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FOUR PART ALBUM RELEASED
The Guru And The Gypsy Inspiration
NO BOUNDARIES
Have you ever wondered why life comes in opposites? Why everything you value is one of a pair of opposites? Why all decisions are between opposites? Why all desires are based on opposites right from documented First Life?
Notice that all spatial and directional dimensions are opposites: up vs. down, inside vs. outside, high vs. low, long vs. short, North vs. South, big vs. small, here vs. there, top vs. bottom, left vs. right. World of Opposites!
If one were to take a dominant age-old worldview, one of the first tasks given to humans was to name the animals and plants existing in nature. For nature does not come ready-labelled with name tags, and it would be a great convenience if we could classify and name all the various aspects of the natural world. Complexity, Mapping Our Universe and Setting Our Boundaries!
HALF OF IT
Humans, in other words, were charged with sorting out the complexity of nature’s forms and processes and assigning names to them. “These animals look like one another and they don’t resemble those animals at all, so let’s call this group ‘lions’ and that group ‘bears.’ Let’s see, you can eat this group of things but not that group. Let’s call this group ‘grapes’ and that group ‘rocks.’ ” Let’s Group The Lions And The Bears!!
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But human’s real task was not so much thinking up names for the animals and plants, laborious as that undoubtedly was. Rather, the crucial part of their jobs was the sorting-out process itself. For, unless there was only one of each animal, which is unlikely, humans had to group together those animals, which were similar and learn to mentally differentiate him or her from dissimilar ones.
Humans had to learn to draw a mental boundary line between the various groups of animals, because only after they did this, could they fully recognise, and therefore name, the different beasts. Appearance or Reality? Ah but Nature Has No Error! And the Magic Of Words…What’s In A Name?
In other words, the great task humans initiated was the construction of mental or symbolic dividing lines. Humans were the first to delineate nature, to mentally divide it up, mark it off, diagram it. Humans are the mapmakers on earth, creating ‘boundaries’.
So successful was this mapping of nature that, to this day, our lives are largely spent in drawing boundaries. Every decision we make, our every action, our every word is based on the construction, conscious or unconscious, of boundaries. This is not a reference to just a self-identity boundary—important as that certainly is—but to all boundaries in the broadest sense.
To make a decision means to draw a boundary line between what to choose and what not to choose. To desire something means to draw a boundary line between pleasurable and painful things and then move toward the former. To maintain an idea means to draw a boundary line between concepts felt to be true and concepts felt not to be true. To receive an education is to learn where and how to draw boundaries and then what to do with the bounded aspects. To maintain a judicial system is to draw a boundary line between those who fit society’s rules and those who don’t.
To fight a war is to draw a boundary line between those who are for us and those who are against us. To study ethics is to learn how to draw a boundary line disclosing good and evil. To pursue Western medicine is to draw with greater clarity a boundary between sickness and health.
Quite obviously, from minor incidents to major crises, from small decisions to big deals, from mild preferences to flaming passions, our lives are a process of drawing boundaries.
The peculiar thing about a boundary is that, however complex and rarefied it might be, it actually marks off nothing but an inside vs. an outside. For example, we can draw the very simplest form of a boundary line as a circle, and see that it discloses an inside versus an outside. A Half of It view!
UNCHARTED TERRITORY
In the meantime, the results of human endeavours were spectacular, powerful, magical, and humans understandably started to get a little cocky. They started extending boundaries into, and thus gaining knowledge over, territories that were better left uncharted.
This smug behaviour culminated in a dominant worldview and metaphor of the Tree of Knowledge, which was really the tree of the opposites of good and evil. And when humans recognised the difference between the opposites of good and evil, that is, when they drew a fatal boundary, their world fell apart. When humans sinned, the entire world of opposites, which they themselves had helped to create, returned to plague him - pain vs. pleasure, good vs. evil, life vs. death, toil vs. play—the whole array of conflicting opposites swept down on humankind. Choices Made, A Boundary Too Far and the World Falls Apart!
The exasperating fact, which humans learned, was that every boundary line is also a potential battle line, so that just to draw a boundary is to prepare oneself for conflict - specifically, the conflict of the war of opposites, the agonising fight of life against death, pleasure against pain, good against evil. What humans learned—and learned too late—is that “Where to draw the line?” really means, “Where the battle is to take place.”
The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The Battle Is On!
Now our habitual way of trying to solve these problems is to attempt to eradicate one of the opposites. We handle the problem of good vs. evil by trying to exterminate evil. We handle the problem of life vs. death by trying to hide death under symbolic immortalities. In philosophy we handle conceptual opposites by dismissing one of the poles or trying to reduce it to the other. The materialist tries to reduce mind to matter, while the idealist tries to reduce matter to mind. The monists try to reduce plurality to unity, the pluralists try to explain unity as plurality. All we have is an Age of Anxiety in lieu of battles and eradicating opposites!
