves of contravening any kind of officialese. Anyway I head back to Siliguri for a train back down to Kolkata, where I have to both enter and exit <st1:country-region><st1:place>Bangladesh</st1:place></st1:country-region>. I've never been turned away at a boarder before but now it's happened twice in as many days! At least the bus rides out here were worth it- northeast <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> is more rural with much less rubbish and obvious poverty and often beautiful, if needless to say still a hard life for them here. There are vast flat fields, often multicoloured with different crops, woodlands, palm trees, clean rivers with people washing, houses on stilts, well dressed women, and as usual the close proximity of animals, including sheep and chickens as well as ubiquitous cows and goats. The buses all have a good 50% of the widescreen variously obscured by an image of a deity fixed on the middle on the dashboard, two sizable pots of plastic flowers on either side, a frilly curtain hanging down from the top sometimes with gaudy flicking lights, and a string of little shiny glittery things placed up and down across the driver's whole field of vision: nothing like a gauze between you and the world, not taking it too seriously. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> From there I got a two-hour local stations train to the boarder, standing for a couple of hours along with most of the rest of the passengers, dangerously full and frenzied as ever but great views from the side- no doors just wide open gaps onto the carriage. An all-painted up Vaishnavite (Vishnu follower) on board spoke to me, showing surprising understanding, for his economic position, of the Hindu philosophy of unity of God in other religions, and all people and things.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> A shared auto-rickshaw gets you to the boarder where despite the usual creeps and consters coming from all directions, is relatively hassle free. Boarders can be a great experience with a lot to think about- everyone's the make and thinking up new ways to defraud you, wanting to be your guide, trying to obtain or fill in forms, claiming to be an official and giving false information, distracting you as you change currency. You have to sort transport there, money change, get visa if necessary, exit country immigration departures, customs, officials' checks, walk over boarder ignoring creeps giving you directions, entry country immigration arrivals, customs, officials' checks, and transport away: there's every chance of officials lying about visa prices and exchange rates if you're unsure in advance and you need to know the baksheesh/ bribes situation. Also only a small minority of the passport-checkers can actually find or read much of your details page, visa or stamps.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> However <st1:country-region><st1:place>Bangladesh</st1:place></st1:country-region> is much more relaxed a place than <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> with less frenzied urban areas, hard-sell and vicious money-grabbing norms- a breath of fresh air; there's the usual gaunt, repressive quiet of Islamic societies though, interspersed with regular prayer calls from loudspeakers. A minority of women I've seen are veiled and more only with headscarves or no headwear, though perhaps those were the Hindu minority here. There’s a sense that the place isn't at ease with itself but it's basically friendly and has a safe enough feel, despite poor street lighting in the towns and little English spoken; the cycle-rickshaws use pleasant bell rings rather than horns or manic buzzers, and everything's a little gentler. Costs are half or less of Indian prices, and the bank notes begin at a value of 2 cents.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> They see very few Caucasians, I haven't seen any others yet, and like the Chinese for instance, stare and stare in some kind of dumb mixture of horror and fascination; you have to put up with various naive jokes they obviously make about your appearance. Six key phrases listed at the front of the guidebook are 'hello', 'thank you', 'yes', 'no', 'I don’t understand Bangla', and 'please stop staring at me'. There are obviously no norms at all against this and it can be very patience-testing indeed: several at a time will walk up to you and stand face-on a meter away, staring expressionlessly for minutes at a time unless you can shove them off. They find your simplest actions intensely fascinating- getting something from your bag or writing on a piece of paper seem to be among the most utterly amazing things they’ve ever seen.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I travelled from Benapol on the boarder to Jessore a couple of hours away by bus, all with uncomfortable children-sized seats for small Asians for whom it's more natural to crouch, and to Khula, hoping to go a little further east and south from here. The scenery becomes more southeast Asian and perhaps more exotic with dense palm trees and rice fields; the population is 160 million with half of the children underweight, 83% with less than $2 a day and literacy rates 50 and 30% for men and women.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The Bangladeshis are sociable, striking up conversation at any moment, even if it's a bit annoying when their English rarely goes beyond a couple of questions and they can tell I speak no local language- many though just haven’t got the idea that some people in the world speak other languages. Also as indeed in many other places, men who are friends may hold hands and put arms around shoulders with no romantic connotations. Part of the ready interaction can surely be related to the limited conception of personal space and affairs of others, and instead the culture retaining in everything a kind of Dionysian interconnectedness and innocent commonality. I went to <st1:City><st1:place>Barisal</st1:place></st1:City>, east of the sundarban or mangrove swamp area in the southwest: views from the bus over here from <st1:City><st1:place>Khulna</st1:place></st1:City> are very pleasant, clean lush jungle with long stretches of road where trees arch over, simple villages and numerous waterways and bridges, along with one ferry getting vehicles across a larger river. Several rivers have estuaries to the south including the <st1:place>Brahmaputra</st1:place>, Padma, Jamuna and Trista, each of which merge, split and change their name several times.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> One major advance on <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> is the serving of tea in cups with handles rather than a glass to burn your fingers- often there’s even an accompanying saucer, frequently spilt in and later drunk from. And it isn’t brewed with the milk already in, a sickly if sound solution for sterilizing it, but gets a couple of spoonfuls of sugar cream paste added afterwards, along with more sugar; tea stands can be sociable. Men’s shirt and trousers are also gradually replaced here by longes, a kind of narrow skirt worn throughout <st1:country-region><st1:place>Myanmar</st1:place></st1:country-region> next door. The traveller faces far less deception in buying and selling here than in India, and even when it’s annoying of course you need to pause and think that you might do the same faced with their situation, that in most cases it’s a normative rather than consciously immoral behaviour (as more reliable Western trade is also only normatively moral), and that it’s part of a wider system valuably contrasting with Western transparency and articulation. There's still plenty to wade past though- at one roadside shack restaurant they didn't have a menu of course, which meant they could try grossly overcharging and arguing at the end when I didn't establish prices first- which smaller food stalls wouldn't have bothered doing; I realised it was coming though and paid them only a few more near-worthless notes before walking off. The roads in the towns go very quiet at night, and apart from <st1:place>Dhaka</st1:place> aren’t too noisy in the day either with most vehicles being cycle-rickshaws. The town to town buses have a high accident rate- not just small, with a high centre of gravity and permanently overcrowded with as many people stuffed down the aisle as possible, but the roads not usually wide enough for two large vehicles to pass, and the verges they pull onto often full of people or cycle traffic. Considering the chaos on the roads the drivers are quite good but the whole thing is definitely risky; they also don’t do handbrakes- it’s just put in gear with a roadside brick under a wheel or two. Like most things, petrol is cheap at 25 pence a litre. A long bus journey and five ferry crossings south of <st1:City><st1:place>Barisal</st1:place></st1:City> (ferries sink every couple of months) is Kuataka, a village of two or three roads on the coast east of the sundarban swamp. In such very small places in developing countries it can be hard much decent food: everyone there basically buys and cooks their own and what restaurants there are serve bits of bony chicken and plain rice with perhaps a little cold vegetable, very dubious. Stalls sell biscuits more than anything else, being long lasting, with a few potato chips, soda drinks or some bread if you’re lucky; even bananas were hard to find. There’s a pleasant beach where even the brainlessly curious locals don’t bother you too frequently; it’s rather surreal and dreamlike with bright sunlight and haze emphasizing either the white of the sand or the darker colours of objects and their shadows. The few umbrellas seem like they don’t belong there or as though they date from the distant past- it’s like a scene from an enigmatic sci-fi film or a hallucinatory Seurat painting. Despite being the <st1:place>Indian Ocean</st1:place> with a breeze in the air and the coast subject to cyclones, the sea is very still with small gentle waves, the water muddy from the nearby estuaries; southeast of here is what is said to be the world’s longest uninterrupted beach at around 120km.<?xml:namespace prefix = v ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" /><v:shapetype id=_x0000_t75 stroked="f" filled="f" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" coordsize="21600,21600"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><v:path o:connecttype="rect" gradientshapeok="t" o:extrusionok="f"></v:path><o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype><v:shape id=modify_button_381863 style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px; Z-INDEX: 1; MARGIN-LEFT: -16pt; WIDTH: 24pt; POSITION: absolute; HEIGHT: 24pt; mso-wrap-distance-left: 0; mso-wrap-distance-right: 0; mso-position-horizontal: right; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-vertical-relative: line" o:allowoverlap="f" alt="" type="#_x0000_t75" o:spid="_x0000_s1026"><?xml:namespace prefix = w ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" /><w:wrap type="square"></w:wrap></v:shape><o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>

