2023-12-11 07:55:57
There are those who maintain that we must meditate with our eyes open and those who maintain that we must do it with our eyes closed. I do a little of one and a little of the other. One of his students once asked a great Tibetan master: “Master, I have never seen you meditate.” He replied, “Have you ever seen me distracted?” and he closed the topic. In short, everyone must follow the technique suited to their nature. The mind can create images, and worlds, it can visualize gods, do what seems impossible. But the other aspect, that of the Conscious Void in which we will end up sooner or later, is Pure Joy.
LAWS The Franco Battiato dossier 1945-2021
In the Ashram of Ramana Maharshi I felt a micro ecstasy, it must have lasted a couple of seconds at most. Francisco Varela, an internationally renowned biologist-neuroscientist who had chosen the spiritual path, was fortunate enough to meet Tulku Urgyen in Kathmandu. While they were talking about meditation techniques, Varela asked him if he could let him try the Pointing-out Instructions experience. No problem, Tulku Urgyen replied and threw him into a dimension of Immense Peace. “I tried it for an hour,” Varela said, “and no one will be able to take it away from me.”
Franco Battiato: some things we don’t know about him by Luca Valtorta 14 May 2022
Ramana Maharshi for example, did not want students. And when one asked him: “Master, are you teaching me to meditate?” he replied: «What should I teach you? There is only one way.” He raised his right arm and pointed his index finger towards the sky. At sixteen, one night, he thought he was dying. He was sure. In the midst of the nightmare, he began to analyze himself. I am not my body, I am not my thoughts, I am not my desires, my fears, I am not this, I am not that… What am I? My conscience! Well, in one night he solved his problem. He left home, entered a cave and began to meditate. His asceticism came early, he was in ecstasy. When he returned to his body, he was always disturbed by kids who sometimes threw stones at him, and there was someone who chased them away and sent them away. But Ramana said: “Leave them alone: I do my job, they do theirs.” He was an incredible man who had great and innate abilities.
A painting by Franco Battiato (signed with the pseudonym Süphan Barzani) dated 1994. Galleria Maestri engravers, Milan
A painting by Franco Battiato (signed with the pseudonym Süphan Barzani) dated 1994. Galleria Maestri engravers, Milan
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Returning to meditation, I do my exercises in the position in which I am most comfortable. For many, the Hindu lotus position is valid, that is, sitting on the ground with crossed legs, but for me it is difficult because I am tall, and I get tired. In fact, I have always meditated while sitting or on an anatomical stool. It is sufficient to sit evenly, with a fairly straight spine, hands on your legs, like the ancient Egyptians, or with one hand on top of the other.
Many of the things I do, however, are personal, they came out little by little. However, if you really want to meditate, either you have a teacher who corrects you every time you are doing things wrong, or you can do it on your own. I learned some breathing exercises myself. The prana it is our vital energy, and to assimilate subtle energies, we need to work on breathing. When I read that we need to separate gross energies from subtle ones, I asked myself: but how do you do it? And I did it, on my own. I haven’t been able to communicate it to anyone yet, because it’s not easy to describe it in words.
I meditate three times a day: in the morning before breakfast and after washing. At dusk, before eating, and in the evening before going to sleep. But everyone chooses their own way. It is clear that the volumes of time change, that is, if I do one hour or forty-five minutes in the morning and at dusk, in the evening I do ten, and I try to enter lucid dreaming.
The only hiccup I had in my way was during the engraving of Cafe of peace. Very powerful opposing forces prevented me from entering my world. It made me feel bad not being able to meditate. As soon as I sat down, the darkness, terrible. It lasted about six months, which seemed interminable to me. Now what I await and desire most is the moment of meditation. When, for some reason, I can only do a few minutes, I feel guilty. It is very difficult for me to give up that pure relaxation, which gives me a sense of reconciliation.
We must reiterate one thing: that we are changing beings. We try to stop, but we are always changing. And this applies to everything, even relationships. Unfortunately we have an obsession with staying where we are, but this is not possible. Sometimes I happen to see the nature that I see every day as something superior, to perceive its stability. Well, I don’t want to use dangerous terms, but I see it as an earthly paradise, of which birds are a wonderful manifestation. Then if we study them with another eye we see that the birds also argue, suffer, etc. So there are both aspects. But it is easier to meditate in nature, among the scents, in front of the flowers and trees. In short, to put it simply, I have always considered nature as a language, a language that must be decoded.
When I first saw the Grand Canyon, I saw something primal, which makes the experience itself the true object. It’s not you who looks and says “how beautiful”, you are absorbed by what you see and become that. The subject is exchanged for the object. It’s such an extreme landscape! It has a red soil that recalls Mars, and among other things it is identical to that onEtnaup.
«If you have problems, go to a bosco», a shaman who lives in Brittany told me, and added: «When I need energy I go under the trees». And this works. It occurred to me that I’ve done it from time to time, too. In the early morning, for example, when the sun rises, it happens that it illuminates only the leaves of the trees above, giving them a white color, of total purity…
It is what mystics call the white experience. And then the chromatic notes of certain passing clouds, light and yet of such a suggestive intensity as to become almost deafening. The colors of nature are language for me. The scent of flowers is language. Getting close to a jasmine or an orange blossom is intoxicating, and those flowers are only a billionth part of higher existences.
In one of my essays, Atheists and fake believersI was talking about how just the movement of the flexors of a hand is such a perfect and complicated mechanism that it is superior to the intelligence of certain humans.
It is not possible that matter could have invented genius, talent, intuition. When you listen to composers like Bach, Handel and so on, if you have any sensitivity at all, you are amazed by the depth of their works. You think, “Is it possible that a human could have created this from apes?” Another unbeatable joke. I have never seen an ape become a man, and not because it takes millions of years for it to become one, but because it already is: the ape is a human being, demoted. I happened to see insects with which I aligned myself, in mutual perception. And then I understand that they are like me, in another condition.
So I don’t say: “I am a man, I think, etc.” The moment there is that level of perception which also concerns intuition, in which the insect is afraid of me or in any case does not know what type of being I am, it means that everything is reduced to an alarming lack of knowledge, from a certain point of view. I have never made a difference between dogs, cats and humans. I have always seen human beings living as if imprisoned in the prison of their own nature. Human beings are like this too.
We are guests, within nature. But, as that Tibetan we were talking about before said, the samsara it is a projection of the nirvana. With due comparisons, all mystics affirm that the mind needs this natural space. Then it is clear that you can meditate even in a room, but the mind adapts to the breadth of the horizon. Meditating in front of large spaces rather than in narrow spaces is crucial.
When I meditated at my house in Milan I saw a tree in the middle of the concrete. Just seeing that tree, with all those leaves and a few birds perching on the branches, was enough for me; if he hadn’t been there it would have been much harder. I love birds. Once, two little ones came onto my porch and couldn’t get out and banged against the glass. I took them both and let them fly away. How people keep birds in cages, I don’t know.
Edited by Eugenio Lio and Elisabetta Sgarbi
MAGAZINE
“Pantagruel” is all about him
This unpublished work by Franco Battiato is taken from Pantagruel (edited by Eugenio Lio and Elisabetta Sgarbi, 368 pages, 24 euros): a magazine published by La nave di Teseo whose second issue, entirely dedicated to the Sicilian musician, has been in bookshops since 12 December Together with Battiato’s long text (of which this is an extract) there are contributions, among others, by Angelo Branduardi, Mario Andreose, Michael Faber, Antonio Gnoli, Igort, Mario Martone, Melania Mazzucco, Elisabetta Sgarbi, Vittorio Sgarbi .
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