NOT TWO — LIVE PERFORMANCE PROPOSAL
A proposed 60-minute audiovisual performance by The Formless Track. Indicative performance visualisation — adaptable to venue and setting.
Not Two combines electronic music, projected teaching text, monochrome imagery and the live presence of Zen Master Hyon Gak Sunim, Dharma successor to the legendary Zen Master Seung Sahn.
The 11 tracks form a continuous narrative, punctuated by four short live interventions.
11 tracks · approximately 60 minutes · four live interventions · electronic music · projected text and imagery · Hyon Gak Sunim live
The music carries the teaching.
The live interventions open it.
Opening — presence before explanation
The room is dark.
As the stage becomes visible, Hyon Gak Sunim is already seated in stillness, held within a pool of light.
There is no introduction.
1. World Upon World
World Upon World opens at the widest scale: worlds within worlds, mind and world reflecting one another, without fixed centre, beginning or outside — all here, all now.
2. The Flow
The Flow brings that vast perspective inward. There is no fixed self, only a moving stream of awareness — changing, continuous and flowing as this moment.
LIVE INTERVENTION 1
From the universe to experience
After The Flow, Hyon Gak Sunim speaks for the first time.
He briefly introduces himself and The Formless Track, then turns from the larger picture to the individual:
If everything is moving and changing, what are we actually doing with our experience?
The next three tracks explore grasping, knowing and separation.
3. It’s Only TV
It’s Only TV presents experience as continual appearance: movement, energy, “waves in the void.”
The teaching is simple: do not grasp what appears. Let it arise and pass. Freedom lies in not touching.
4. Don’t Know
Don’t Know draws directly on Zen Master Seung Sahn’s teaching of don’t-know mind: cutting through the demand for conceptual certainty and returning to immediate experience — just this, moment to moment.
5. Not Two
Not Two turns toward separation itself. Thought creates the line between “me” and “you,” self and other, subject and object.
When naming and conceptual division fall away, what remains is not two.
LIVE INTERVENTION 2
From teaching to practice
After Not Two, Hyon Gak Sunim shifts the focus.
These are not ideas to admire from a distance.
The question becomes:
What happens when somebody actually tries to live this?
The next three tracks move from teaching into lived practice.
6. Silke Rising
Silke Rising begins with a real human story: a near-death experience leading to the question, What is life?
That question becomes years of practice, pain becoming presence, service, commitment and transformation.
7. Enter the Spiritual Fire
Enter the Spiritual Fire moves into the pressure of practice itself.
Fear, anger and hidden material are not escaped but exposed. The instruction is to remain in the fire long enough for it to transform rather than destroy.
8. No Hope
No Hope strips away the bargain with the future.
Hope is presented as projection. Time is not promised. What remains available is now — truth, presence and attention in this moment.
LIVE INTERVENTION 3
Back into the circle of life
After No Hope, Hyon Gak Sunim speaks again.
Practice does not remove us from life.
We return to habits, relationships, responsibilities, fears, pleasures and losses.
The question is no longer how to escape ordinary existence, but:
How do we meet it?
9. The Loop
The Loop returns to habitual human experience: the same thought, the same fear, the same film playing again.
The loop is interrupted not by analysis, but by awareness:
one breath — return now.
10. Circle of Life
Circle of Life then expands the view beyond the individual altogether.
Human beings imagine themselves to be at the summit of life, but the lyric places us within billions of years of biological continuity.
Roots, wings, cells, species — one immense family.
Our arrogance breaks that circle through habitat destruction and loss.
The teaching becomes ecological as well as spiritual:
remember our place; protect the circle.
The performance has now moved outward again — from an individual human life into the much larger living world to which it belongs.
LIVE INTERVENTION 4
Farewell — and one final reminder
After Circle of Life, Hyon Gak Sunim addresses the audience for the final time.
The whole journey is gathered briefly:
worlds within worlds, mind, grasping, don’t-know, non-separation, practice, habit, life.
Where does all of this finally arrive?
Here.
Now.
And one final reminder:
This very moment is the universe.
The final track begins.
11. This Very Moment Is the Universe
The final track resolves the whole performance.
There is no before to reach and no after in which awakening will finally happen.
We are not standing outside the universe looking in.
No inside. No outside. Only this.
Hyon Gak Sunim returns to stillness.
There is no further speech.
The music resolves.
The image fades.
The pool of light disappears.
Darkness.