Street food is good if you see it cooked and served immediately, and sells for a pittance: popular things include pakora- a potato/ vegetable paste, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:City><st1:place>varna-</st1:place></st1:City> a battered potato or maize, jeluvie- a sweet made from a sugar cream solidifying when poured into hot oil, and vegetable samosa. Tea or chai, served with milk and sugar in little glasses without handles is popular all over, and sometimes there's black or white Nescafe. Food stalls are preferable to many restaurants because of transparent preparation and freshness, and it matters little if the equipment looks horrendous; join a group already standing around for vendors with a good reputation. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:" /><o:p></o:p>As in nearby Buddhist countries Hinduism provides a powerfully contrasting set of norms for and understanding of sexuality, and key expressions of this are at the Shiva and Vishnu temples at Khajuraho and the Surya sun god temple (an aspect of both Shiva and Vishnu featuring in the Mahabharata) at Konark near Puri, a couple of states away in Orissa. Both are World Heritage sites and feature sculptures of sexual activity and sensuous human and divine forms; they're made of different stone with the Khajuraho complex somewhat better preserved- both would have been phenomenal sights in their original polished state in what was clearly a liberated medieval India. They're dated 950-1050 and 1250, before <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> came under the sexually conservative sway of its Abrahamic religious rulers, first the Islamic Delhi sultanate from 13-17<SUP>th</SUP> centuries then the Christian British to the 20th. Other examples of Hindu religious and sexual unity include works in the early Ellora and <st1:place>Ajanta</st1:place> caves in <st1:place>Maharashtra</st1:place> to the west, as well as the still ubiquitous phallic Shiva lingam and images of mortals in sexual congress with Brahma. These of course contrast fundamentally with Islam’s and Christianity’s denial, and consequently sexuality’s position in the Hindu worldview became largely theoretical: although they visit in large numbers, today Indians show some immaturity and repression in finding such images embarrassing or humorous, as indeed Asians of nearby countries don’t. <o:p></o:p> Religions are interested in sex from a moral perspective that goes far beyond the fact that it can result in children someone has then to look after: their main concern is the Dionysian character of the sensation and sense of abandonment, loss of restraint and absolute negation of Apollonian principle. Carnality is then further troubling as out of this it provides a powerful transcendent experience where corporal and spiritual, subject and object, lust and love, desire and beauty are dissolved, suggesting there’s something wrong with their understanding. <o:p></o:p> The Abrahamic religions accept sex has to be central to life but harbour deep uncertainties if not repressed contempt for this core level of humanity, and have problems with fornication, homosexuality and a range of practices. Obviously it's the nature of the wider culture that's at fault, not our natural, God-given state. Dharmic Hinduism isn’t such a principle-based castle-in-the-sky doctrinal religion asking to be debunked and acknowledges sexuality as an interface with the divine; indeed the sculptured figures at these sites are not only human but semi-divine and divine, expressing the unity of God and us through sexual transcendence. Shiva's intercourse with his consort Pavarti is a focus of the Khajuraho complex: needless to say the idea of God having sex is anathema to the Abrahamians.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The temples’ celebration of love-making is both riotous and movingly sensuous; they display a complete and unselfconscious continuity between ordinary life, where the attention is focussed outward and things related to each other, and sexual activity where it returns on itself and makes no reference to anything else, hence being absolute and divine. Everywhere sexual fullness is matched by refined and measured intelligence: there’s no loss of control, due not to Apollonian denial but to opulence paralleled by an inner order. The deities at the centres of assemblages of amorous couples are themselves very sensual and at one with the ravishment all around. At Kharjuraho only around a tenth of the sculptures are obviously erotic but all are arousing and curvaceous, embodying sexuality’s combination of detached beauty and intense desire. At Konark however almost all are erotic, there are thousands of couples having sex in endless positions all in deep bas-relief: in amongst them are images of oral sex, sixty-nine, chains of three and group sex, masturbation, homosexuality including monks giving oral sex, even sex with animals.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> The figures smile across the centuries with the fantastic coordination of sexuality with serenity, embracing all of life through a knowingness that transcends affected relations with it (either sensory or intellectual): there is relative or sensory plus absolute or spiritual pure consciousness together. The two can't be separated in rational Apollonian terms, only from within the Dionysiac itself: this unity is lost in the Christian West, sexuality as fundamental indeed being the first thing that has to go.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Kolkata lives up to its reputation as defining some of India's extremes and immediately around the train station are scenes of severe poverty- there's a large underclass with virtually no possessions living hard and short lives; I'm not at all sure one filthy half-human looking wretch I walked past today wasn't dead. Some sources still call it by its colonial name <st1:City><st1:place>Calcutta</st1:place></st1:City>, one problem with the new name being it sounds too close to the original.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> There are man-pulling rickshaws here, sad to see, though quite why cycle-rickshaws are beyond them I'm not sure: there aren't any in the town centre. The main travellers’ hotel area is in a tangle of streets not far from a busy road that might get my vote for the most chaotic, polluted stretch of barely controlled mayhem in the country, it's a real rat race. Alternate clouds of petrol fumes and thick dust blow at you in the heat as the touts, con-artists and beggars with every imaginable deformity run or crawl after you; drugs and whatever else is available. A couple of kilometres away is a huge area of great street food stalls, getting you stuffed for a pittance: these streets absolutely seethe with people and activity. <o:p></o:p> There's quite a sharp social gradient upwards and a sizable relative middle class emerges, with a few well dressed businessmen and some good vehicles on the main roads; the atmosphere is fairly sophisticated and the hassle factor for the foreigner perhaps a little easier to deal with; being a young city developed by the British the roads layout, as in Mumbai, vaguely resembles that in large English cities. The wrecked buses only slow down rather than stop and have windows only short Indians have any hope of seeing out of; rather than auto-rickshaws though there are negotiable taxis.<o:p></o:p> One night there was a hairy spider in the room- I was impressed how sensitive it was to the vibrations from movement, shooting across the wall when I took a step; meanwhile on the television included for my $4 was news comprised of articles of conditioned drivel closely related to that in <st1:country-region><st1:place>England</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Also one taxi I was in, with no wing mirror, pulled sharply into traffic on a main road and smashed into a motorbike- fortunately the bike skidded so it hit side on and I think managed to stay upright: the taxi just drove off.<o:p></o:p> Went to the <st1:place><st1:PlaceName>Indian</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType>Museum</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> here- the usual scruffy assortment of dust covered junk with poor labelling and lighting, specialising in dreary rocks and the odd supposed meteorite. However the collection of first millennium Hindu and Buddhists sculptures are good- superbly ornamented voluptuous deities with tremendous headgear, really sophisticated and fantastic, with some Buddhas and bodhisattvas dated to 1st century. I also liked the fossils of extinct giant elephants and turtles, some quite bizarre: the hall's Aladdin’s-cave gloom adds an aura to them, rather magical. Also went to the Victoria Memorial, very popular with the Indians though unsure why- just a large old imperial building with paintings of limited artistic merit, of whatever bunch of stuffed shirts and street scenes- most of which have changed little. <st1:State><st1:place>Victoria</st1:place></st1:State> never even bothered to come to <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region>, far from it, so it's all a bit mysterious, and indeed many other such colonial places have been renamed or demolished altogether. However interesting similarities between English and Indian cultures include their class or caste societies, formality and decorous speech, cautious pragmatism rather than theoretical planning, a rich inwardness issuing from the parsimony, scepticism towards change and development, congested small scale approach to design, an overexcited rather childish tone to urban activity, small-minded pleasure taken in gaining through others' mistakes, sexual repression and birth control problems, a confident disregard of other cultures, and cricket as an expression of measured and pacifist psyche.<o:p></o:p> Before long I felt I’d had enough of Kolkata, though with my itinerary knew would probably have to come back. I secured a Bangladesh visa from the embassy here- the terms are restricted, a maximum 15 day single entry stay within a one month period, and a land entry point east of here I'm supposed to use was noted down. One explanation might be the state of emergency and curfew in the capital <st1:place>Dhaka</st1:place> imposed yesterday after resignation of the acting premier and various troubles approaching a planned election: there are a few other boarder crossings with <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region> and I'm going to try to get in from the north, to exit in the southwest.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> No one at the embassy had much reliable information regarding visa issue requirements, office hours, collection times or anything else- as of course nobody in south Asia does about anything: generally speaking what people may say and how things actually are often have only the most vague and distant relationship. If you want to get the feel for something you ask at least three separate officials and take a majority vote. I arrived at Siliguri by train then got a shared jeep for three hours up to Darjeeling, only $2 once past lying touts and taxi pushers: not much fun though, the driver was atrocious even on the flat but the endless bends up the hills had one guy vomiting on a regular basis out the window and turning most of the rest of us green- lucky I hadn't eaten. Fortunately the road has modest concrete barriers most of the way and isn't too narrow, otherwise the drops mean one mistake and it’s certain death: signs read 'if you drive like hell you'll get where you're going sooner than you think' and 'Take time in this life rather than adding more to eternity'. <o:p></o:p> It’s a town 2200m up in the Himalayas just south of Sikkim, between Nepal and Bhutan: there are said to be great views of snow capped mountains here including the world’s third highest, but I couldn’t make much out due to mist and cloud now in the low season. It's very cold in the day with your breath visible and it drops a lot lower at night: the hotel has enough blankets but are themselves so cold it takes a couple of hours before you feel warm in bed, and hot water and electricity is limited with the infrastructure not really up to it.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>

