6ch, you should tell us who you think is not being a "friend" to detlof and why.
You once had to apologize here and I said to you it was courageous to do so, and even allowed you to do so without apologizing specifically, which is what you should have done.
Similarly, its not constructive to say to someone that there are people who are not their friends, then not say why or who you are specifically talking about.
Some of that selective courage, please. |
OK, so then how do we, mechanically, so to speak, get people to appreciate beauty in music more/deeper, or even see that it exists? I mean, if being drawn to the hiend is synonomous with being drawn to feel more beauty in music - and assumably, we get on the audiophile path to make that happen more - then how do we catalyze that to happen in people more who don't know about it?
Is it just exposure, as in marketing penetration?
Or, do people have to change themselves in order to see what we are saying?
Is it both? If so, then don't we have to orientate our marketing and educational efforts towards educating people more on the appreciation of beauty?
In a capitalistic structure geared towards pleasure, how do we get people to want meaning in music?
Can you teach someone to see the beauty of a sunset? |
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I think that many of the above responses are excellent and well thought out, but seem to address mechanics. In other words, as with most things in our society where we assume that if we just invent another thing, or another technique, or another structure, then the problem will be fixed. The assumption in that a re-structuring in the external relationships is the problem.
I would submit that the problem is not in a re-working of the externals, but rather, a solution directed towards the internal is what would change our predicament (of course, rather than looking "out there" for our answer, we might have to look within. And, of course, this would require an effort at self-reflection that actually might impede our focus on externals).
People are right when they say the hi-end will always be small. Why? Because those individuals who search for beauty in any given society - and that's exactly what we are doing when we sit down to listen - are always a relatively small proportion of a population (at least, so far). The question then is, is this group shrinking to a threshold where the external societal structures no longer uphold that search, our search then mutating into what the external-focused masses yearn for? And here, if you look close, you can see the big difference, the determintive difference, between what we do in the hiend and what what society is moving towards and replacing the hiend with.
When we listen to music, we do so with a receptive, non-active mind. But, the activities that are replacing the hiend are all focused on a stimulation of the active mind (video games etc are a stimulus to the thinking mind; hie-nd audio is a catalyst of the receptive mind). Presently, these two forces are opposed because the forces that are addicted/attached to the active mind are intolerant in a societal context towards activities of the receptive mind; leisure is fine if we have time, but if we have work to do, it is relegated as expendible. The assumption that a more active mind more actively making and accumulating things is better than a mind receptively experiencing beauty, is mutating into the assumption that such mind is an impediment towards that active mind.
How is this happening?
Although we know that our "leisure time" enables a space in which to appreciate beauty, the fact is that our entire culture is progressively, regressively focused on activity that shrinks this space in people's lives. Thus, there are two dynamics involved: a) an expansion of active stimulation and b) a shrinkage of the leisure time to receptively experience beauty. This is, in turn, reflective of 1) the fact that capitalism and its cycling progression favors active-external focused minds and not receptive minds (listening to music is not a money-making activity and, therefore, from a capitalistic theoretical view, a less viable activity, and 2) we assume that the active activity lends meaning and not experiences of receptivity (Luther gave us that one; labor gets you closer to God in this life, our so-called work ethic).
The result of these assumptions, cycling progressively upon themselves, is a reduction in the number of people who have the will towards receptivity, regardless of its capitalistic viability, and an increase in the number of people who are addicted to the active stimulation of their thinking minds - through the acquisition of things, the playing of video games, all externally-orientated, etc.
I know this all sounds "abstract" but its actually much simpler. These are the underlying currents of society driving us towards a greater addiction to consumption (of external things) and a marginalizing of receptive activities of the mind, or beauty perception.
And so, we see a decline in the "arts", but actually we are seeing a decline in the minds who are willing - who have the will towards - the experiencing of art.
This situation can not be addressed in a fundamental way through tinkering again at the externals. Its getting too late for that, tensions are building, people are asking more and more if "art" has a future - our question here. Ironically, the tension increases as those same people continue to focus on a external market fix imposed from the outside by society upon itself, or marketed to itself. Because, a change towards greater receptive minds in society is not accomplished by marketing from outside, but by the individual from the inside.
How you accomplish that should be your question.
Am I apocolyptic? It may appear that way, especially if you don't want to consider that this might be true - re-categorizing a person as a regressive mystic is always a good way not to look - but, actually, this is just the way its supposed to be.
The talk above, even if still on externals, is still a turn towards the solution in its own way. But we could go faster... |
Thank you cdc.
Yes, gregm, good point. "Leisure" activity is not just looking at the body (I'm sitting still), or, that I'm not engaged what is defined in society as leisure (what I'm doing when I'm not at a job, leisure defined by what it is not), but addresses the orientation of the mind.
We use the word "leisure" as a point of departure because most people understand it, generally, to mean a space where the mind CAN be more receptive. But you're right, many people are so attached to the objectifying activity of their minds that even in "leisure" time - off work - that orientation towwrds the world continues and the activities adopted remain reflective of that attachment.
