Ground
Here's the situation, idioticy, nonsense, violence, it's not a good policy, therefore, we must ignore fighting and fussin...Heavy D, Self Destruction
That which shines light must be willing to be burnt. - Unknown
The world is filled with good natured individuals who care about the state of the world and feel responsible for its improvement. If you are one of them, thank you for having the bravery to open your heart to our collective suffering. The world needs you.
It is very difficult when paying attention to global events not to be disturbed by news of war, scandal, killings, abuse, neglect and other types of aggression. It can be overwhelming when trying to figure out what to do to try and improve the conditions of our planet, country, community and family. I'm often confused as to what to do and become disheartened about my ability to create any type of meaningful change. Like many, I struggle with feeling confident about the best path to take; Should I protest? Incite a riot? Vote? I don't know if there's a right way but what I have discovered is that I am a part of what needs to be changed, and since I have the most access to me then I should start here.
All journeys start here. Where we are. I could look for another place to start, maybe in an illusory future in my mind where I am my better self, but even then I would have to start here to get there. Thinking that I should be somewhere else before making any headway in life is denying that who I am now doesn't possess the ability to develop and I don't see much use in that view. It's easy to want to search for the wisdom to solve our problems elsewhere but it is wise to start our search within. So let us start where we are.
This book is for those who consider themselves a member, practitioner or fan of Hiphop Culture.
Most Hiphoppers enjoy it for its musical aspects; emceeing, djing, music production. Others enjoy it for all of its elements emceeing, djing, bboying (breakdancing) and graffiti. I am a lifelong member of the culture. Being born in 1976 it was pretty hard to avoid Hiphop because it was everywhere in the early eighties and everybody wanted to be down, including me. During lunch we made beats on the table, on the bus we rapped, during class we drew graffiti but I couldn't breakdance to save my mothers life. My mother used to take my sister and I to a breakdancing class in 1984 taught by some Breakin 1 types, replete with bandanas, leg warmers and tights. I'd blame me being terrible at breaking on them if it weren't true that I just couldn't allow myself to feel awkward in front of others.
What lies at our core? Who are we? For an adherent of Hiphop the answer is that; Hiphop. You are that which you seek. You are that which ultimately occupies your awareness which is that awareness itself and all of its qualities. How rarely throughout the course of human history have people stopped their inner and outer wandering to ask the question and fearlessly go on the search to find themselves.
It is my premise that Hiphop is just another means of searching and discovering who we are. The word that I most frequently use to describe who we are is our nature, but other words will suffice. Words such as essence, ultimate self and core all point to a definite existence that underlies our everyday experience. Hiphop is another word that describes that nature.
Afrika Bambaataa says that Hiphop is love, peace, knowledge, wisdom and understanding; that it is raceless, genreless and free from whatever qualities we'd like to attach to it. Essentially Hiphop is infinite and can contain all that arises. When described like this Hiphop is an experience more than an object. It is the aim or goal of a Hiphopper to be Hiphop, just as the aim of Buddhism is to not be a Buddhist, it is to be Buddha. As KRS one so infamously says, I am Hiphop. The way I understand this is that we are those qualities; We are love, peace, knowledge, wisdom and understanding and Hiphop is the term that we use to describe the experience of individually and collectively touching our nature. Hiphop is not a thing, no more than a recipe in a cookbook is a meal. The ground nature (Hiphop) cannot be described accurately, no more than love or peace can be quantified or made tangible. It can only be experienced as freedom from the conceptual attachments that we have conditioned ourselves to believe in. In this way Hiphop is less about doing and more about being. I contend that the ultimate hip hopper is not the one who will spit the illest rhyme or the dopest records but is the one who has allowed the elements to expand their awareness to where the distinctions between like, dislike and I don't care have vanished. Then we have adopted the qualities of Hiphop, awake to all experience and free from attachment to any one of them. We experience Hiphop through those who have most allowed themselves to go through the process of being, self exploration, incorporating insights, sharing, returning to being and repeating the process as a journeying through phases that cut through how they once saw themselves and the world to be.