India and Bangladesh, winter 2007 (not polished work!!) <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:" /><o:p> </o:p> India’s sacred philosophical tradition provides it with a backcloth of unmatched richness, making it the cultural centre of the world. Its contrasting norms and values and confident identity provide an intoxicating experience with many thought provoking observations for the Westerner, putting ones understanding through a different lens. As with many places though it's being subject to processes of change- its development is far behind China’s but does indeed seem to be progressing in a similar way; it’s had many invaders across many centuries and subsumed them all under the power of its identity, and the issue is how far it can do this again. Hopefully a distinction can be made between material development and the excesses and corrosive effects of Western mass culture.<o:p></o:p> I also made trips to India eight and ten years ago and everywhere remains the involving flux of characteristic scenes and activity, varied religious expression, and the sense of a refined gauze across everything despite the bedlam. Streets see endless animals- cows, buffaloes, camels, elephants, horses, goats, pigs, sheep, chickens, monkeys, dogs, cats, rats and birds: herds progress downs streets in the thick of rickshaws, bikes and throngs of people. The sunlight is particularly ravishing and mellow in winter, bathing all in a gold glow and gently illuminating and enhancing pale colours; the fields, plains and sky shimmer in the heat and stillness: there's a connection between the climate and the Indian temperament- the almost spiritual haze has a parallel in the lack of articulation and disinclination even to say 'yes' and instead the marvellous sideward head movement meaning only 'I understand'. Arguably reality isn't comprised of delineated components with particular attributes to find the truth about but indeed merges holistically together. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Increasing wealth is enriching rather than detracting from the culture in people being better and more colourfully dressed, especially the women and their saris, and less dust meaning the cities are even more a seething blaze of sights, the drabness lessened as buildings are painted in characteristic styles- higher standards have allowed the delicate rainbow that was always there to be better brought out. However the travel experience has been softened with more roadworthy vehicles, street lights, illuminated signs, painted instead of rusted trains, fresh banknotes, phones, internet, menus with more than curry, and things generally not in quite such a bad state- there’s even less dung and rubbish: it’s as though there was something in the harsher realities that has cultural value. India’s intensity and strength has slipped slightly, the sophistication bevelled in parallel with the worst of the living conditions.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Traditional battered wooden rickshaws of tremendous character and unity with their environment are now seen alongside quality Western vehicles, almost nowhere to be found in the 1990s, the aesthetic power and inwardness giving way to squeaky clean, soullessly manufactured curves of glass and metal; dung dumping cows and bulls, with their sacred imperturbability and virility, are threatened with removal from the streets; and more and more train station platforms have caretakers, in shifts governed by whatever rational schemata, and are being upgraded into the usual neurotic cleanliness and anonymity. When public spaces are never swept or cleaned there’s no worry about keeping them so and no-one bothers you at unspecified moments, pushing you out the way with a broom- the attention and focus have a little less stress and interruption: Quentin Crisp’s insight that 'after the first four years the dust doesn't get any worse' is being lost.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Scenes may still be compared with the refined impressions of Turner paintings, but at least in the larger and tourist trail towns they're changing. Disheartening aspects of modernization then include more insensitive fearful foreign tourists peering through the tinted windows of safe aircon coaches, whereas before you could walk around sites alone in a much harsher and culture-shocking environment. Alongside this, guidebooks were fabulous things to read once, alluding to other worlds and appealing to a necessary open mindedness toward the new, whereas now most are offensive rubbish, putting the travel experience on the surface in childish jokey terms and appealing to the cliquiness of sameness. A culture is enriched by less under-development and support from society in as far as in order to look after oneself and deal with life the attention tends to be focussed inwards more rather than remaining on the surface.<o:p></o:p> The concern is what has happened to Thailand for instance is happening here- in the mid ‘90s Bangkok had far more foliage and much of it quiet, refined and sophisticated in a way it simply no longer is: if you hadn't been there you could just never know what it had over the present metropolis, and Delhi’s refurbished roads, market areas and neon marketing lights are looking distinctly Thai. Indian culture runs deeper though and it sometimes seems that the West's excesses must always have an antipode, perhaps in a way similar to the wind's inability to blow everywhere on a sphere but necessarily having points of rest and reference. There are over 600 000 visitors annually now, an enormous increase from only a few years ago, but the smaller and less visited places remain largely untouched by Westernisation and tourists are much less of a horde just bringing their own culture with them; even on the train to Jhansi south of Agra I was the only Caucasian.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> India’s being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century but needs to avoid a levelling of the character of its society down to the simplistic desires of the largest, democratic tier of society at the base. The qualities and unique insights of Indian culture and religion have come top down not bottom up, whereas Westernisation as lead by the moronic masses means passive television, junk food, ring tones, celebrities and the rest of pop culture’s white noise and rubbish. And surely even the masses don't really want this, but instead something to believe in and feel part of, something not just determined by them. There's a confidence to the south-southeast Asians which can come as a surprise- there's a self-assurance and spring in their step you don't quite see in the West. Unfortunately, if understandably, most Indians who speak to foreigners do so with a few to getting money out of them and have little compunction about deception, especially in view of the wealth differences. The idea is that if your attention’s focussed only on the surface of things then you can rightly be deceived, and certainly you’ll be wanting to kick yourself as much as them. It's a place where good personal organisation is a constant need and where small mistakes will count against you, possibly drastically: you need to think all the time, and which also perhaps justifies the disapproval towards alcohol.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I only use budget hotels- I wouldn't use expensive ones even with a lot of money to spend, and indeed in most places they don't exist: you want to be as close to the local way of life as possible without compromising safety or cleanliness too much, and without having to address moral questions about high spending in a place of such poverty; Indian ones are around $5 a night. Occasionally there may be the company of rodents, ants, spiders or cockroaches (ten inches once) but they also tend to be secure with plenty of staff around. You don’t let your guard down- at one place I asked for a bucket of hot water and they gave me the exposed element of an old immersion heater with wires coming out the top, to plug in and place in the water myself, suspended by a piece of wood across the top: absolutely lethal. At least in the north in the winter months there are few mosquitoes and a net isn’t needed- the days are pleasant but nights much cooler.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The Taj Mahal at Agra is a mausoleum built by the Muslim Moghul ruler Shah Jahan, over 20 years in the early 17<SUP>th</SUP> century in memory of his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal who died young- it's a quite profound statement of eternal love and very moving, with the solemnity, strength and passion of great art. The building's proportions are unexpected but have fabulous unity and rhythm, as though reverberating within themselves, and indeed the interior under the massive dome provides an appropriately strange echo; there’s also a Hindu lightness, sense of play and range of colours as the sun moves. He was devastated by his loss and spared no expense ensuring she'd never be forgotten- numerous precious stones were imported from many countries and worked by artisans in fine detail, all at immense cost: to think he would do this as you walk around is rather touching.<o:p></o:p> Lengthy train and bus rides get you to Khajuarho, a small town famous for its erotic medieval temple complex; interesting to see immense numbers of all-over bright green birds here making a tremendous racket, swarming around a few trees on the edge of the town, really deafening to walking past. <o:p></o:p> I made it to Puri on the east coast after shuffling across two or three towns near Khajuraho for the right rail network- they had no entries in the guidebook but were quite interesting urban India, vibrant, mean and unclean. Puri's a town with a famous large temple to Jaganath, a somewhat abstract form of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place>Krishna</st1:place>; certain gods are popular in certain areas and little known in others. It's one of four pivotal religious sites in the country's points of compass but unfortunately non-Hindus aren't allowed inside: I didn’t bother arguing that I’ve studied Hinduism and visit a large local temple in <st1:country-region><st1:place>England</st1:place></st1:country-region>. At pilgrim towns like this there’s added religious symbolism and minor temples around, a larger bovine contingent and extra beggars and other unfortunates pestering you for good favour, as well as the usual touts and scammers. There's plenty of accommodation and lots of Westerners, Japanese and Koreans, although they're drowned out by the devoted throngs and you can still go all day in town without seeing them; you can also walk to a pleasant and extensive beach.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> There are far fewer auto-rickshaws here and instead mostly cycle-rickshaws: harder on the driver but at least a green and quiet vehicle, they come with retractable rain/ sun roofs, and cost about the same. There seems to be a connection between the bad aesthetics and alienation of petrol engines’ mass production and their running on a polluting, irreplaceable and unearned resource: they may have advantages but issue from a less balanced approach to the world. Cows by the dozen are found around the temple entrance, in the crowds, the stalls and side alleys, sometimes pursuing you for bananas or at least the skins if they see you holding any; vendors hit them with sticks to push them off but they don't go far. Trying to relate their sacred status to providing milk or labour in the fields, or because Krishna was a cowherd and so on, really misses the point about these creatures- this is the sort of explanatory perspective of Western rationale that doesn't apply here. They embody qualities of the divine as do no other creatures, noted also by the Egyptian and Mesopotamian ancients for instance- they're singularly calm and peaceful, with the bulls exuding a head-in-the-air masculinity and inner strength.

