Satori: Belief

 

"Belief" is another early Satori song. The story of the song goes back to the summer of 1990 when I went to Greece.  So much of my writing my senior year was colored by that experience.  The cover of the album was shot there, and yet, that's me jumping off a cliff into the water.  I believe a gal named Janet McClelland took the shot, and this was in the era of analog photography.  There was no checking to see how the picture came out, and an action shot like this... well, who knew.  There had been several instances of cliff jumping on that trip, and I had taken several pictures, and I felt certain they would all turn out awesome.  I asked Janet to take one, just so I could be in one, but I didn't think it would turn out. Hers was the only that turned out. 

At any rate, the first time I jumped off a 60 foot cliff, I was extremely nervous.  I needed to clear about twelve feet from the launching point in order to land in water that was deep enough.  I was in the middle of a sleepless six week trip, and I was high on adrenaline and emotion, and I can't say that under any other circumstance would I have taken that jump, but I did, and the fact that I did stuck with me. 

Well, fast forward about six, seven months. The music came first, and while we jammed on the music I felt compelled to utter one word: belief.  I wrote the rest of the words that night. The song and the picture go hand in hand, as do Satori and belief.

It might seem a bit odd for a band with a buddhist name to be singing about belief.  I did not have a conscious understanding of Buddhism at that point, but I had read Kerouac's Dharma Bums, the year before and it had magnetized me towards Buddhism. In the book, the narrator climbs a mountain with Buddhist friend, Japhy Ryder, and the friend tells him as they come down the mountain that you cannot fall off the mountain if you simply let go to the mountain.  Or something like that.  While I was in Greece, we climbed mount Olympus.  I did it with my guitar, and I ran down the mountain following Japhy's advice, and found that he was right. I couldn't and didn't fall of the mountain. 

My understanding of satori was that it was a brief flash of enlightenment- though many buddhists today would argue that is kensho.  But it is a point where we experience a kind of enlightenment, where we are able to see into the nature of reality.  Typically, this requires the exhaustion of the rational perspective through the use of koans and meditation, but the result is deep understanding. 

This goal of enlightenment was paired with my fervant desire to live as richly as possible, which might seem to in no way related to any buddhist concept.  There was a tension there to be sure.  The goal of the music that we created was a sonic illustration of that tension. The verses of "Belief" are all about winding up the tension for the release of the choruses. The song is all about tension and release, which was Nirvana's formula right?  It's a bit ironic that I wrote this song, before I knew they even existed, and about a year before Nevermind exploded onto the scene. But Kurt Cobain had a much darker view of the world. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel.  

I think what made us different is that we had an open mind about the world.  It wasn't dirt, but it wasn't perfect.  Were we true buddhists?  Well, I remember chanting buddhist chants before a show to center us.  But then on stage we sought to unleash the fury of belief.  It seemed a bit of a contradiction. 

I never say what the belief is, because it doesn't matter (to some extent).  If you are with the universe, and the universe can carry you, then your belief is true and good things will happen, I suppose.  But we need belief.  We can't live our lives without it.  We are not widgeteers put on this earth to create units for distribution.  We need meaning and depth and purpose.  Belief is what propels us forward.  

Somewhere in the thirty years since I wrote this song, I find myself among the crowd that sees the world through a materialist and mechanistic worldview.  The world is a series of numbers, and we must follow the numbers to make choices.  Science will show us the way, right?  Except that science is just a tool, and it can't answer the questions that matter the most: What path should we follow? Why does it matter?

Beliefs are future-oriented ideas.  If you act, you act on belief.  If you raise your child, you do so based on belief.  Even something as mundane as putting money into an IRA requires belief, because the future is unwritten.  Why do we construct the lives that we construct?  Reason can't answer that.  It can hopefully support it, but belief is a faith that we are heading in the right direction.  You don't need a religion to have belief.  You just need to believe. 

While belief propels us towards the future (and out of the circumstances that steal our energy), satori is the stillness.  It is the quiet.  Just as we need strength to conquer our demons, we need peace to surrender to our angels (not exactly a buddhist concept).  But the stillness and the quiet provide us with the space to reflect on harmony. Belief shoots us out of the cannon while satori gives us a place to land.  

I often paraphrased Steven Wright and spoke of Satori of that moment when you fall back in your chair and then catch yourself.  For a second you don't know what's about to happen, and it could be terrible or it could be a tremendous relief.  For the band, the satori was the moment in the song that captured that uncertainty.  In "Belief" it was the second before each chorus when the music stops for a second, and there's no certainty that it will land. 

The tension between the satori and the belief runs through our music. We might think of tension as a negative, but the tension in the bow-string is what sends the arrow through the sky.