One More Time

I'm too burned out tonight to post anything original, so instead I'll just cut and paste two more articles for those of you who haven't got enough yet about the David Lynch Change Begins Within benefit concert for Transcendental Meditation. Here's Jon Pareles' review from the New York Times, and a frankly goofy piece by Nancy Franklin from The New Yorker. Finally, I'm adding a piece from The Huffington Post about how Michelle Obama exemplifies certain Buddhist ideals.

Just Say ‘Om’: The Fab Two Give a Little Help to a Cause
By Jon Pareles
April 5, 2009

Paul McCartney announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Shears!” Then Ringo Starr strode onstage at Radio City Music Hall on Saturday night to sing “With a Little Help From My Friends.” The two surviving Beatles shared a microphone, and then embraces, in their first public performance together since a 2002 memorial concert for George Harrison.

For encores Mr. Starr moved to the drums and Mr. McCartney, surrounded by other musicians on the bill — including Sheryl Crow, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Donovan, Bettye LaVette, Moby and Ben Harper — sang two more 1960s songs, “I Saw Her Standing There” and a rarity, “Cosmically Conscious,” that Mr. McCartney wrote during a 1968 trip that the Beatles (and Donovan) took to learn Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India.

What cause could marshal that much of a Beatles reunion? War and peace, poverty, human rights, the environment? No. The concert was a benefit for the David Lynch Foundation, which seeks to teach Transcendental Meditation to a million students worldwide. “Every child should have one class period a day to dive within himself,” reads the manifesto at davidlynchfoundation.org. “This is the way to save the coming generation.”

It was clearly a Lynch production. The concert began with the composer Angelo Badalamenti playing his ominous and Romantic theme from Mr. Lynch’s television series “Twin Peaks.” A musician stepped onstage to provide a drumroll on a tom-tom as each performer was introduced. On an overhead screen “Change Begins Within” was projected over an abstract, slowly rippling, very Lynchian image of a wave.

As at most benefit concerts, music was interspersed with proselytizing: testimonials and video clips about the benefits of meditation. There was an undeclared contest over who had been meditating longest: 37 years for the comedian Jerry Seinfeld (who did bits about movie theaters, public toilets, taxis and marriage), 38 years for the radio personality Howard Stern, 41 for the two Beatles and — the winner — 43 years for the flutist Paul Horn, who also made the 1968 visit to Rishikesh. That trip ended in acrimony, but the surviving Beatles held on to the mantras the Maharishi gave them and said they continued to use them.

Mr. McCartney introduced “Cosmically Conscious” (which was a hidden track on his 1993 album “Off the Ground”) as a song written around two of the Maharishi’s favorite phrases, “cosmically conscious” and “It’s such a joy.” It turned into a full-harmony chorale with the assembled singers.

Although Donovan sang his 1960s hits and Mr. Starr’s own brief set included the Beatles’ “Boys” and “Yellow Submarine” (with Mr. Vedder and Ms. Crow vigorously singing along), many musicians used the occasion for lesser-known songs about quests for spirituality and meaning.

Ms. Crow performed “Riverwide,” a Celtic-Eastern hybrid. Mr. Vedder sang a wordless vocal meditation, layering harmonies in repeated loops, and the pensive “Guaranteed,” with lines like “a mind full of questions, and a teacher in my soul.” He was joined by Mr. Harper on Pearl Jam’s “Indifference” and the Queen-David Bowie collaboration “Under Pressure,” a song about seeking love amid “the terror of knowing what this world is about.” Ms. LaVette fronted Moby’s band, bringing soulful fervor to “Natural Blues,” a song about “trouble with God.”

But it was also a night for reminiscences of the 1960s and of the Beatles. Ms. Crow sang George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” and Mr. Starr spoke about writing “It Don’t Come Easy” with Harrison. Mr. McCartney sang his memorial to John Lennon, “Here Today.” Video footage of the Beatles accompanied Mr. McCartney during his set, and he played the violin-shaped style of bass he used at Beatles concerts. Mr. McCartney gave robust performances of songs from his band Wings, his solo albums and especially the Beatles catalog, revealing that “Blackbird” was inspired by the civil rights movement and exulting in the high notes of “Let It Be,” “Lady Madonna” and “Got to Get You Into My Life.”

He and Mr. Starr shared the stage lightheartedly, evading all the dramatic implications of a Beatles reunion. After the encores Mr. Starr jumped in front of Mr. McCartney waving peace signs. A grinning Mr. McCartney stepped in front of him, and back and forth it went. They were old band mates, sharing songs and clowning around, remembering a trip they took many years ago.