With romantic music and particularly Wagner the listener has a fuller identity with the inner dynamics of great art, with critical distance and objectivity given in the Self’s self-referral processes rather than relative separation from the aesthetic content. There’s unquenchable absorption in good Wagner and minimalism, endless melody and lack of symmetrical rest points meaning the listener never wants to relinquish the music’s hold on the attention; linearity is expressed only in the Dionysiac’s own hypnotic onward movement and surge, in a unity of relative and absolute that leads to Self-based thought and action in life. Moreover as minimalism is nearer to popular music Wagner moves towards cinema, in each case closer to life than architectonic art.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:" /><o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Minimalism is a valuable expression of the postmodern concern for surface and textual consistency as a reapplication of the confused modernist process of foregrounding structural elements and material in trying to make intellectual sense of the hidden aesthetic. However it has parallels with serialism in its holism and self-referentiality, homogeneity and non-hierarchical ordering, concern for no historical paradigm, and pre-compositional design and autonomy that undermines individual subjectivity and personality in the composer and listener, except that the disregard for depth-structure allows universal Dionysian subjectivity, and its directed onward movement, to emerge instead. Also minimalism doesn’t share postmodernism’s nihilism towards the critical on all levels and has the open-ended logic of holistic form that characterizes life anywhere, thus paralleling 5<SUP>th</SUP> state of consciousness in being simultaneously critical and lived, relative and absolute.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Traditional formal music’s closure and resulting objectivity and autonomy furnish the sense of separation or self, but formal schemes given from without are arbitrary and such a self or identity unstable: minimalism instead locates the self in a more intimate relationship with itself where it recognizes its own nature in the material’s hermetic step by step movement. Life has neither closure nor definite answers on the intellectual level and hence music emphasizing life’s aesthetic essence over formal frames is more authentic and conducive to 5<SUP>th</SUP>; faith in the rightness of the aesthetic and the unstated gunas makes it unnecessary to abstract them away in a formal autonomous sphere of meaning purely reflective of life. Life questions cannot be answered nor reality and truth begin to be accessed by Western rational philosophy but only by open-ended Vedic philosophy, or art.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Minimalism’s development has reference to Indian traditions- in music, for instance in the rapid melody over a drone along with complex rhythmic and metrical schemes, in philosophy in interconnection and concern for subjective experience, and in religion in sensuousness and exultation. Also minimalism’s paradoxical nature of being small scale repetition and constant change within large scale forms and background stasis, reflects the Self’s dynamic silence and the combination of richness yet nothingness of the Veda- its detailing of sophisticated relations which are essentially intuitively obvious, and for a realized person as a well with water all around. These relations are also comparable with the seething virtual quantum events of a vacuum, and with the inner movement yet non-relation to anything else of sex. Dynamic silence and all polarities are in pure form in the 4<SUP>th</SUP> of transcendental meditation with the mind observing itself without thoughts, immobile in circumscribed attention; minimalism’s subtly changing motifs moreover reflect the changing character of the mantra during its repetition.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Minimalism’s focus on the aesthetic in isolation means of course it may lack the same depth of interest and complexity as music generating it from wider means, but its value is in containing the attention in a similar way to the intuition keeping back from unreferenced discursive thought. As in Shiva’s dance in the nataraja, bliss consciousness, freedom and boundlessness is really found within limitation because they’re already given and contained within us, and have core expression in the intellectually closed down nature of sex and its subject-object unity. The contained state in life is of unsuperfluous thought and action, not doing what isn’t necessary and acting silently as required by anonymous, unpossessed underlying dynamics. Architectonic structures in art however, subservient in minimalism, do embody circularity or coming back but in long term, reflecting the culture’s state of loss rather than immediate return of the Self to itself where one can be oneself and fully live life. Harmonic movement away from and back to the tonic particularly reflects keeping the Self and self realization after a period of self-consciousness and lost thought, and the realization that of course you just have to be yourself: the most fabulously sophisticated and complex life activities are common sense. Indeed almost all Shakespeare’s plays conclude with the return of the king, the real authoritative, divine ruler within us.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The development of material only out of its own characteristics and level of the gunas brings the thrilling sense of creation ex nihilo, for instance in Glass’s Satyagraha opening scene or Wagner’s Rheingold prelude with ideas cutting into an undeveloped harmonic base seething with potential. Both composers use interconnected holistic form, for Glass becoming an entirely static, non-dramatic montage, abstract and surreal and going far beyond direct representation of events; Nyman’s The Man who mistook his wife for a hat libretto also concerns a shifted perspective on life and a logic beneath its surface and arbitrary structures and levels of order, as given expression by music in general or its aesthetic gunas, without which we are lost.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Adams’s Nixon in China by contrast is an example of postmodernism’s Dionysian play, non-discursive critique and incredulity towards overarching schemes and authority. Nixon's 1972 visit to China is recent history to relate to closely, even within personal memory, and as often with Glass the music is drenched in marvellous nostalgia; the libretto comprises poetic couplets, complementing the surrealism and iconoclastic repetition of music and words, and indeed people not normally singing to each other. Singing though captures the Dionysiac, as indeed in Greek tragedy, realizing the subject matter’s remarkable vitality. The opening two acts have more clearly delineated statements and melodic sequences but in the third these are spliced and juxtaposed such that they are taken less seriously, being treated nihilistically or hypercritically- both the closed sections and what emerges to have been the overly high tone of Nixon’s and Mao’s ideological stances are mocked. Indeed with such irreconcilable differences the only option is to transcend them to a state of play without attempting dialectical critique: the protagonists slide into personal reminiscences aligned with the postmodern concern for subjective response. Arbitrary subjective viewpoints of course are useless since a unitary truth does exist, but with subject and object being intimately linked personal intuition is the route to it. Furthermore most of the best music is in the first half followed by an anti-climax, disrupting linear development and reflecting postmodern uniformity.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Moreover Adams’s Century rolls is a dreamy commentary on the romantic piano concerto, its disbelief in definite structure and content and letting the music slide into surface effect, glitter and garish colour similarly critiques the whole modernist paradigm of determinate components. Further, Ives uses tonality non-structurally with for instance unexpected placement of triads bringing a critical position moving behind dialectics to look on them with detachment, serenity and humour, and again encapsulating American ghostly mysteriousness, hypnosis and unreality lying behind massive materialism.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Thought is closed down by architectonic rather than intuitive, material-led form in that bondage and boundary come from external imposition not the internal containment of self-referentiality and necessary right action. Freedom and ecstasy issue from within, also as expressed in sex for the girl in bondage, and the man giving himself to her without reservation, as much a prisoner: the for-other rational but uselessly free Apollonian is relinquished to leave for-itself locked-on Dionysiac, the field of given truth and gunas, and senses and passions at the interface of experience and reality. For-other and love then issue from the encompassing Self-Self relations of for-itself sex as having and being had dissolve, all as the Dionysiac and the material in intuitive form provide movement out of their inherent gunas and aesthetics structures. The same disappearing insatiable quality and impossibility of complete familiarity of sex and its independence is at its artistic height in music of successful intuitive form, such as variously in minimalism and Wagner, it being instead in closed architectonic sequences where sated familiarity and restriction is found. Inscrutable aesthetics offer greater liberation couched in their own fixed logic than in perspicuous frames for the intellect’s fearful attempts at determinate reconciliation and satisfaction.