The Jazz of Living
a Dharma talk by Dr. Larry Christensen - Zen Center of Portland

September, 2003

I really enjoy Jazz and I have always thought of jazz as the musical equivalent of Zen living.  I really don’t know much about the theoretical aspects of jazz but I think of it as freedom of natural expression, responding whole heartedly in the context of the song, one’s instrument, your own proclivities and state at the time and the other people in the band.  It is like Zen living and practice.  We respond naturally without concepts to our surroundings and with a wholehearted, non-thinking expression of our instrument (our selves).  For instance when we sit we are on these pillows facing a wall, not moving and with a bunch of other people who are doing the same.  What would our natural expression of our true self be at that time?  Maybe you think, “To run away?”  But wouldn’t it be to look ahead, to breath and for the body to just be, to just sit there, experiencing the legs, the breath, the sounds, etc.  For the nose to express itself as a nose, for the hands to express themselves fully as hands, legs, butt, stomach head, all the same.  All the parts of the instrument are playing in harmony the song of being Mike, or Darren.   Everyone is a slightly different note or harmony of notes, but all together in here there is a beautiful jazz orchestra.  Just listen to us. 

There is a koan what is the sound of one hand.  This is it.  Can you hear it?  What is the sound of Mike or of Darren or Jack.  Can you hear each one?  The whole world is the player of these instruments.

It is no wonder that Jazz came out of the suffering of the blacks in America.  Being enslaved from a very harmonious living with the environment in Africa to brutal degradation and chains as slaves in America, the African American slaves used music as one of the few expressions of their natural and spontaneous interconnectedness with the natural flow of things.  The African-American slaves had to narrow their natural expression out in a very restrictive environment.

Likewise, when we are sitting we also have to try and express ourselves naturally and in a very full manner in what looks like a very restrictive environment.  We can’t move, we can’t talk, we can’t even think. What are we supposed to do?  Well we can see, hear, breath and feel.  We can be.

But we think this is not good enough.  We think this is boring.  We want to get back to controlling our life, doing something, where we are the star of the drama.   It is very difficult for us just to be.  I read a quote the other day in an advertisement that went something like “Humans are the only animal that doesn’t realize that the point of life is to enjoy it.”  We are so intent on doing the next thing, whether it is brushing your teeth or going to work.  We find it very difficult to “do nothing.”

But that is the problem right there. We think it is doing nothing.  But it is far from it.  It is doing everything.  Doing seeing, doing hearing, doing breathing.  Everything is involved in anyone of those things.  The wall and the floor and the air and everyone in the room all participate in breathing or in hearing or in seeing.  We are all together making a jazz combo.

But we find it is very hard just to jam, to grove in harmony with everything. We start to think, to talk to ourselves, we find something for the “me” to do,  instead of the nose or the stomach or the hand doing.  We seem to need a self, so we create one with our thinking, “I’m sitting,”  “I’m playing this instrument.” We judge the notes that we or others are playing, “my back hurts, I can’t take this anymore.”  Then we plan to move or say to ourselves that this is not a good practice, or I’m not a good Zen student.  We want to be playing some other song.  “I’d rather be at the beach.”  Well you aren’t, so be here.  But it is very hard just to be ok with the notes that the universe is playing right now.  We have judgment about them, and want different ones.  Then we make a me that is suppose to be in control and have the music sound differently.  We believe that there is someone playing the instrument instead of the music playing itself.

But where is this “me?”  Take a few minutes sometime today and try to locate the “me” that is in charge, that me that is breathing, or seeing, or hearing, or the me that is walking.  We believe that without a “me” things will go very wrong, maybe out-of-control.

But paradoxically when we are able to just be here in this moment, just as it is, experiencing things just as they are without commentary, without judgment or evaluation, without so much of “me” controlling everything, when we can settle down and just be, fully, we start to have a different sense of what living is, a different kind of self becomes apparent. This type of living, this big self as it is sometimes called, has no separate me having all the experiences.  Instead the experiences are having the experiences.  The hearing is doing the hearing, the seeing is doing the seeing, and the body feeling is doing the feeling.  No separate “I.”  And sense there is no me, separate from or “having” the feeling, thoughts, etc, there is tremendous freedom to just be whatever arises next.

It is like a good jazz player. They don’t have to think. There is no “me” playing the instrument or the music. They respond intuitively to the song and the other players. Likewise this non-self self is also responding to everything around it.  The nose is responding to the wall and the floor and the road and the earth.  In fact it is created by all of those things.  All of those things are having a collaborative effect in producing the nose, or the sound or seeing.  But you can’t think this kind of thing into consciousness, you have to experience your nose without thinking and try to see that what you experience, the sensations that you call nose is what the wall feels like in human form, or what the sound of the traffic is in human body feeling.