All Together Now
by Nancy Franklin
April 13, 2009

It’s one thing to expect, at the age of seven, that you would grow up to marry Paul McCartney, and it’s another thing entirely to meet him in person, forty-five years later. Kidding! They’re exactly the same thing. That early expectation and the latter-day encounter both involve the maximum amount of happiness that the human frame can take, and both feel perfectly natural and, at the same time, unreal and impossible. The marriage never took place; the meeting occurred last week, when McCartney was in New York rehearsing for a benefit concert that he was headlining on Saturday for the David Lynch Foundation. The film director founded the organization several years ago in order to spread the practice of Transcendental Meditation, particularly to schoolchildren who are under stress because of poverty or any number of other debilitating, brain-scrambling aspects of modern life; the goal of the benefit was to raise enough money to teach meditation to a million kids, as the skill appears to help them focus and be happier and more resilient. The Beatles became associated with TM in 1968, when they went to India to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and two other sojourners from that time were on the bill on Saturday night as well: Mike Love, of the Beach Boys, and Donovan. And a third who also had some success in the music business, Ringo Starr. He and McCartney hadn’t performed together since 2002, at a memorial concert for George Harrison.

McCartney was rehearsing with his band in a studio in the West Twenties. In the reception area, you could hear, coming from behind closed doors, “Drive My Car,” and then “Got to Get You Into My Life.” McCartney’s publicist then opened the doors as the group began “Let It Be.” If you’d been there, you’d have seen a woman’s head actually snap back in the whiplash shock of catching sight of Paul, seated at the piano. (Lynch was in the room, too, sitting on a couch, wearing his usual white-shirt-and-black-jacket ensemble and his snazzy backswept hairdo. He was quiet and still as the group rehearsed, and just once reacted visibly to the performance, when he turned to a man next to him during “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and made some chopping motions to try to manually express the way the drummer, Abe Laboriel, Jr., hit a series of beats that were so totally right and in there.) McCartney wore jeans and a flowered shirt, tucked in, and soft dark-brown shoes. He looked almost dewy (he will be sixty-seven in June), without any of the beef-jerky stringiness of some of his rock peers. The recognizable Paulisms were there: the mouth becoming an O when he sang certain sounds, the head moving side to side three or four times in a row during the faster numbers. He was doing a run-through of the concert, including practice versions of his between-song patter. After “Let It Be,” he got up from the piano and said, self-consciously, “So we say welcome—‘Welcome’—because that’s what we do,” and waved his hand in a circle, and then sat back down and played “Lady Madonna.” He then went to the microphone stand between his two guitarists, Brian Ray and Rusty Anderson, strapped on an acoustic guitar, rolled up his sleeves past his elbows, and said, “O.K., then a story about back in the sixties,” and began singing “Blackbird.”

After that, he said, “The next song is a song I wrote for my friend John.” Knowing that there would be applause at the mention of Lennon Saturday night, he added, “Let’s hear it for John.” In the song, a tender ballad called “Here Today,” released only a little more than a year after Lennon was killed, Paul wonders how John might respond to Paul’s musings about their relationship. It drifts to an end with the pensée “And if I say I really loved you and was glad you came along” and some “Ooh”s, and sends listeners back not just to 1980 but even further, to 1957, when the Liverpool teen-agers first met. Seconds later, the early sixties flashed on everyone’s mental screen, when McCartney took off the acoustic guitar and put on a bass guitar just like the one he played the first time Americans saw him, in 1964: a Hofner violin bass. While one was experiencing discreet, silent hysteria—the collision of the past and the present having started an internal wildfire—McCartney kept cool, tossing a smile and a wink at Lynch when he sang the lyrics “thought of giving it all away to a registered charity” in “Band on the Run,” an acknowledgment of the fund-raising effort that had brought them together.