The elements, Emceeing, Djing, Bboying, Graffitti are the methods (another word I like to use is skillful means) by which those who take up the mantle of bboy or bgirl use to actualize Hiphop. The elements are tools that when used skillfully can wake us up to our most basic and helpful qualities. What matters the most is not how entertaining we are but why we use the elements. Talent is entertaining and can certainly be associated with being able to reach people but is overrated in comparison to the development of insight through art. In fact insight may be a talent in and of itself. When you realize that there is a deeper purpose besides gratifying ones ego, Hiphop can be an exercise of exploration of perspective and unlock new ways of being helpful to others.
How we experience Hiphop is through three distinct, yet interconnected perspectives; the experience of those perspectives is determined by how we choose to focus our awareness and the quality of our experience is determined by how much we have attuned our awareness to rest as the three perspectives. The three perspectives are 1st, 2nd and 3rd person perspectives, 1st person is our own awareness as individuals which no person can experience but us, usually communicated through using the words I, me or my. 2nd person is when we attempt to see through another's perspective or share our experience with another, communicated through the words we, us and our and 3rd person is when we take on the perspective of the objects in our environment (or the environment itself), usually communicated through words like them, it, it's and that.
The Buddha and Hiphop
The Hinayana or small vehicle is the first stage of the Tibetan Buddhist path. The view of this stage is the foundational view of Buddhism found in all schools of Buddhism around the world and is based on the life and enlightenment of the Buddha.
The Buddha was a rich young man named Siddartha who grew tired of his affluent and guarded life who sought to find out what life was really like. He left his comfortable surroundings one day and saw that life wasn't as he was led to believe by his parents. Life was not full of never ending pleasure, never growing old, getting sick or dying and was actually the opposite. Everything grows older, gets sick and eventually dies. Sid also discovered that there were individuals who spent there entire lives trying to become comfortable with that reality and sought to find out how he could be like them. After much effort and discouragement he decided he would search until he figured out how he through his own experience, could wake up to an understanding of why human beings suffer so much and how they could be free of such suffering.
Sid meditated for a long time until he felt he was sure that he knew the source of suffering. This is now commonly known as enlightenment. Sid saw that suffering comes from a belief in an illusory self and is based on attaching to ideas and behaviors that support this sense of self. Instead of accepting our sensory experience and life as it is, we over exaggerate the illusory gains of pleasure, aggression and not paying attention at all. This causes us to live life on egos terms which is a never ending excursion of dissatisfaction because no matter what we do we can't make life exist on our terms. We can't make pleasure permanent, we can't make pain or change go away and we can't not pay attention to our minds, bodies, others and the world without experiencing the reality that it won't work. Living like this leads to anger, selfishness and being out of touch with our everyday experience. This in turn leads to our world being full of war, greed, materialism, mindless entertainment, scandal and desensitization to the pain of others. That is suffering, and the perpetual effort involved is called samsara. However, the Buddha saw that this is a choice. If we chose to pay attention to how we construct our idea of a self and our ideas about what lies outside of ourselves we will be free from this suffering. Not that we won't experience pain (which is different from suffering) but we will learn to accept pain and loss as realities, not as something to be fought against. To free ourselves the Buddha prescribed a path of paying attention to the totality of our lives in every moment through discipline, wisdom and meditation. He saw that living life on its own terms was a worthy path and living life falsely was a life wasted. He also emphasized that there is no time except the present to engage in this path. He saw that there is no time outside of the mind that believes in it.
Hiphop means many things to many people. To most it is a musical genre, to some it is a culture, to few it is a way of engaging sociopolitically and to only the most puerile adherents is it a method of cultivating love and wisdom.
Because Hiphop is a human affair, humans involved in Hiphop experience suffering. Whether you are an "artist" or fan you probably believe in a self and spend most of the time trying to please and reinforce that self. This means that if you are an artist then what you create is probably for making you feel good, either from the act of creation or the validation you get from what you have created. There's nothing inherently wrong with feeling good about what you've made or receiving praise for it. The issue is that we can get attached to that experience as all that there is to get from the act of creating, instead of using our efforts to deconstruct how we get caught up in creating suffering for ourselves and others.
