---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote:
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, salyavin808 wrote:
>
> I've been listening to Zazen for about an hour now. It's not my usual sort of
> thing but it must be rather pleasant as I have no urge to switch it off. It
> could have veered into shallow, anodyne new age territory but the peaks and
> troughs seem to keep it lively.
Part of it may have been the "tough taskmaster" approach that Rama took to his
students, in Zazen's case being the rather...uh...aggressive recording and
creative schedule he set for them and that they -- to their credit --
fulfilled. I've lost count, but I think that they recorded at least 20 full
albums of music in the space of about ten years. I won't bore anyone here by
repeating what I said about them in an earlier chapter of Road Trip Mind, so
for those interested, here's that link:
http://www.ramalila.net/RoadTripMind/rtm28.html
http://www.ramalila.net/RoadTripMind/rtm28.html
I've only recently discovered this resource of well-mastered,
well-rendered-digitally music on the web, and so I'm discovering it at the same
time everyone else is. I listened to a few songs since my first post, and a few
still stand out for me as "consciousness-changers." They include, for the
curious, Samurai > Samurai's Victory Song, Tantra > Rama's Song, and Mystery
School > the first 4 minutes of Mystery School. That's Rama.
When I saw the "album list" on the page I URLed earlier, I was weirded out
because one of the best of the albums IMO was not listed. It was called
"Canyons Of Light," and it painted a musical portrait of many of the places of
power in the American Southwest in which we had experienced "desert trips" with
Rama. Clicking around, I discovered that it has been preserved at another link
on the same site, and with video of the places in question, too. Such a deal.
http://www.ramameditationsociety.org/canyons-light-cayman-blue
http://www.ramameditationsociety.org/canyons-light-cayman-blue
Oh dear, just a tad too elevator-ish for my taste. No highs, no lows, no
texture, no nuance. Musical pablum.
All these years later, and there is still some truth in the Rama one-liner I
quoted at the end of my RTM story above, "I am mainly in the music." Whatever
constitutes "best" when discussing a fallible, ordinary human being, he brought
it to his music. Some of that "best" seems still to be there for me, all these
years on...