But you may be saying, “That sounds so ridiculous,” “I don’t know anything about what he is saying.”  That may be true but try to do this exercise, this experiential way of understanding.  Bring your attention to you hand for just a minute.  Try and feel the sensations in you hand.  All five fingers, the palm of you hand, the back of your hand, the skin, the inside bones and muscles of your hand, the throbbing of the blood.  Try and feel as much of the entire hand, without thinking about it, just the raw sensations.  Now play with the notion that those sensations are sort vibrations, vibrations or energy.  Energy vibrating at different frequencies to produce different sensations, some of which we name as bone, others and muscles, first finger, palm, etc.  What we are feeling are just vibrations.  Nothing solid or fixed.  Notice how they are changing all the time, nothing remains the same, like music, constantly changing

Now start to see that all the sensations in your entire body are the same, just vibrations.   But they are all connected and playing one harmonious melody.  Even the pain in your knee or back is a bunch of intense energy vibrations.  All these vibrations are in harmony and playing together.   They same can be said for sounds, just vibrations and also seeing, just vibrations.  Different kinds of vibrations so that some are seeing, others are sounds.  So both inside and outside are all vibrations, all in harmony, all part of the jazz melody called our life. 

All vibrations are connected and influence every other vibration.  They are dependent on the vibrations around them.  Again feel the sensations, the vibrations in your hand, or more accurately the vibrations we label as our hand.  Imagine for just a minute that the frequency of those vibrations are caused or affected by the vibrations of the sounds we are hearing.  So imagine that you can detect or feel the vibrations you are hearing in the vibrations in your hand.  So that the sensations or vibrations in your hand are what the sounds would “feel” like if they were translated or transformed into physical vibrations.  In other words you are feeling what you are hearing.  The hand is nothing but a physical manifestation of the sound you hear.  This may not make sense intellectually but you can actually feel this to be true.  Not by thinking about it but by experiencing it without thinking.

One of the ideas in modern physics these days is something called super string theory.  Very briefly the idea is that there are no elemental particles or solid building blocks for what we consider matter, but rather what there is are very small loops of something they all “strings” (they don’t really know what strings are, in fact some people don’t think there is anything that vibrates, there is only vibration) that vibrate at different rates making the vibrating string appear or act like different particles.  The rate of vibration seems to be context dependent that is, it will vibrate at a certain rate because of vibration of the other strings around it, and irrespective of the distance they are from each other.  Its like if you hold a struck tuning fork next to a violin string, the violin string starts to vibrate and make a sound too.  In other words all strings influence the vibration of every other string.  As Whitehead said, “Everything is everywhere all the time.”  I like “Every experience co-creates every other experience throughout space and time.”

This fits with another interesting astronomical property that scientists have recently discovered which is that the universe has a general tone that can be heard or detected in outer space, it is a B-flat.  Maybe this B-flat is the sound made by all of these strings vibrating.

This all sounds great.  But this is very hard to do.  We do not like how our neighbor is vibrating his or her instrument, or how we are playing.  We want to get rid of the way she talks to me.  We want her to be more kind.  We decide to not get close to her.  We are out of the grove there.  Or are we?  Maybe we have just shifted to a different key, maybe a minor key.  Maybe we are in free jazz, squawks and honks like Ornette Coleman.  You may not prefer that kind of jazz, but it is still music. 

So how do we get to appreciate this kind of music this critical, angry, judgmental form of jazz?  (Reminds me of Su Ra and his Electric Galactic Orchestra).  This is the hard part of practice, to start to notice this too as part of the jazz orchestra , a differently sounding instrument.  We first have to notice the harsh criticism.  We need to not take it for the truth, but more so as a much believed thought that we are having.  We don’t need to get rid of it, but rather to notice it without further judgment.  Then go to the bodily sensations that accompany this instrument.  What is the harmonic muscular tension that is playing a duet with this thought?  Try to experience the bare muscle tension.  Then let it have a solo without the thoughts for a while.  Then let other voices or instruments be heard.  Notice the knees and the butt.  Listen to sounds.  Try to expand your hearing, listen to the rest of the band playing along with the tension, that the sensations we are calling tension are really vibrations that are in harmony and are not separate from all other experiences in the room, Mike, James, the floor, the sounds, etc.

So no matter what the experience, whether it is our body sensation, hearing, or seeing it is all Zen music.  Even our thoughts, judgments, and emotions are different types of Zen music.  And every instrument is being played by not “me” but by the whole world.