Setlist: [Tim Solo Acoustic] 2008-05-20; Richter\'s, New Haven, CT

[ChrisPitch]

I: jam* > Hey Hey What Can I Do, Free > Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat) > Free > Runnin\' Down a Dream > Free, Vasoline, That\'s Alright (Mama), My Name Is Jonas, Dirty Love > All I Really Want to Do, Cocaine, Isn\'t It a Pity > Hey Jude > Castles Made of Sand > Drain You > Misirlou > Drain You, The Gnome > Fasterthan...** > Exit Music (For a Film), The World Has Turned and Left Me Here > Roses Are Free

II: Sparkle > Bike > jam > Boogie on Reggae Woman > The Wizard, There She Goes > Hard Luck Harry > There She Goes > Are You Experienced > jam > Doo-wop jam > Ewok Celebration > MU (Episode 4), Shake It Off, Son Of Simpleton^

Thank you to FrankZappa for keeping the setlist!

* with \'Let It Grow\' (Grateful Dead) and \'Swingtown\' (Steve Miller Band teases)
** with \'NBC Jingle\' and \'I Feel Fine\' (The Beatles) tease
^ played in a few different musical styles and with \'Banana Boat Song\' (Harry Belafonte) and \'You Enjoy Myself\', \'Reba\', and \'Tweezer\' (Phish) teases

[Vassillios]

Sooooooooo.... how was the eppy 4?

[princesscaspian]

haha very very very cool.... just as you\'d expect it to be. dark, confused jams.... i need to hear it again!!!!

[Vassillios]

Awesome!

Mu is the name of a hypothetical lost continent, which is thought to have been located in the Pacific Ocean before it sank beneath the waters, similar to Atlantis and Lemuria, with which it is sometimes identified.

Does Tim watch lost or something...?

[Drew_Kingsley]

Awesome!

Mu is the name of a hypothetical lost continent, which is thought to have been located in the Pacific Ocean before it sank beneath the waters, similar to Atlantis and Lemuria, with which it is sometimes identified.

Does Tim watch lost or something...?

I would guess it\'s either a Tom Robbins reference (Still Life with Woodpecker) or a Led Zeppelin reference.

[Lexington]

paul ryan thank you again. you are the effin man. from what i heard last night, MU has ser composedness. i sounded amazing, really beautiful melodies i can\'t wait to actually hear it in person, or atleast not through a phone.

[Vassillios]

lex you lucky bastard

[ds673488]

i cannot wait to hear eppy 4 live, its painful every day to wait

[FrankZappa]

Mu (uppercase Μ, lowercase μ; Greek: Μι or Μυ [mi]) is the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 40. Mu was derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for water () which had been simplified by the Phoenicians and named after their word for water, to become Mem . Letters that arose from Mu include the Roman M and the Cyrillic letter Em (М, м).

The letter Mu appears in conjunction with alpha and omega to signify the "beginning, middle (meson) and end", a phrase found in an Orphic verse describing Zeus, and later adopted to describe both Jehovah and Jesus.

In Aeschylus\' Eumenides, the repeated moaning of the letter Mu is the sound made by the sleeping Furies as the ghost of Clytemnestra begins to invoke them. It again appears as an ominous mantra in a 10th century Coptic papyrus, containing a Christian injunction against perjurers that invokes the angel Temeluchos:

I adjure you by the seven perfect letters, ΜΜΜΜΜΜΜ. You must appear to him, you must appear to him. I adjure you by the seven angels around the throne of the father.

In Pharmacology Mu is an important opiate receptor

opiate: any chemical substance that has a morphine-like action in the body.

[jocelyn]

A monk once asked master Chao-chou, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"

Chao-chou said, "Mu"


At first the answer to the query posed by the monk seems obvious. A central tenet of Buddhist thought is the belief that all sentient beings have Buddha-nature, so to that extent that a dog is sentient, a dog has Buddha-nature. That this answer is so obvious suggest that this is not the response the monk is looking for: The question is not to be interpreted literally and responded to conceptually. In fact, rather than a straightforward question the utterance by the monk to Chao Chou constitutes a Koan

.