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Moreover the aesthetic’s inscrutability relates to the indeterminate foundation of knowledge and impossibility of its intellectual grounding: the epistemological search for certainty and intellectual transparency of the 17<SUP>th</SUP> to 20<SUP>th</SUP> centuries was inconcludable and misguided, only complementing ever-shifting modernist perspectives and metanarratives. Rather than the basis of our experience being knowable and graspable in a forgrounded intellectual way it has transcendental and divine reference beyond the thinking mind, its holism infinitely leading onwards to more knowledge, as in minimalism and Wagner. Instead of limiting frames, systems or principles in life there is only on-edge experience as guided by inner its form, with the discursive mind aligned to and never foolishly replacing it.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The fascination of the Dionysiac and aesthetic in minimalism is paralleled by the fascination in the facial expressions of those either led to execution, being tortured (in 3<SUP>rd</SUP>) or experiencing sexual sensation, with the more Self content to interface with the relative, as suggested by intelligence and attractiveness, the better- as for instance here (BA vids links). In art, the passions, sex and death, the absolute in the relative and dissolution of duality have core expression or realization- and it is this coordination that the whole mind achieves in 5<SUP>th</SUP>. This focus of the attention to something narrow in scope is all as in minimalism, often particularly when the subject keeps expressions to a contained minimum so they count for more in indicating their experience and movement towards death or orgasm: the interest is in the switching between failing to intellectually reconcile what’s happening in terms of the relative, because the absolute and its immediacy and reality is involved, and failing to reconcile the absolute per se. Inward transcendence beyond the vortex of dualities and their aesthetic play to the oneness of the absolute or Brahman is the only reconciliation possible, encompassing absolute and relative together. There’s the same riveted fascination in the smallest, finest details in minimalism or faces, indicating the Dionysiac and the directness and irreconcilability of the aesthetic reference in sensation or intuition, sometimes for instance prompting rewinding either recording. The listener and watcher is stilled with the intensity and focus of their awareness, their Self as seen in the Dionysiac given back to itself: in both minimalism and the passions the absolute in the relative, and the cognitive faculties and consciousness encompassing the external world, unite subject and object and dissolve external, voyeuristic, vicarious experience into one’s own.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Rational Apollonian activity underwritten and subsumed by the Dionysiac in 5<SUP>th</SUP> allows the attention’s smooth movement from one to the other without disjunction, grounding it and giving it meaning. The emergence of sexual sensation into the mind, as with visceral physical contact’s emergence into the seemingly Platonic in seduction, makes evident the unity of the two but a substantive transition nonetheless appears to exist in the affectation of 3<SUP>rd</SUP>, where the attention isn’t already located in the Dionysiac and on the level of orgasm; Western culture and NB unsupported discursive mind also normalizes a transition. The unity of the two encompassed by the mind is all as musical movement along aesthetic lines at key points or denouements where recombination of material takes place seamlessly due to the new dynamics already being in place under the surface, for instance in Glass’s Second and Fourth dances. Perception here of other legitimate aesthetic angles on the system also enhances real intuitive critical insight into pre-rational cultural presuppositions, and thence the forms of life built on them.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Glass’s Dance No.1 is a good example of minimalism’s parallel of the aesthetic focus in sex- it has truly incredible magnetism, creating an insatiable fascination and desire with the attention transfixed and mesmerized by every last detail: possibly the most unturnoffable, compulsive thing ever written its returns are almost unique in music. It’s music of sheer ascent and exhilaration with intense onward lines, rhythmic intoxication and understated radiance and ecstasy paralleling sexual and narcotic experience, complemented by erotic overtones of the solfage syllables sung. Bass keyboard notes become increasingly rapid as the work progresses and as in much pop music the starts of bars or short phrases are accented, all as increasing heartbeat and inner rush towards orgasm with the thrusting rhythm increasing more slowly; moreover the repeated actions in both minimalism and sex, including the movement of lips or skin across each other, and the nature of sound that comprises all music, reflects material reality’s fundamental nature of vibration and form from sound. There’s also the elation of good jazz group improvisation on the same material, blending fabulously in high colour; emphasis is on the unmediated, experiential aesthetic, the non-theoretical base level of reality.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Repetitive actions and circumscribed attention in minimalism, sex and various religious chant intoxicate due to the correspondence with consciousness’s divine self-referral nature, needing to refer to nothing beyond itself. The self-referential experiences in sex of yourself and your sensation and of the other person and theirs are centred on repeated action at the crotch by the crotch- the body’s aesthetic centre or mind’s absolute reference or ratio point as expressed in the relative form, referring only to itself: body and mind and object and subject are dissolved and any ratio-nal intellectual activity eradicated. The relative all makes reference properly to the transcendent absolute but the absolute only to itself, this having purest expression in the orgasm within sex’s hermeticism: the crotch’s stimulation is for-itself and similarly minimalism’s aesthetic content has no framing reference for wider analysis, the material and its repetition justifying itself, like the Self by itself for itself. Despite sex and minimalism being confined and narrow and in a sense dull, they can paradoxically be of utmost meaning, interest and exhilaration, focussed on the visceral Dionysiac and its logic, the essence of art and life.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The ever-fresh interest in minimalism’s re-introduced material is all as that in seduction and sex, and life, being via the constant reference to the absolute and fundamental gunas or imperatives operating in motiveless silence, free of relativizing, proportioning and dismissal: one kisses because this action in the relative refers to the absolute, and one continues and proceeds under dynamics independent of ratios with anything else. Reasoning and reconciliation stops seduction, there being only self-justification and kissing because of kissing. There’s no wilfulness or inflexibility in good minimalism because the aesthetic, the Self, truth and sex is that which is to be insisted on: in Nyman for instance there’s often one exultant idea after another, a manic onward drive lacking pause and rest for critical reflection, but with inner logic and space. Moreover works like Reich’s Variations and Music for mallet instruments and their the long underlying waves overlaid with repeating insistent material parallel Tristan and the sexual character of all Wagner’s mature music.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> There are also the parallels in minimalism and sexual interest of the mind looking around the endless interrelations and reciprocal interaction between it and the experience, and its intoxication by its own transcendental, rationally unfathomable stimulation. Further the moment to moment renewal of interest in the leading gunas in these particularly reflects 5<SUP>th</SUP> immediacy and the natural approach to all things afresh, independent of baseless reasons or ideas. Self-referral aesthetic processes and their infinite resource of meaning are also central to tonality, minimalism’s harmony and the force shaping all normal musical aesthetic content: it has transcendental reference from its end of phenomenology equation of acoustic with subjective consonance, which avoids the infinite regress of epistemological justification and arbitrary dialectical reasoning behind alternate harmonies. As in sex the aesthetic logic of intuitive form and tonality is of inexhaustible return, distinct from the contrivances of architectonics and other harmonies.<o:p></o:p>

