Contemplative fieldnotes:
My brother - a musician - asked me how he would go about using music to train attention.
Playing around, using this masterpiece from James Holden - Renata youtu.be/2FmFXQSIzCo
If anyone has played with music + meditation let me know.
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Cool.
It's a really broad topic so I suppose broad questions might give you some space to riff on whatever it is you've found helpful:
- How do you like to use it? What functions does it serve?
- Do you use specific focus strategies, or not?
- What pitfalls have you found?
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I use it as a warmup/for doing rapid alterations between broad/narrow attention.
I'll often pick a song with a strong percussive bass/drum line that occasionally disappears. While it's there, focus on the percussion. When it's gone, open up to everything.
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Yes the spatiality aspect - broad/narrow, inclusive/exclusive, etc - seems like a key strength in using music, and pretty accessible to the beginner, eg: brother immediately grokked what I meant when I said something like, 'open to the experience of silence in which sounds arise'
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I really like your question and this conversation. I suspect that almost every contemplative person uses some kind of focus on listening. In fact when I focus deeply on listening even found sounds become a kind of music.
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For me to incorporate music into that deep listening experience, I find that I most enjoy the music when it has a certain spaciousness and/or a range of effects
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Mmh. I tend to listen to various electronica, but symphonic music or classical instruments would also do, I think.
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Yes. This puts me in mind of the tradition of Rasa which dovetails with tantrism. A Rasika savours the qualities of an experience and distills its emotional resonances. And then those distillations are savoured as well.