Not doing

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

I get a mails from people who noticed that there is no longer any music on the site. That is because I took all the music away some weeks ago.
There are organisations who sue people for doing what I have been doing on this blog and I cannot afford that. So, I decided to try and find a way to make a reasonable settlement for legally publishing audio on this blog. But what is “reasonable”? I only want to write about music that is nowhere available, so I am not going to paying a few thousand euro’s per year to an organisation that has nothing to do with this music. But what I do on this blog is pretty unique so it is difficult to say what is reasonable. And who is to define the meaning of “reasonable” in this particular case anyway? I am corresponding with people about this issue, but for the moment I have to be silent about it.
While I was on vacation I thought about what to do with “The soundtrack of my life” during the period that I cannot put any music on it. I kind of like the humour of this situation. And there are enough other topics that I would like to write about. I don’t know if there are people interested in reading that, but the only way to find out is to try it.
As some people already know I am very interested in esoteric philosophy. Maybe even more than in music, although they are of course impossible to compare. My main source of esoteric inspiration and information came from what is known as “The fourth way”. This name comes from Gurdijeff, but it was Ouspensky who first wrote most of the ideas down that are now known as “The fourth way”. Later other people started publishing Fourth Way books too, and as with every esoteric idea it becomes pretty watery over time. I gave up trying to stay up to date with what is published under the flag of The Fourth Way.
Still, the ideas of Gurdijeff and Ouspensky play an important role in my thinking. Especially the idea of “Self-remembering”, but also some other ideas, like the idea that “we cannot do”. If you hear this for the first time, it might sound ridiculous, but Gurdjieff made it very clear that we are not the masters over our own life as most of us like to think: everything we think we “do” happens automatically, or mechanically, as Gurdijeff called it. What we think we “do” is actually just “happening”, like the rain or the growing of a tree.
In the past twenty years I puzzled lot about the ideas that I learned from the books of Gurdijeff and Ouspensky. Last week I wrote this about the idea that we “cannot do” in my paper zine:

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