We are addicts of the thinking mind that seeks to objectify everything it sees: science reducing the mind into a thing; the reduction of animal minds into product-things; the seeing of the other person as a thing to be manipulated towards further acceptance by the others (society).
This is a cycling that leaves progressively less space for silence. The tension exists between those minds who move towards receptivity to "what is" and those minds who deny the possibility of this movement and cling to their ideology of materialism (read: only matter and the manipulation off matter exists to determine truth).
The tension is increasing and we see it in society in general and reflected in its microcosms, like the hiend, and particularly in its microcosms that address "art" as they are marginalized and its participants ask themselves, what can we do about it?
What is paradoxical is that, because the hiend also deals with technology, and because those that are technolog-ic in orientation are predominantly materialist, the hiend has a significant population of people who are allied to objectification and are advocates of its ideology, and yet, at the same time, are engaged in an art that shows them the partiality of that attachment; they are attached to the thinking mind, yet when they are listening to music they are letting go of that thinking mind, and yet later, when they talk about it to others, revert back to the ideology of materialism.
Interesting... |
Hello Ohn. No, being drawn to beauty in the hiend does not mean that if you are not in the hiend that you can't see beauty. However, if you are drawn to beauty in general, then I think you would also be drawn to the beauty of music, and, therefore, the hiend.
Hence, my inquiry about how we reach those people that may already be drawn to beauty in other areas but don't know about the hiend. This was an attempt to draw the parameters of marketing towards a goal not based on stimulation of the personality (create a new style: you need this! adverts) but DIRECTED to areas where such beauty-drawn minds tend to congregate; don't change minds (because you can't teach someone to appreciate a sunset; you cann't teach receptivity to beauty), but locate them.
The former strategy seeks to stimulate minds to action though argument, the latter admits that the creation of the beauty-drawn mind is internally driven (not subject to stimulation by external in advertising context)and not subject to being changed through persuasion, and,therefore, the strategy must be to find them already formed or on that progression.
Unless, of course, you also think that there might be a way to catalyze the collective mind towards receptivity, which as I've argued before, necessarlity involves catalyzing the "letting go" of one's attachment to the power of thinking over things. Ohn, how do you think we should do that?
So, back to mechanics: where are those minds drawn to beauty yet are not in the hiend?
What other "hobbies" exist where the urge is towards beauty of that which is being experienced as phenomenon?
An ad for hiend in Wine Spectator? |
Here (hear), I'll call him.
6ch, 6ch (possibly someone might dare think, six channel audio), come home, come home, time for supper!
Sorry, 6chhc6, just couldn't help myself... :0)
Hi detlof, hope you are well...yes, their direct opposites too. Some people adopt a variance ideology and incorporate that into the idea of themselves. They then take that new idea of themself and turn and fight the minds that they just came from, and in so doing, assure that have never left! This can happen with any idea: materialist, so-called liberal, conservative, environemntal-based, etc.
In such people, you see the same orientation as the materialist: they use that idea to then use against the other to stay where they are. For example, they adopt the idea of vegetarianism (I am one, BTW) and this idea becomes them, their ego structure, as opposed to an action that arises from what they are. These people become missionaries, seeking to use their "good" ideas to quell another. It remains a predatory action of the thinking mind, not an empathic symptom of being.
In the hiend, we see this in a romantic idealist fashion, where people say that they have experienced music deeply as a means of excluding the other, in this case excluding people who like "accurate" sound. They do this by equating their alleged attainment with some sort of spiritual attainment. This is where you see someone claiming to be a shaman of triodes, or invoke Zen language. The reactionary, fundamentalist taint remains.
It is this exclusionary orientation of both minds - the making of the other mind into the other thing - from either group that, underneath, makes them the same. They are each using ideas of themselves to stay where they are and control the other through thinking.
The "tooth and nail" comes not from engaging them on the idea, its content, but from engaging them on an idea of themselves, a self that does not want to change, that thinks if it stays where it is and follows the rules provided by others then it will be safe. It is fear of change. This produces the recoil that we see many times to an idea here, because it is not the content argued with, but the felt pressure of potential change.
Yes, all truth can be turned on its head, at least all truth obtained by thinking; all thinking directed at the infinite grasps merely tangents of finiteness. It is always an approximation; some thinking points away because it wants to stay where it is and deny what it might become, other thinking points to that potentiality in all that only the individual can choose for himself.
But then, you know this.
Cheers across the ocean. |
Oh yea, on mechanics. You know what "mechanic" really gets people going, really makes them want to join the hiend?
Hearing people like twl talk about turntables, or detlof about his stacked Quads.
Its us.
Just keep talking to people with passion - the passion translated from your deep listening experience. Not a missionary grabbing by the shoulders, just tell them and they will come.
Its a matter of...
faith |
Oh Viggen, don't rain on the beauty parade, especially if what you offer is a radically subjective justification!