An early example of repetition in Wagner is the thematic Rule Britannia overture, the score of which was rejected by a London evaluating panel, doubtless as it can look too simple on paper, where the theme is presented such that it becomes ever more rich and interesting the more it’s heard. In the late operas the motifs all relate to underlying configurations or sets of notes that are never stated in the music, and the resulting holistic, hermetic structure that keeps within initial conditions is all as keeping within the nataraja or keeping the unstated Self within the attention, the absolute hidden in the relative. The Rheingold prelude is the first mature music in this revolutionary step into the amazing involvement, exhilaration and forward movement issuing from repetition and the exploration of the relations and logic of the inner characteristics of strong material per se.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:" /><o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Wagner’s motifs aren’t developed but new ones generated out of their characteristics, with their possibilities and surrounding textures explored up to set levels of complexity, and right artistic decisions on which direction the material moves in being made at each point: this along with the unstated seminal material behind the motivic network parallels the immutability of the Self yet proliferating evolution and gain in relative life, itself hermetic and holistic on the large scale. It’s the emphasis on the Dionysian aesthetic here, undiluted by disingenuous Apollonian formalism that causes people’s aversion to Wagner, living in the repressed West where art developed as an objectifying, reflective repository of the Dionysiac, following loss of real Dionysian life and increasing alienation in the modern period: Wagner’s passion and intensity moves away from art and closer to life again, fundamentally conflicting with current culture and normative systems.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Wagner uses not only networks of repeating undeveloped motifs but at times immediate repetition: at one point in Gotterdammerung for instance the redemption motif is repeated several times in increasingly rich harmony, orchestration and volume to focus the mind on its aesthetic content, drawing the attention back until the motif is enlivened in the mind to shine in utter radiance and divine power, the Dionysiac exultant in both fullness and order. Wagner also expresses on the wider scales the on-edge sense of keeping the Self and not being lost in theory in his immense long term intuitive control despite passion in the moment- the absolute and relative together. Similarly in the Walkure second act opening, at the point where the initial motif must be furthered instead of new material being provided in a form leaning on balance and intellectual satisfaction, it’s simply replayed but again at increased volume: it works superbly through attending to the increasingly emerging infinite aesthetic resource in the quality material, traditional development by implication being unnecessary and ultimately misguided. The wider form by motivic web is grounded in stasis but with new motifs generated, similar to minimalism and the stasis from architectonic suppression though long term change of material- in both cases structure being developed out of plastic-ended recombinable motifs. Other Wagner-minimalism parallels include through-composition and elimination of points of rest and reflection with the attention transfixed only by onward movement and exhilaration, sectional working through the areas of the material’s possibilities, and concern for the moment and its closed inner freedom over closed extended melody and its groundless overbearing formal presuppositions.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Minimalism is anti-authoritarian in its repetition, high redundancy of content, low information, tonal harmony and subsuming of form while creating its own inner space for material to play, yet its formal processes and control parallel serialism in constricting the material’s development. There’s similar loss of play within architectonics and critical distance in Wagner, the content framed by no traditional context but again by intuitive movement in the cognitive faculties- there is unity of form and content, subject and object, the gunas in art being those of life. Minimalism may be highly architectonically structured but as in Wagner the repetitions disorientate the intellect, prevent perspicuity and undermine pillars, with transitional bridges to successive regions constantly built and burnt. Yet the internal logic allows the music to levitate, with play self-validating through ecstasy of the moment in place of outer logic: as with orgasm, the moment and its inner imperatives obliterate any surrounding intellectual construction. After these musics there is no need for more art but only for life, architectonic contrivances being central to art but no longer necessary: unity of the gunas with their frame free of affected relation is our unity with life.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Slower minimalism that reduces down the iterations can also illuminate the process to beautiful effect, for instance in Glass’s Violin concerto, Company, Facades from Glassworks or Tirol piano concerto; however there’s similar aesthetic logic, moving only in the moment referenced to no structure outside itself in any good melody, such as in the Chopin nocturnes, Shostakovich or Dvorak symphonies, or Monteverdi, Puccini or Sullivan numbers. It’s present in examples of juxtaposition over linear architectonics like the Messiaen and Schumann piano works or Strauss and Bax orchestral works, and in motivic writing in Beethoven’s Eroica symphony first movement (see that chapter) and the Grosse fuge, as well as Wagner. In all cases the right selection from an evolving array of possibilities is made based on that moment’s logic, the movement being unpredictable yet in great music inevitable and commanding. In slow and rapid minimalism the flux and movement is the same, just that more of the possibilities are foregrounded on the surface in rapid and more only in the mind in slow, but decisions are made with the same poised intuitive control and inner form. There’s the dynamism and infinite possibility of the silence of the Self yet right action at any one point, all as the self in lived life being aligned with the Self or the gunas, the logic within the dynamism.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Stasis can also arise from a drone, with long intense notes giving time for the attention to return back on itself in re-engaging with them, exalting in aesthetic awareness of one’s own Self: as with the focus on aesthetic content in repetitious music, the mind transcends the intellect for aesthetic life, retaining the Self and finding the absolute in the relative. Examples include the second section ofPart’s Tabula Rasa and Cantus for Benjamin Britten, the first movement of the Pastoral symphony, Young’s Seventh composition (a two note chord ‘held for a long time’), some Hildegard of Bingen and other medieval music, and singingly intense held notes in Wagner. Also in both the improvisatory North Indian Gandharvaved and Scottish piobaireachd bagpipe musics there are constant base notes, intersected respectively by the bamboo flute with complex rapid melody within a raga or chanter and isolated groups of grace notes- all different and reminiscent of the Scelsi Fifth quartet. The Indian melody reflects the mind’s thought and discursive wanderings while periodic attention to the magnetic, hypnotic drone reflects self-referral consciousness, the returning mantra in meditation and stress release. Bagpipes also have only nine notes but this limitation increases rather than decreases the fascination and its wider repertory’s idiom is accordingly repetitious and rhythmic yet complex and unpredictable. Further, some effective film music is static, ambient and non-melodic, for example Cliff Martinez’s for Solaris of 2002.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Scarlatti’s ecstatic sonatas use repetitious devices but also example the exploration of the same small scale form, over 560 times, and many baroque and renaissance composers among others likewise wrote large numbers of similar works, Birtwistle being a recent example with his series of similar extended orchestral canvasses developing under the contained dynamics of their particular material. Examples in painting includeCezanne’s and Rothko’s reproduction of the same scene or scheme numerous times and Van Gogh the same sunflowers five times: in each case a specific form is explored with endless depth and interest, again staying within the nataraja. Moreover op art and Bridget Riley's repetitive geometrical schemes create mesmerizing, disorientating effects and movement in stillness through explicitly drawing in the self-referential nature of consciousness and the cognitive faculties- a similar process to the glitter, dazzle and Dionysian aleatory associations of incident in minimalism the individual mind makes. <o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> In all cases energy and movement issue from a seething background stasis, all as right and powerful action issues from the Self’s dynamic stillness. Repetition’s containment and trancing effect embodies the constant focus of 5<SUP>th</SUP> or circumscribing the Self within itself away from unsupported thought, and its exhilaration the infinity of achievement residing in consciousness. Achievement is essentially already accomplished because all relations are with the unitary absolute, the lack of relative relations meaning the ecstatic answer to all problems is that there is no problem. Repetition, self-referentiality and the lack of subject-object distinction, everything being contained within consciousness, bring loss of distance for critical or individual subjectivity: there’s no externally conceived framing, depth structure or foreground-background contrast for material or thought to play in. Yet only conceptual criticality or individuality are lost, intellectual space and its ideas of subjectivity being without the possibility of a substantive base, and instead true collective, Dionysian subjectivity emerges; in both the aesthetic and sexual, private subjectivity transcends to the intersubjective and universal.