Inter-Dimensional Music: Lewis Richmond

Three Marks of Existence + two Basking in Gravity sessions in Indianapolis and Ypsilanti

Zen remains a helpful practice for me for many of the same reasons that I felt comfortable going to the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles for the first time over 20 years ago. I arrived looking for help accepting that my cat The Gator was dying. I left the sangha after a couple years of intermittent participation for the same reason a lot of people fall off: I felt better. Even when I was inevitably feeling worse again, their devout approach to Zen didn’t fit in with how I was living my life. It was a wonderful community, and I have a huge amount of respect for their practice! I still credit the monk I sat with there – who likely has no memory of me – with starting me on the Zen path. I just needed a community that was offering these teachings in a different dialect.

This is one of the tricky things about Zen. It’s intrinsically hard to define, which means it’s easier to find an approach that suits the particular headspace I’m in. As someone who grew up in a far right evangelical Christian church – founded by my parents, who have since left and disavowed that malignant ideology – it’s important for me to find a community that doesn’t bring back memories of hardline fundamentalist dogma. The downside to this malleability is that Zen can be used to justify pretty much anything, from Japan’s WWII-era war crimes, to the alt-right dharma¹ of Brad Warner and other BuddhaBros, to AmaZen’s operant conditioning chambers.

Wariness of authorities offering proprietary interpretations of the same old wisdom is embedded in the first few lines of Zen Master Dōgen’s 13th Century tract Meditation and Truth, one of the foundational texts of Zen. Along with the Heart Sutra, it was one of the few Buddhist writings we focused on when I lived at the Indianapolis Zen Center. “Don’t follow the advice of others;” he writes, “rather, learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become one, and you will realize the unity of all things.”

That abstract directive works best when paired with what I take – as someone who’s been in fundamentalist recovery for over three decades – as one of the few articles of faith in Zen: That it’s better to not be jerk, than to be a jerk.

The way I read Dōgen, he’s saying to watch out for people who think they’ve figured out something new about Zen. Which is why I come back to the same language from Lewis Richmond over and over again. The simplicity of a Zen practice focused on doing zazen rather than reading zazen is also helpful when you have the low attention span of an ADHD-addled brain such as my own. It’s much easier for me to sit in meditation for an afternoon after revisiting a couple helpful paragraphs than spending hours parsing various Dōgen translations for shortcuts to enlightenment.

The language featured on the September 2024 Basking in Gravity yoga sessions and Inter-Dimensional Music broadcasts – scroll down for the streaming/DL archive – is the same language heard in one of the Void Contemplation Tactics guided meditation videos I made at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. These videos are part of White River, Slow Flow, an ongoing project using heavily manipulated slow motion video of the river that cuts through Muncie, Indiana,

To further erode any remaining illusions of my own Buddhist scholarship, the Richmond quote isn’t even from one of his books. It’s from an interview - occasionally paywalled – in Tricycle that I found through a haiku posted on Twitter by fellow slop-style practitioner and longtime friend of the show Revolt of the Apes:

Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone. This is really just a restatement of the traditional Three Marks of Existence: non-self, impermanence, and suffering. I don’t think I would have expressed the truth of suffering as “you are not alone” before my illnesses, but now I find that talking about it that way gets at something important. The fact that we all suffer means we are all in the same boat, and that’s what allows us to feel compassion.

The idea that you should be wary of self-proclaimed masters offering proprietary revelations is ideal when paired with the reminder that Zen has been offering variations on the same basic theme since the 1200s. As my friend Nick Terry, the organizer of the sangha that I sat with in Marfa, Texas put it in one of our correspondences, “More and more I find the real point of meditation is to be kind. To everything.” He also likes to use Fugazi lyrics in his dharma talks and everyone should listen to his new album of meditational/devotional ambient/experimental . . . jazz? with Rob Mazurek:

If you’re still looking for audio vibes, there are two fresh episodes of Inter-Dimensional Music featuring Lewis Richmond available to stream/DL down below.

But first some updates.

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Basking in Gravity: Ypsilanti and Indianapolis

Basking in Gravity
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Ziggy's // Ypsilanti, MI
12 - 2 pm
$5
no one turned away for lack of funds

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Join us next Sunday for Basking in Gravity’s Michigan debut! We’ll be joining friend of the show Golden Feelings and dozens of other artists and musicians who will surely soon be friends-of-the-show in Ypsilanti, a city about halfway between Ann Arbor and Detroit that is one of the friendliest and most chill places I’ve ever visited. Ypsi Freak Fest is organized by our weirdo beardo bird-loving buddies at Wyrd Byrd.

We’ll be hosting another unique iteration of our ongoing art/mindfulness project that combines elements of audiovisual installation and group performance with slow-and-low yin yoga and Zen-inspired "non-self improvement" meditation. No experience necessary, bring a yoga mat if you’ve got one but if you don’t we’ll figure something out.

More info on the new dedicated Basking in Gravity page:

Basking in Gravity

Basking in Gravity
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Healer // Indianapolis, IN
1 - 3 pm
$10-20 sliding scale donation
no one turned away for lack of funds

We’re returning to our home base at Healer in Indianapolis the following Sunday – October 13 – at a new time, 1-3pm. To preview previous Basking in Gravity soundtracks, tune in to Inter-Dimensional Music on 99.1 WQRT FM Indianapolis on Fridays and Saturdays at 12pm ET, or dial up Marfa Public Radio in Far West Texas Sunday nights at 11p CT at marfapublicradio.org. We’ve also got literally hundreds of shows available to archive and/or stream here:

Inter-Dimensional Music FM

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ID MUSIC 20240906: Lewis Richmond I

stream | download

For this week's session, we return to the language from Zen teacher Lewis Richmond on the tradtional Buddhist Three Marks of Existence, as read by your host. Our soundtrack for considering NON-SELF, IMPERMANENCE, and SUFFERING includes unsettling soothers from gloomy industrial spas; organic, inward-looking techno; whirling psychoactive dervishes in dub; and percussive ambient sludge metal. 

The program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with "Sleep Hypnosis for Generosity of Spirit" from Najee-Zaid.

Najee-Zaid - Never Too Far
Luke Stewart - Amilcar
Controlled Bleeding - Music for Earth and Water
A Hand - Mantra
One Million Eyes - Koala
Scotch Rolex, Shackleton, and Omutaba - The Three Hands of Doom
Tribes of Neurot - Markandeya
Dhyana - Satori
Najee-Zaid - Never Too Far

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ID MUSIC 20240913: Lewis Richmond II

stream | download

More language from Zen teacher Lewis Richmond on the Three Marks of Existence, as read by your host. Our soundtrack includes New Age dub, spectral Middle-Eastern hand percussion, and shimmery French-Ghanaian post-punk.

The program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with box-fresh drone metal from SUNN. 

SUNN O))) - Wyoming Big Sky (edit)
PÖ - Cociage
Hot Rocks - Serpentine (Version)
Massive Attack v Mad Professor - Heat Miser (Dub) demo
Muslimgauze - Narcotic
Line 47 - Creations
Twilight Circus v Lutan Fyah - We Can Make It Work
SUNN O))) - Acres of Calms (edit)

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1. The “Elon Musk, BuddhaBro?” episode of the Conspirituality podcast offers an illuminating deep dive into the very nasty world of alt-right dharma and the appropriation of mindfulness strategies by the neo-fascist tech oligarchy. Much of it is based on the work of guests Ann Gleig and Brenna Grace Artinger, whose research article “The #BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas” can be found here: [PDF].