KO-ANS
The word Koan or Ko-an comes from the Chinese term kung-an, literally "public notice," or "public announcement." There are reported to be some 1,700 Koans in all. There are two major collections of Koans, the first being the Pi-yen lu, that is, the "Blue Cliff Records," consisting of 100 Koans selected and commented on by Yüan-wu, in 1125. The second being the Wumenkuan, also known as the Mumonkan, a collection of 48 Koans compiled in 1228 by the Chinese priest Hui-k\'ai, also known as Wu-men. Both collections derived their Koans from the same orignal source, the much earlier Cheng-te ch\'uan-teng lu texts.
Basically a Koan is a paradoxical utterance used in Zen as a center of concentration in meditation. The paradoxical nature of Koans is essential to their function: The attempt to break down conceptual thought. Koans are constructed so that they do not succumb to conceptual analysis and thereby require a more direct response from the meditator. Interpreted in this way, the question is an appeal to Chao Chou to draw on his own insight into reality. This restricts the possible responses open to Chao Chou. An affirmative answer to the question would fail and Chao Chou could be accused of reliance on traditional teaching, rather than personal understanding. As such, it would fail to meet the challenge a Koan represent. Nevertheless, Chao Chou cannot answer "no" since this would be to deny scripture. This places Chao Chou in a perplexing situation. Both the ordinary conceptual responses are inappropriate: He cannot answer either yes or no. It is this inability to provide a satisfactory conceptual response that constitutes the paradoxical nature of the present Koan. Koans set up paradox situations like this in an attempt to provoke a non-conceptual response from meditators.


When we practice Koans, we often only deal with what is immediately provided by the translator. We rarely investigate other sources and dig below the surface. And there is always a lot more to a Koan, or any barrier for that matter, than first meets the eye.
Often, central parts of the ancient Koans were extracted from other sources. The masters who created Koan collections used source materials that were familiar to the people who were studying these Koans. They were presented within a known cultural and historical matrix. The teachers assumed that listeners had a grounding in basic principles of Buddhism and local folklore. For us, ten centuries later, the challenge is to uncover the full spectrum of the Koan, its breadth and depth.(source)

Chao Chou\'s response is to answer neither yes-nor-no: To answer Mu. Mu is not as unusual as it first seems. There are many everyday questions that we would not want to answer either yes or no to. Consider the question: "Have you stopped beating your dog yet?" Now it is notoriously easy to invent a situation in which either a positive or a negatively answer to this question is misleading. Either answer will mislead if I ask the question of a devoted animal lover, someone who would never mistreat any animal. If I was to demand a yes or no answer from an such a person they would be in a situation equally perplexing as Chao Chou\'s: any response they make will be misleading. A positive answer has the implication that the mis-treatment once took place and has now ceased. Whereas a negative reply implies that this non-existent mistreatment is still continuing.

The difficulty with answering this question for a pet lover is that the question itself set up a misleading picture of things. The question implies the existence of something that has never taken place and any response only seems to place one more firmly within that view of things. The correct response is to question the question: To ask for an alternative way of picture things. This is also implicit in the notion Mu. To answer a question with Mu (to say neither yes-nor-no) is to deny the validity of the question itself. The reason the answer is neither yes-nor-no is because the question sets up misleading categories, similar to Avyaakata in the sutras, that which do not apply to the situation being examined. Mu is a call for the question to be unasked. A call to look beyond the limiting conceptualisation implicit in the question. In fact, Mu is more extreme than this: It is a call to move beyond the limiting perspective of conceptualisation itself and to a directly contact with ultimate reality via pre-reflective awareness.

More here:

http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/bodhidharma/mu.html
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/bodhidharma/mu.html