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Cognizance is a matter of self-referentiality not discursive deliberation, external reality intimately relating to us: quantum physics indeed implies that the most distant galaxies only come into existence as billions of years old when observed, their photons behaving in the same observer-dependent way in experiments as all others. And as post-foundationist epistemology and the impossibility of intellectual demonstration of the outside world’s existence shows, there’s no reality external to us, or to the nataraja, or to our topologically closed universe we can see: everything’s contained within our awareness. There’s likewise no need to look beyond the aesthetic per se to arbitrary architectonics, theoretical castles in the sky and endless critical positioning: only the aesthetic or the gunas’ level, or life itself, leads the way. And self-referential 5<SUP>th</SUP> state of consciousness is bliss-consciousness, happiness being our underlying natural state and provided for nothing by the aesthetic, not something we have to create from scratch or work towards dialectically.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Repetition exults in itself, reflecting consciousness’s emergence of understanding out of itself, including ethical understanding in one’s desire rising to support that of others and delighting in the happiness of others desiring it: similarly smiling at others or laughing, they smile or laugh because they see the same happiness integral to them, and a self-sustaining and all-embracing loop develops, also as with smiling to a mirror. We smile because we smile, the absolute depending on nothing beyond itself, generating and perpetuating itself all as aesthetic return’s lack of justification, which repetitive music focuses on. Knowledge, ethics and aesthetics inhere complete within us and accordingly core human activities such as art, spirituality, sex and friendship retain their interest for us independently of our exposure to them: any critical justification would involve separating ourselves from ourselves, impossible as our basis is a unity transcending the intellect concerned with dualities. Computers’ functioning may be split up but we are alive- God is one and there can be no talk of other Gods: the base necessarily can’t move to be looked at critically by shifting position elsewhere.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Repetition eliminates the confused pursuit of intellectual reconciliation by overwhelming with the Dionysiac, all as sex makes clear that beyond the conceptual mind relinquishing attachment from ideas and evaluations about sensation, holding onto a sense of distance between oneself and the senses is misguided, particularly as the repetitive movements persist towards their conclusion; approaches to life based on detailed reason and contingent, contextualised systems of thought are negated by a grounded, triumphant immediacy. Moreover minimalism is accused of being unrelenting, wilful or monotonous when it’s just a focus on the underlying aesthetics, truth and Self, which never tires and should never sink below the level of the attention: an example is Nyman’s work with its constant line and focus, such as A Handshake in the dark or The Piano concerto.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Though regular architectonic, teleological art music can be readily listened to while doing something else, the two activities involving different parts of the mind, intuitive and intellectual, good repetitious music is uniquely compelling and engaging, making other activity almost impossible- the focus on the aesthetic leaves no unsupported intellectual activity to run alongside a formal frame. You don’t want to miss a single split second, contrasting with other musics where the attention can assimilate and internalize them partly by reference to pre-given schemes: repetitious music, similar to the narrow, contained idioms of folk or pop, is getting closer to life and away from art reflective of and distanced from life. Being continuous with life, uncritical folk and pop are more easily ignorable altogether but repetitious music remains critical art because of inner form and seething dynamics in the mind, aligned with the gunas. Through intuitive critique repetitious musics connect the gap between whatever aesthetic reference or gunas alignment there may be in the identity thinking of contextualized life, along with its folk or pop, and in abstracted architectonically critical art that goes beyond this and its present cultural inconsistencies.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Repetitious music has no specific points of change for the intellect to wait for but instead a constant slow rate of change, and thus only the intuition finds itself at one with the evolving landscapes; Wagner’s sophisticated transition processes and continuous integrated contrapuntal virtuosity enhances the bridge-burning, and the intellect struggles even to recall a previous state the present one evolved from. This may occur to the intellect as suspicious change by stealth but it’s more circumscribing the mind in the nataraja and rapture, focussing it in the ever fresh moment and avoiding loss to account or theory. Sunsets (see The Sun chapter), work in exactly this way, changing imperceptibly to provide constantly refreshed magnificent, immense aesthetic vistas and clarifying the absolute unity of nature with the perceiving cognitive faculties and mind- ‘I am That’: change continually takes place just as one’s interest would be sated. Academics have argued that minimalism’s submerging of pre-given structure is deceptive in the same way that contemporary consumer culture dulls the mind’s perception of the wider system and prompts it with mindless desire for new but essentially the same goods- but the real source of insight and freedom is from within, not more framing from without.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Sexual activity’s repetitions, its unity with oneself and the other person, and repetition of the activity parallel musical repetition. In sex the mind’s attention to the repetitions is self-referential in the Self-your Self and Self-other’s Self relations, their Self being the same as yours: sex unifies Self via your own sensation unified with that provided you from the other, your perceptions of their experience with their experience, all unified with yours, and so on- and the music encompasses this in its proliferating, interrelating vortex of the perception of repetitions and them being given back to the mind again. There is a background stasis in sex, it referring only to itself and nothing out in the world, and taking place in one location, combined with intense involving activity making clear the Dionysiac is all there is; sexual activity stimulates itself as it proceeds, the passion and interest increasing with the repetitions- all as in music. Offspring are produced by sex out of the finest foundations of its for-itself nature, all as the absolute connects with the relative out of its isolated and hidden nature via the Self and the gunas, by comprising the relative’s underlying structure. Strong onward movement paradoxically issues out of static, for-themselves repetitious systems with inherent necessary, pre-rational dynamics and logic: direction is uncertain and weak issuing from imposed dynamics.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> The decline in production of quality art music as a result of post-tonality and postmodernism’s levelling environment may be countered via inner dynamics of post-narrative, non-teleological minimalism- although the tensions in the West particularly as its energy source runs out may be increasing to a point where a much simpler, less alienated life is re-established, thus eliminating the need for a critical art tradition altogether. Minimalism’s success in bridging the gap between life and art while remaining critical shows the redundancy of framing as externally conceived beginning, middle and end, or in society as driven metanarratives or overarching sets of principles. If development and evolution are to be authentic they must proceed along self-generating lines not based on gaining the fruit of action but located in the moment, as with walking up steps in the dark and using a torch for each, one at a time- then there is the unpredictable inevitability of intuitive form in unity with not dominating content, relative and absolute together. Moreover the reduced reliance on architectonics and intellectual framing of the aesthetic in minimalism, and links with pop, make it easier to assimilate.