Much of what is considered destructive in Hiphop can be attributed to the inner suffering of its practitioners. The overwhelming amount of greed, violence, misogyny, addiction, aggression and materialism expressed not in the name of working out the causes of those issues but in the delight in them is a sign of the prevalence of suffering in the Hiphop community. Hiphop scholars debate the underlying causes of Hiphop's ailments; psychological issues, poverty, racism, poor education, the media, the government, poor parenting, run down communities, capitalism, crime etc. All of these arguments have merit but miss the fact that all of these causes aren't ultimate determinants of an individuals behavior. There are many poor people who aren't violent or greedy and many people who don't come from poor parenting and violent communities who choose to hurt others. The ultimate determinant of an individuals behavior is how they have freed themselves from their conditioning, found something that is good about themselves and made choices that transcend who and how they were taught to be. It's a matter of choice over what we want to do with our lives. Choose what you will but life is short, and if you want to make hit songs or spin records for thousands of people and you think it makes you happy then do it. The Buddha did not encourage belief in him, he encouraged confidence in ones own experience through diligently searching for the answers to life's most fundamental questions.
The Buddha taught that until we begin to try and solve our underlying issue of attachment to a self then we will appropriate whatever we do or whatever we have in our surroundings as a means of reinforcing our ego. This means that as Hiphop practitioners we will use the elements in self serving ways until we see that they can be used for other purposes. I personally have witnessed Hiphop go through three distinct phases: (1973-1985) egocentric, (1986-1994) ethnocentric and (1994-present) worldcentric. During each phase, many Hiphop practitioners explored a different aspect (read: perspective) of reality. Although not everyone during these time periods embraced the qualities of these phases, many did and utilized the elements to express the values associated with those phases.
Hiphop is currently worldcentric regardless of what you hear on the radio or see on tv. Just like a mountain, we know the peak not by where we see most people climbing but by how far others have gone and given us ways to experience it for ourselves. In the Hiphop community there are many examples of excellent climbers who have turned around and told us about the potential that Hiphop possesses to introduce us to higher elevations of thinking, living and interacting. Often times their voices are diminished but those who confuse success with attention. Entertainers get lots of attention, often times rightly so. They have learned the art of attracting people to their popular message which is a skill. However this is not the same as success. Success does not depend on followers, it depends on how far one has gone in a given pursuit. In the Olympics, no one pays attention to the most flashiest athlete, it is the one who was the strongest, fastest or had the most endurance. Even if no one paid them any attention after they won the gold, they would still be the best because they pushed themselves to the limits of physical human potential. You probably don't know who won the Nobel Prize in physics but you probably know that why they won wasn't because they had the biggest chain. In Hiphop, the journey is less about how many people can I get to mention my name but how well have I explored who I am and what I am capable of. How much of a scientist have I been? How have I explored an area of the human experience that others were afraid to? To the masses, popularity in Hiphop today is determined by what's cool among young people (as if what's young is what's new, it can be, it used to be). Popularity used to be determined by who pushed the envelope by introducing the world to something that wasn't there. In my humble opinion what has really changed is the extent to which people allow themselves to be told what popularity means instead of experiencing for themselves what is healthy for them to be attracted to.
What Hiphop Needs: You
Hiphop needs its followers to practice it as a sacred art form. Sacred doesn't have to mean spiritual it can translate into special or holding high value. Hiphop isn't sacred just to be sacred, it's sacred because of its inherent value. And what is its inherent value? Hiphop's most endearing quality is its ability to accept whatever arises, all sounds, all movements, all art styles, all tools and all perspectives on the human experience and allow them to be expressed however the practitioner sees fit. This means that whoever you are and whatever you feel can be explored and expressed through Hiphop. You don't have to be high in skill in order to be Hiphop. You only have to embrace who you are. The most successful artists (read: success as developed in authentic self/other knowing, not at making money) are authentic and growth centered. They know who they are, where they come from and where they want to go.
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