On wisdom and music

I am studying for the test and taking a little break to write on the blog. On Friday I went to the Rubin Museum of Art again to see the new exhibits and I encountered the CD with the soundtrack from the SAMSARA movie. Just seeing the cover with the scene of the movie, a monk against a background of Himalayas, brought memories to me of my short time spent in Tibet and Nepal and being surrounded by vast spaces and mountains. The vast spaces around me and connection to nature give me the feeling of such freedom... The concrete around me now is so limiting... It's much more difficult to retain the sense of freedom in this present scenery. The music composed for this movie includes voices of the Himalayan people and instruments such as Armenian duduk, Japanese flute, Indian sarangi, Mongolian violin. The music is transcendental. The movie is beautiful, deep and simple, and I saw it in Kathmandu - I wrote about it on the blog after I saw it. I read the director's statement on making the movie and his spiritual connection to it and it deeply moved me. Here's what he says: " I went to a school called life and taught myself cinema. I always knew that I wanted to make films, even before I saw one at the age of nine. I lived in a very small and poor village in India, next to a railway junction where many trains stopped but only to exchange passangers. My village was nobody's destination. As a kid I sold tea on this unique railway platform. I would often sit on the deserted rail track, waiting eternally for a train to arrive, staring at five empty cups of tea, hanging from my five fingers." During my travels in India so many times I observed boys and men selling tea, walking around railway stations, streets of cities and villages and walking through the cars of trains. The image of cups hanging from five fingers is vivid in my mind, always...

Yesterday I took another of these boring communication and clinical skills classes. The material covered has nothing to do with ethics, at least not what I would consider ethics or anything that would bring me any realisations... It's just part of the curriculum and I had to take these classes. The school is changing its profile and is changing for the worse but I will write about this some other time. This time I just wanted to write about this class. During the class we watched a movie on Rumi and his poetry. It was basically a group of translators and literary persons talking about him and his work and how difficult it is to translate works such as these into English, etc. At one point of the movie one of the translators is meeting with a Turkish musician in Turkey and the musician tells him: "Forget about books, throw them all out." And the translator says: "But I like books, I learn so much from them." The two men talk about different things because they belong to different cultures and although they understand the words, they don't understand the meaning or the different meanings the words may have. The Turkish man really says: "You will learn from books how the material reality work - you are in it so it will help you adjust to it and make things easier for yourself. But if you are looking for answers to your deepest questions, you have to look in you. You will not learn the deepest meaning of life from books. You can only learn it from experience, daily experience and relationship of things, and your relationship to them, the illusive things and images that can't be captured in words". The American translator doesn't understand him. He looks for answers to his questions in literary works and believes it is the only way. Before my trip in 05 and 06 I read books very seriously, thinking they will bring me answers. Now I read them for entertainment. I study all this material for school and read a lot of books. It's all very interesting but it always is teaching me only the skill to do things - they are only teaching me the reality of one, material, dimension. The images I experienced during my trip, and also in NY but to a lesser degree because here the energy is scattered and hectic and concentration is fleeting, is what gives me connection to different dimensions, not as visible as the material but equally present. I am learning the skill of putting needles, applying herbs, moxa and guasha, but if I don't have the deeper connection with universal energy I am not going to be of any help to anyone. What heals is presence and wisdom. What brings me to wisdom is the image of tea cups hanging from five fingers and other images which I can't really describe.

Here's a line I also found in the CD:

"The winds of grace blow all the time. All we need to do is set our sails."
Ramakrishna