Day of the Waste Arena, 44th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): The Stable Genius warned today that any country he believes is illegally manufacturing drugs destined for the US is vulnerable to military attack. Great. Because the War of Drugs worked so successfully here (sarcasm) that it's time to take it global.

It's the second day of the Rohatsu practice period and I added a half hour to my now daily (for this period) sitting. Two and a half hours, consisting of two 30-minute sits and two 45-minute sits. 

I use timers for my meditation rather than stare at a clock. I used to use the timer app on my iPhone for a timer, but no matter how gentle the alarm I selected, I still found it jolting when it went off, and then I had to scramble and fumble around with my phone to turn it off. That made for a rude ending to a graceful sitting period.

A few years ago, I came across a compilation album by the label Other People titled Caves, a "compendium of timers for every-day use." Each track starts with some gentle, wordless, new-age/ambient music for a minute or so, and then fades to silence for five, ten, or more minutes. At the end of the silence, the music gently returns for another minute or so. The "caves" are the silences between the sounds. One track by the ambient musician Laraaji is a 25-minute cave, and with the intro and outro, the whole track is 30 minutes in length, perfect for a half hour of zazen and kinhin (walking meditation). The other tracks are all of shorter length, but I used some music-editing software to expand the silences of those other tracks to 25 minutes and for a year now have used three of them as timers for my 90-minute meditation periods.

Meditating while listening to music isn't Zen meditation, or shikantaza ("just sitting") as the Japanese call it. Just sitting is exactly what the words describe - nothing other than simply sitting still, and anything added to it - sitting and chanting, or sitting and practicing mindful breathing, or sitting and thinking about a koan - is not "just sitting." Just sitting, with no "and." So sitting and listening to music is not shikantaza, but with the Caves tracks, the music quickly falls away just as I'm settling in, and the "and" disappears. 

But sometimes, especially during this Rohatsu practice period, I also use some extended-length recorded tracks as my timers. It's not shikantaza, but in my experience it can still be a form of meditation. It won't work if I'm listening to anything with words or singing, or instrumental melodies, or even a fixed rhythm. But there's some drone music that consists of little more than a single tone sustained for extended lengths and there's some ambient music that's so ephemeral and nebulous that there are no hooks or anything else for the mind to latch onto, and those tracks can make good timers. The sound simply disappears into the background, not unlike the other ambient sounds of the house on an afternoon - the fan from the HVAC, the birds outside, the occasional passing car, sometimes (and annoyingly) some landscapers working their gas-powered leaf blowers somewhere in the neighborhood. 

Today, I used three of those 25-minute Caves and two 45-minute ambient tracks for my sitting. The first ambient track was Elaine Radigue's Occam XXV performed by the organist Frederic Blondy. The entire 45 minutes is one long sustained note played on organ that slowly, imperceptibly, rises up out of silence and then fades back again by the end - now that I think about it, the exact opposite strategy as the Caves. It's the aural equivalent of watching paint dry, perfect for meditation (Radigue, it should be noted, is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist). 

The other 45-minute track was Annea Lockwood's sound collage World Rhythm, consisting of field recording of various nature sounds - a babbling brook, lapping waves, bird songs, honking geese, occasional rumbles of thunder, with moments of silence or near-silence. To some people, it might not even qualify a "music," although the counter argument is that sounds arranged from field recordings of nature is no less arbitrary than sound arranged from plucked strings, drum beats, and vibrating columns of air.

FYI, I'm off Spotify now, and all my timers today were ethically purchased off of Bandcamp, including the Caves, Occam XXV, and World Rhythm.