THE FINAL DANCE
This goal of separating the opposites and then clinging to or pursuing the positive halves seems to be a distinguishing characteristic of a worldview of progressive civilisations —its religion, science, medicine, industry. Progress, after all, is simply progress toward the positive and away from the negative. Yet, despite the obvious comforts of medicine and agriculture, there is not the least bit of evidence to suggest that, after centuries of accentuating positives and trying to eliminate negatives, humanity is any happier, more content, or more at peace with itself. In fact, the available evidence suggests just the contrary: today is this apprehension of “future shock,” of epidemic frustration and alienation, of boredom in the midst of wealth and meaninglessness in the midst of plenty.
The root of the whole difficulty is our tendency to view the opposites as irreconcilable, as totally set apart and divorced from one another. Illusionary Boundaries!
The inner unity of opposites is hardly an idea confined to mystics, Eastern or Western. If we look to modern-day physics, the field in which the Western intellect has made its greatest advances, what we find is another version of reality as a union of opposites. In relativity theory, for example, the old opposites of rest vs. motion have become totally indistinguishable, that is, “each is both.” An object, which appears at rest for one observer, is, at the same time, in motion for a different observer. Likewise, the split between wave and particle vanishes into “wavicles,” and the contrast of structure vs. function evaporates. Even the age-old separation of mass from energy has fallen to Einstein’s E = mc2. Likewise, such opposites as subject vs. object and time vs. space are now seen as being so mutually interdependent that they form an inter-woven continuum, a single unified pattern. What we call “subject” and “object” are, like buying and selling, just two different ways of approaching one single process. And because the same holds true for time and space, we can no longer speak of an object being located in space or happening in time, but only of a space-time occurrence. Modern physics, in short, proclaims that reality can only be considered a union of opposites.
In the words of biophysicist Ludwig von Bertalanffy:
If what has been said is true, reality is what Nicholas of Cusa called the coincidentia oppositorum. Discursive thinking always represents only one aspect of ultimate reality, called God in Cusa’s terminology; it can never exhaust its infinite manifoldness. Hence ultimate reality is a unity of opposites.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy.
From the viewpoint of coincidentia oppositorum, ”the coincidence of opposites”—what we thought were totally separate and irreconcilable opposites turn out to be, in von Bertalanffy’s phrase, “complimentary aspects of one and the same reality.”
That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves, which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say “ultimate reality is a unity of opposites” is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.
The point is that all of the lines we find in nature, or even construct ourselves, do not merely distinguish different opposites, but also bind the two together in an inseparable unity. A line, in other words, is not a boundary. For a line, whether mental, natural, or logical doesn’t just divide and separate, it also joins and unites. Boundaries, on the other hand, are pure illusions—they pretend to separate what is not in fact separable. In this sense, the actual world contains lines but no real boundaries.
A real line becomes an illusory boundary when we imagine its two sides to be separated and unrelated; that is, when we acknowledge the outer difference of the two opposites but ignore their inner unity. A line becomes a boundary when we forget that the inside co-exists with the outside. A line becomes a boundary when we imagine that it just separates but doesn’t unite at the same time. It is fine to draw lines, provided we do not mistake them for boundaries. It is fine to distinguish pleasure from pain; it is impossible to separate pleasure from pain.
Repeat, illusionary boundaries again!
Commenting on this, L. L. Whyte said:
“Thus, the immature mind, unable to escape its own prejudice … is condemned to struggle in the straitjacket of its dualisms: subject/object, time/space, spirit/matter, freedom/necessity, free will/law. The truth, which must be single, is ridden with contradiction. Man cannot think where he is, for he has created two worlds from one.”
And these illusory boundaries, with the opposites they create, have become our impassioned battles.
Since it is expressly the boundaries, which we superimpose on reality that slice it up into innumerable pairs of opposites, the claim of all these traditions that reality is freed from the pairs of opposites, is a claim that reality is freed from all boundaries. That reality is not-two means that reality is no-boundary. Thus the solution to the war of the opposites requires the surrendering of all boundaries, and not the progressive juggling of the opposites against each other. The war of opposites is a symptom of a boundary taken to be real, and to cure the symptoms we must go to the root of the matter itself: our illusory boundaries.
When the opposites are realised to be really one, like either sides of a coin, different and yet one, and you make a choice, the discord melts into concord, battles become dances. Like the Gestalt Principle the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. The parts metaphorically are the opposites with their individual meanings or understanding of a frame of reference and/or reality, as each one of us understand. The whole - absolute reality - is greater than the sum of the opposites or parts. And in there is the grand design of creation, of absolute reality, of our existence, the boundaries, the choices we make, the results we have and the continual dance. It is our life , experience, choice and realisation journey.
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The Union of Opposites leads to The Final Dance.
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The tribute to this Inspiration is the Four Part Album. The music is a fusion of Jazz, World Music and Hindustani Classical (Indian). Quite rightfully jazz is an open improvisational form and its swing and hot club forms fuse with other genres into gypsy jazz! Indian Hindustani classical music on the other hand has tradition, structure, and yet within the norms ... improvises. The common anthem is 'improvisation'.
When the two forms meet together to celebrate a collaboration do we have The Guru and The Gypsy dance? The Union of Opposites. Illusionary boundaries. Repeat - No Boundaries!
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Road Scholar Music pays tributes to Sarodia!
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