Really though, yes, people have different opinions - I think we are aware of that - but that fact itself doesn't translate into the proposition that, therefore, all opinions are equal. Certainly, there are some guys who only care about the equipment - whose minds are so orientated towards an attachment to things that it overwhelms any tendancy to be drawn into the music, as in, an imbalance between thing and mind - but I don't think we should tell ourselves that that way is the optimal means of experiencing meaning in the music. I can't imagine you beleiving this either, even though being equal/equal has a good sound to it in a crowd.
Radical egalitarianism enables one to proceed into a group and judge them by saying they shouldn't form opinions where one way is differentiated from another, but this is disingenuous: some truths are truer than others, all knowledge is built on that proposition. Moreover, the opinion that all opinion is equal is a performative error; in making that argument you disprove the argument.
Second, the hiend is not a "thing." People who are attached to the power of their mind to objectifying reality many times make this error; they reduce mind to an object - science has been doing it since Descartes.
The hiend is a group of minds who listen with those minds to sound-phenomenon, again, it is not a "thing". As long as you assume its some-thing "out there" - like an object I can manipulate - and not your own mind, you won't understand, and will ask questions unaware of the materialist assumption underlying and limiting what answer you can potentially derive.
All are equal in potential to "hear" beauty, but some choose to limit themselves in the assumptions they bring to the listening.
Again, the question is: how can we find more minds that have seen already that beauty isn't a thing? |
Oz and Viggen, thank you for your well thought out responses.
Viggen, I disagree that the mind has not itself become objectified by the western project. Science - ratio-empiric method applied with assumption that all truth derives from matter - first reduced matter to smaller and smaller pieces (Descartes reductionist method aplied to Galileo's idea of universe as machine of matter), then, that reductionist ideology was turned upon the mind itself. The entire history of so-called post modernism is a history of deconstruction on the mind; the existentialists looked beneath thought and saw a Nothingness, the Deconstructionists broke up sentences, saw nothing between, and assumed a Nothingness. Interestingly, the assumption of a Nothingness prior to thought is itself a bias of the thought attached mind; a space-of-mind absent thought is a Nothingness because only meaning derives from thought, so it assumes. The Existentialists and Deconstructionists rejoined the assumptions of scientific method they originally sought to see beyond by seeing silence of mind and, then, adopting this assumption. No evidence to do so, just re-adopted scientific materialism's assumption that outside of thoughts about matter nothing else, effectively, exists. Ironic, eh? The result is thought structures without a ground of meaning, the collective mind in recoil from that assumed Nothingness turning back to the power of the thinking mind to give it things to accumulate and cycle into pleasure, so on, and, hence, what you see - if you see - around us. The cycling of "Captitalism", as we practice it, is merely a reflection of this deeper cycling. Surface eddies, so to speak.
Which brings me to Oz, always asking good questions. You ask, "Do all people limit themselves by their assumptions?" This is subtle. No, not by the assumption itself, but by the attachment to that assumption. Now, you could say that the word "assumption" inherently implies an adherence to a set of thought-rules, and I would agree, so let me modify this to, an attachment to thought is a limitation in and of itself. This does not mean that you don't use thoughts - you don't go mute, Jesus could yap with the best of them - but that you do not derive your identity from your thought. This means, impliedly, that identity in this instance is grounded in "something" else. The grounding is not in thought, although thought still arises, but in the ground of thought, or the silence between, beneath and infusing thought.
So, if you still think, but are grounded in the ground of thought - and, thereby, through that grounding, not attached to thought - then what is it in thought that one becomes attached to? I mean, if all thought-rules are assumptions, then what is it that is attached to? Answer: thought arisement, if observed by the silent mind, has momentum, or orientation to that which it is responding to; thought is tied to the object of thought and the orientation to that object and/or mind determines whether there are limits or not, or how dirty the lens is as a metaphor. The lens becomes clearer by a reduction in recoil from the object/other mind, or a reduction of attachment. This recoil/attachmnet is reflective of the prey/predator remnants of the mind. So, what I am saying is that an attachment to thought, and the recoil to other thoughts that you see, IS that "attachment" I refer to. Its not thought per se that's "bad", but the prey/predator momentum that separates the silence in your mind - your true face of grounding - from that Silence which is also the ground of all that you see outside.
Yes, Viggen, I am presupposed to move towards this Silence (and, you will note, it is not coincidental that music is experienced deeply when the mind is silent...). On all of us being presupposed to being drawn to this beauty, yes, all minds are drawn to this flame, even the ones who deny it exists. The Silence, like a mother who never turns away, is quite nice to us on that point.
On "Storms": we are not drawn to the Light of Silence/Beauty/Truth because of our escape from storms; the storms are a result of our recoil from the Silence in the first instance. Pleasure may result from grounding in the Silence of Beauty, but pleasure should always be your aftertaste. But I think you know this Oz... |