Now, it would be hard to describe the effect the next song had. The most efficient way is just to name the title and tell you to call your best friend and scream into the phone for five minutes. Ready? “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

McCartney introduced the absent Ringo, who was at that hour flying in from Los Angeles (“I’d like to introduce to you a legend”), with an exaggerated flourish of the arm that ended with his hand about a foot off the floor. Reacting to the oddness of being in that position, he patted the air there. After “With a Little Help from My Friends,” he and the band pretended that that was the end of the show, doing, for their own fun, a little bit of James Brown’s audience-teasing faux-closing number “Please Please Please.” But there was one more song. It’s not a secret what the song was, but it is kind of personal and not the sort of thing that you can really share. Basically, it’s about the relationship that Paul has with an unnamed writer from The New Yorker. When he first saw her, standing across the room at a dance, she looked really good, so he went over to her. (In order to further disguise her identity, and to protect their privacy as a couple, he’s changed her age in the song.) The attraction on both sides was so strong that they danced together all night. After that, he decided that he would never dance with anyone else again, and pretty soon he fell in love with her. True story.

Michelle's Way: Lessons In Buddhism From The First Lady
by Ed and Deb Shapiro
April 9, 2009

Tonight, for the first time in history, our First Lady will attend a Passover Seder in the white House with her two daughters, as the President honors the Jewish people. For the last week she has been electrifying Europe with her warmth and her fearlessness in showing that she cares. She is adored wherever she goes for one simple reason: She brings hope. The hope that the world can be a caring and compassionate place, and the hope anyone of any color or background can fulfill their dreams.

It brought tears to our eyes when the children at the school Michelle Obama visited in London jumped up and down and hugged and hugged her and she hugged them back. We could see in their faces that, because of her, they too felt they had a chance. Her charisma and confidence make others feel comfortable in her presence. Deb, being English, was delighted to finally see someone arm in arm with the Queen!

A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity. - Buddha

When we read this quote we thought Buddha could have been saying this about Michelle Obama! She is setting an extraordinary example by doing things her own way and being true to herself. From having bare arms, to serving lunch to the homeless in a soup kitchen, to planting a vegetable garden at the White House, she is making us take a fresh look at the role of the First Lady, and at our own prejudices and opinions about what we think is right and wrong.

A person who gives freely is loved by all. It's hard to understand, but it is in giving that we gain strength. But there is a proper time and a proper way to give, and the person who understands this is strong and wise. By giving with a feeling of reverence for life, envy and anger are banished. A path to happiness is found. Like one who plants a sapling and in due course receives back shade, flowers, and fruit, so the results of giving bring joy. Through continuous acts of kindness the heart is strengthened by compassion and giving. - Buddha

Michelle Obama's combination of honesty and kindness is the essence of maitri--a Sanskrit word that means unconditional friendship with oneself, and from there the feeling of unconditional friendship with all others. This is the basis for compassion, the feeling of being at home in your own mind and body so that you are at home with everyone. She expressed this in her interview with Oprah, when she said, "My happiness is tied to how I feel about myself."

A great shift has happened in the U.S., as if we have emerged from a dream (that for some was a nightmare). We all know we are living in trying times, but we also have great karma as we lucked out by electing a First Couple who are showing the world that America is again cool. Between them, the Obama's have brought down the barriers so that we are no longer an isolated nation. "We are now" as our friend Barry says, "a more humane country."

With all that Michelle Obama doing she is not without her critics, however, and dealing with criticism is one of the burdens she will have to bear if she is to stay true to herself, for there will always be those who disagree with her.

When people speak badly of you, you should respond in this way: Keep a steady heart and don't reply with harsh words. Practice letting go of resentment and accept that the other's hostility is the spur to your understanding. Be kind, adopt a generous standpoint, treat your enemy as a friend, and suffuse all your world with affectionate thoughts, far-reaching and widespread, limitless and free from hate. - Buddha

Trusting and believing in ourselves is perhaps the greatest gift the First Lady could offer to each of us. When we don't then we belittle our own intelligence. By offering maitri -- compassionate friendship -- to ourselves, then we all get to live in a more caring and friendlier world.

So how do you feel about Michelle Obama? Does she make a difference in your life? Do you appreciate her example of living with compassionate friendship and generosity?

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Ed and Deb Shapiro's new book, BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You And The World, foreword by the Dalai Lama and an introduction by Robert Thurman, with contributors such as Marianne Williamson, Michael Beckwith, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jane Fonda, Greg Braden, Byron Katie, Ed Begley, Ram Dass, Ellen Burstyn, Dean Ornish, Seane Corn, Russell Bishop, KD and others, will be published in October 2009 by Sterling Ethos. Ed and Deb are the authors of over 15 books, and lead meditation retreats and workshops. Deb is the author of the award-winning book YOUR BODY SPEAKS YOUR MIND. They are corporate consultants, and the creators of Chillout daily inspirational text messages on Sprint cell phones. See their website: http://www.edanddebshapiro.com/.