What interesting audio are you listening to?

Awake & Coastal Brake by Tycho.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXbax5qveo4

Talk about conditioning, I can’t think of much that isn’t more subjectively cognized as pleasant, unpleasant or neither than music!

It’s really interesting to bring mindfulness of all of the aggregates when hearing music.

I like quiet. The radio in my car never gets turned on. There is enough noise in my mind without adding to the din.

When I do choose music, it’s pretty varied. When I play guitar, I usually play loud.

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Indeed! But it seems every other Buddhist forum has this thread. I figured I might as well start it here, while trying to also improve on the usually “post your music” thread that seems to always pop up.

I’ll actually change the title of it so that people realize they don’t have to just post music :grinning:

Alas! I can no longer do that. Too long away from the forum, I suppose!

Iron Maiden, always good start for a spiritual search.

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Help me, help me to find my true
Self without seeing the future
Save me, save me from torturing
Myself even within my dreams

There’s got to be
More to it than this
Or tell me why do we exist
I’d like to think that when I die
I’d get a chance another time
And to return and live again
Reincarnate, play the game
Again and again and again and again

But I thought in Buddhism we are trying to get out of playing this game over and over again … endgame!

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Yes. But one may perhaps feel prompted to start thinking about such things and the implications of “again… and again… and again…” :scream: by hearing such lyrics.

Maybe… or just enjoy the music.

AN 2.126: Ghosa Sutta - Does the voice have to be completely right?

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That would certainly help. Most people would probably just hear this and think that’s just great!

Okay, that’s probably true.
But in actual truth, I do find it just great (or rather, it is the only plausible way it could be in my view). I think it is only right to be reborn again and again and again as long as one has not completely understood the world. How could one just die forever without having found enlightenment?

But the again… and again… and again… (ad infinitum) part has always had a somewhat desperate connotation for me.
Maybe that’s just me, though.

Anyway, another vague association to spiritual things from the same album:

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I suppose you can see it as an insight into the first Noble Truth of Dukkha. I don’t know if you know “In Flames” but they have this even more:

There’s this path that I can see
It leads straight to misery
We can’t undo what we have done
Just face what’s up ahead

IM also see that there is something compelling about being in this nightmare as if we don’t want to get out just because it is familiar (‘But scared to wake now, in too deep’) and they see it does not stop at death, that we’re reborn again and again.

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Yes, sure I know in Flames, although I’m for the most part not particularly fond of their newer works (since “Come Clarity” and especially after).

But to keep the papañca rolling for another turn, here the next association that comes to mind (which reminds me of certain happenings here recently in this community):

And with this, I will now leave this chit-chat about music, and some vague dhammic associations within it (which has been a pleasure), before someone might complain that Your Bedtime Story is Scaring Everyone.     :see_no_evil::hear_no_evil::speak_no_evil:     :anjal:

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Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
"Bye bye, lully, lullaby.”

Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”


Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world:

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"Seeking but not finding the house builder,
I hurried through the round of many births:
Painful is birth ever and again.

O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too.

My mind has now attained the unformed Nibbâna
And reached the end of every sort of craving." - the Buddha

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The bell gāthā starts the day, before the bell is rung and as it is rung, in Chinese Mahāyāna monasteries. I do not know if the Pāli tradition has a bell gāthā, but I imagine it has some similar manner of formally beginning the monastic day.

This is not a traditional bell gāthā from any extant culture. It is a new composition for the purposes of Plum Village’s Dharma-indigenization for the West. It is a lovely not-too-fancy not-too-plain setting of the traditional text, though.

It is actually written in a Medieval Church mode (special musical scales used in old Catholic liturgical music).

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And yet, still, a very “exotic”, dare I say, “Chinese-y” font was chosen for the video, one should point out. Very interesting, the intersection and friction between Buddhism and exoticism as it “presents itself” or “indigenizes” to “the West”.

One particular traditional bell gāthā, same text as the above, with more elaboration and including Bodhisattva Vows:

Hari OM Tat Sat - Moola Mantra

Om Sat Chit Ananda Parabrahma

Purushothama Paramatma

Sri Bhagavathi Sametha

Sri Bhagavathe Namaha

:anjal:

https://www.enthusiasticbuddhist.com

and

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