Stillness and self-reference are the nature of the absolute, consciousness and the field of the gunas and its logic that interfaces with the relative: the unitary absolute relates only to itself, contrasting with the relative, or the relative’s relative value, which relates to other elements of the relative. Repetitious processes in music provide key expression of and access to the absolute by isolating the aesthetic or the gunas’ logic, in giving the representation back to the attention before it has chance to try and necessarily fail to reconcile or make sense of it rationally: the mind is flooded with reality, purity and sense of ecstatic drowning as the intellect gives way to spiritual devotion. Postmodernism’s concern for surfaces and homogeneity in place of traditional depth structure, teleology and narrative provide an important base for repetitious music, particularly minimalism: the incredulity towards overarching principles or authority from without parallels the contemptibly, laughably misplaced activity of the intellect working with relative relations without absolute reference, and its resulting structures. The intellect needs only alignment with the intuitive aesthetic- depth is in fact to be found in surface, not on it but within it.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:" /><o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Repetition also reflects the use of repeated mantras in meditation for the mind to find unity with itself, moving from 3<SUP>rd</SUP> state of consciousness where the attention attends to concepts and objects of the senses, to 4<SUP>th</SUP> where it’s left only with its absolute Self: its nature providing for no relationships with anything beyond itself, there’s no critical context but only a constant tireless focus or being, without need for rest and reflection. Self-referentiality fixes the attention at every moment and on every fractal level, no matter how closely one attends to the music, negating perspicuous framing that distracts the attention between structural points. <o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Repetition prevents the attention getting lost in thought or the senses and instead always retaining its Self through emphasis on sensation’s detached aesthetic content, not its conceptual attachment to the mind from lack of coordination or NB unsupported discursive activity, nor reflection on either: the Self paralleled in the aesthetic is given back to itself before it can be lost to itself. Self-reference is the nataraja’s circularity but distinct from the confused circular thought of the uncoordinated conceptual mind, trapped in itself in the wrong way and lost in the senses. The clarity and naturalness of self-referral 5<SUP>th</SUP> state of consciousness where the attention returns back to itself before reaching the objects of the senses, the knower established as separate from action and objects in an unaffected relation with them and the gunas, is the first stage of perceiving the absolute value of the relative and the relative’s real nature as included within the absolute: the relative as a whole is a holistically contained realm and hence really only referring to itself in the same way does the Self. Repetitious music encapsulates the attention’s return in its re-presentation of aesthetic material before the intellect can lose itself in confused reconciliation attempts, allowing intuitive logic to emerge per se.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> In repetition the cognitive faculties have a clear play relationship with their sensory information, the interface between subject and object as rational construction losing definition: the attention’s return before reaching the object also means it relates to it unaffectedly, and ultimately hence containing it within itself, in 7<SUP>th</SUP> state. So though repetitious workings aren’t always obvious in great music they shed light on the source of its aesthetic value, and indeed if there is hope for the rediscovery of tonality and any future for art music, it’s to be found in these workings and particularly minimalism. Moreover repetition is the essential practice for accessing the content of any music- though the aesthetic is immediate, music needs to be listened to at least five times in order to assimilate and resolve the intellectual complexities its aesthetic meaning or inner life of tones is couched in, to reveal it to the individual mind’s intuition; aesthetic experience, as with the Self, is inter-subjective and universal, and not ostensive or external.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Repetition along with juxtaposition (see that chapter) bring stasis from loss of teleology and produce an ecstatic flow of surface material through the attention’s focus on it per se, and thus submerge any formal rationalizing architectonics and framing; indeed stasis or a sense of stillness itself can also provide for the attention’s return on itself. Minimalism and other repetitious forms may be highly and pre-compositionally architectonically structured but the aesthetic interest is in the repetitions and the initial material’s slowly evolving characteristics. Aesthetic material is for-itself rather than for set outlines and traditional linearity, moving only on the basis of inner intuitive connections between the successive presentations: the aesthetic is the unity of the underlying logic of the mind and the logic of the noumenal in-itself or reality behind appearances, and needs no external guidance. Repetitious and juxtapositional musics have more homogeneity and less depth-structure in the intellectual sense, and less stratification between foreground and background or even between upper and lower parts, providing a holism, immanence and euphoric lucidity, and sense of the transcendent and divine. <o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> These musics prioritize concern for inner detail and the mind’s seeking of possible options and directions the music must go in, finding transcendental rightness in the good composer’s decisions: insight is in intuitively right selections out of an array of possibilities, where the logic not being intellectually defined or eliminable perennially enriches the mind. As in the nataraja and its dance and play, freedom and infinity are paradoxically found through remaining within unstated aesthetic logic and what is right- embodied by repetition and development of material by small degrees and within limits, and within tonal harmony. For instance among the greatest of all music, the Bach Cello suites show it’s through repetitious structures such as series of arpeggios that are expansive but contained in gesture, harmony and rhythm, that music can find great depth and inwardness, not through supposed hidden intellectually transparent principles that modernism can foreground and dialectically build on.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Successful repetitious works then include Glass’s Dance No.1, Satyagraha, Powaqqatsi, Einstein on the beach, Belle et la Bete and Music in twelve parts, Reich’s Six pianos, Variations and Eight lines, Adams’s Nixon in China and Grand pianola music, Nyman’s The Man who mistook his wife for a hat, Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel, Litany and Credo, Bax’s Paean; Ustvolskaya’s Fourth symphony, Stockhausen’s Stimmung, Stravinsky’s Rite of spring and Les Noces, the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh symphony and last movements of the Pastoral symphony and Violin concerto, the fugue of Bach’s Toccata and fugue BWV.565, most of Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas, and Wagner’s Rheingold prelude and most of his operas. The effects are also shadowed in some pop and folk, for instance Senegalese and other West African musics and their accentuated and endless drumming rhythms.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> The sense of direction retained within the stasis, homogeneity and holism of repetition, out of the material’s inner processes and potentials or gunas allowed by the intellectually silent but dynamic background, formal schemes often being submerged in a lack of articulation, is further exampled by Feldman’s Coptic light and Rothko chapel, Ligeti’s Atmospheres and Lux aeterna, Ives’s Central park in the dark and The Unanswered question, Bax’s Christmas eve, Messiaen’s Et exspecto, the closing movementsof Quartet for the end of time (the title alluding to an end to formally symmetrical metre) and La nativity, Part’s St. John passion, Gorecki’s Miserere, Tavener’s Akathist of Thanksgiving, Eno’s Music for airports, Bryars’ Violin concerto ‘Bulls of Bashan’, Kancheli’s Third symphony, Ustvolskaya’s Octet, Cage’s 4’33’’ and Solo, Poulenc’s Horn elegie, Ravel’s Bolero and Daphnis et Chloe, the sequential ends of Strauss’s Death and transfiguration and slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth, Bruckner’s symphonies, the slow movements of Dvorak’s Fourth, and of Beethoven’s last seven string quartets, Schutz’s St. John passion, Tallis’s Spem in alium and most renaissance polyphony, plainchant, and the piano music of Poulenc, Mompou and Satie such as the three Gymnopedies with their stillness, dispatch and interest in the moment rather than high minded architecture; also Webern’s Bagatelles or Five Pieces despite their rationality.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> All have an uncertainty over where the music is going next yet combined with powerful, inevitable forward movement, the music extending itself and luminously reaching into and realizing further realms- creation ex nihilo but with its own deep logic. The focus is on the aesthetic and the gunas themselves, meaning issuing from within the material freed from rational direction from without: the on-edge quality reflects the passions, particularly sexual sensation with its procreation ex nihilo, but also our natural, effective, focussed but unformulated approach to all life. Containment within oneself is real freedom because reality issues outwards from the absolute and the realm of gunas within the relative. Moreover, cymatics shows how in nature form in various materials from sand dunes to galaxies can be generated by sound, the material shaping itself depending on resonance between it and the frequency: though the sound is from without, form is generated in correspondence and unity with the content’s inner characteristics.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Particular instances of the fascinating inner movement in repetition include the sets of chords of similar character in Reich’s Six Pianos, Glass’s Third Dance, Scelsi’s Fifth String quartet, many climactic points in Bruckner, near the start of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and ends of Symphony of psalms and Firebird, and the comparable last movement of Messiaen’s La Transfiguration. Though not repetitious the chordal writing in Haydn’s piano works has the same mesmerizing quality, and along with Messiaen’s juxtapositional piano music and its vertical harmony initially for its own sake rather than structure, and much minimalism, ask for hearing at a higher volume to bring out the fabulous inner detail. In each case the attention narrows down to concentrate on the intuitive, presuppositional cognitive faculties’ reciprocal involvement in the art-recipient relation, or the aesthetic in isolation.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Intellectually one might expect repetitive music to be dull, based on its low information content and high redundancy in terms of discursive thought and formal frame, but the aesthetic is self-justifying, inexhaustible and self-framing, all as the light of the Self is self-effulgent and not dependent on intellectual deliberation or anything in the relative. Aesthetic play of content needs no outward framework to play within because its nature is intuitive not critical- it’s a self-corroborating, reason-obliterating realm of meaning incredulous towards dialectics and their lack of foundation. There needs to be a unity of form and content in art and life to avoid loss of Self, groundless theorizing and absurdity: NBs however don’t have all their discursive minds underwritten by Self and can think groundlessly without meaningful internal contradiction, having limited Dionysian intuitive aesthetic experience and in poor social conditions creating reflective, detached art and its architectonics, instead of living fullness of IB life.<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>

Hello, nice to be here on this impressive forum. Here's a tract I wrote trying to outline the links between the Vedic tradition, repetitious musics and Western musical minimalism, and sexuality. I tried it on an art music forum but there was little comprehension, so any comments here read with interest. To be truthful it's rather abstract and some of the concepts aren't properly explained here as it forms part of a much larger project. I wasn't sure which board to post it on so if there's somewhere better obviously it can be shifted. A little about me- I'm 38, been to S.Asia three times, practiced Transcendental meditation for nearly 14 years, studied philosophy including some Indian and Buddhist, and applying for a music PhD in minimalism particularly on the connections with Indian music. The following would put any faculty on the ceiling as it doesn't cite sources or fit into much of an established paradigm, but of course the entire Vedic tradition and its directly perceived, intuitive nature is still an utter mystery to these benighted people. So it's not something I'm likely to present to an academic, but is more a record for myself of how I see things.