Guitar god Eddie Van Halen died on October 6. And I just found out that the Van Halen brothers are essentially Asian American! What the fuck?!

How I didn't know Eddie and Alex are Asian American is pretty frickin' mind-blowing. Their father was Dutch and mother Indonesian. I don't know a single American with one white parent and one Asian parent who doesn't consider him or herself Asian American, although I'm sure they're out there. Maybe the Van Halen brothers?! Maybe the Van Halen brothers themselves kept quiet about their Indonesian heritage for whatever reason which is why I never knew about it. I knew they were Dutch and that Van Halen is a Dutch name, either from reading it in a magazine or hearing it from a classmate who read it in a magazine. Not a word about Indonesia and I remember a classmate wondering why Alex had "Chinese eyes" in a rare photo where he wasn't wearing sunglasses. Brother Eddie looked "normal" so that was the end of our junior high inquisition.

Furthermore, in the past few days it has come to my attention that the brothers had immigrated from the Netherlands at an old enough age to be passably fluent in Dutch (young enough to not have a Dutch accent), enough to give interviews in American-accented Dutch. They were at least bilingual!! (I haven't come across anything definitive indicating they didn't know any Indonesian from their mother, maybe they did but mum's the word on the Asianyay ingthay). 

I grew up in upper-middle class, white suburbia where racism definitely existed but wasn't horribly overt or physically violent as it was for the Van Halen brothers. We idiotically didn't listen to black music and that closed-mindedness extended to sexism as we stupidly didn't think girls could rock and ignored the obvious evidence that they could. It also made us Grade A assholes making fun of foreigners and thinking a death-metal band called Stormtroopers of Death with an album titled Speak English or Die was a hoot. What a bunch of fucking idiots we were and represented. I'm not proud of it. I did my best to fit in and in return they did their best to ignore that I looked like the people we were making fun of (no one turned and looked to me at that Alex Van Halen "Chinese eyes" remark). 

If we had seen videos of our rock heroes speaking a foreign language, I bet our narrow little minds would've been blown! They're foreigners! But not nearly as much as if we had learned they were Asian American. I don't know what I would've done with that information. I probably would've distanced myself from it and dismissed it. At that age and in that place, there was no Asian pride, no "Asian American", and Indonesia wasn't even really part of Asia anyway, at least not the important part. There wasn't even awareness of racism; I didn't learn about it until college and only then did I realize it was there all along like rigpa. 

I'm very proud that Van Halen was the first ever rock concert I went to, still in junior high. Diver Down Tour, Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands, NJ. I remember being in the stands and not believing I was in the same space as Eddie Van Halen! He was right there before my eyes with his trademark 500-watt smile doing his bouncy multiple scissor kick jumps on the raised platform stage left and David Lee Roth with his acrobatic, martial arts kicks and infamous ass-less chaps. 

My first rock concert and there were Asian Americans in the band! In later pictures, his Indonesian heritage is facially more apparent and he could pass for an elder Southeast Asian gentleman. Alex can stop wearing sunglasses all the time.

If I knew they were Asian American, I probably would've made more of an effort to remain a fan after the first white guy David Lee Roth was fired. My mind would've been blown 30 years earlier as my Asian American awareness dawned and remembered Eddie and Alex were "half Indonesian". I had trouble getting into their post-DLR sound and didn't feel like chasing it. Even now in my iTunes collection I have all six David Lee Roth-fronted studio albums, but only two songs with Sammy Hagar. And then after the second white guy Sammy Hagar was fired/quit, the name Van Halen became more associated with ridiculous, ego-driven drama and I didn't need that kind of instability in my life. 

I couldn't say I was a fan anymore when the third (fourth?) white guy Michael Anthony was fired (white people being fired by Asians is a comic thrill you only understand if you laughed when Apu gleefully hired Homer to work at the Quik-E-Mart), but I couldn't imagine any legitimate reason for the bassist to be fired. They could spin the revolving door with singers, but Michael Anthony's solid playing and stratospheric backing vocal was the third key to the Van Halen sound. The only reason that makes sense is nepotism, Eddie wanted his son Wolfgang in the band and that's not a legitimate reason. May as well change the band's name to "Eddie & the Family Van Halen" (that would've taken balls). I dunno, maybe Wolfgang was too young at that point for this theory to hold, but when he was finally recruited, it didn't look good. At least Eddie may have been clearing the way for Wolfgang.

I actually have Van Halen's entire catalog of studio albums on my computer (even the reviled Van Halen III), unscrupulously downloaded many moons ago from some unscrupulous Brazilian or Russian site that had them all just in case I might someday be interested. They aren't loaded onto my iTunes and so I have to specifically choose to listen to them like in the old days of LPs and CDs, which is rare for me to do and most of it has gone unlistened to until recently. I have to admit the music is consistently good, Eddie and Alex kick ass no matter who is singing. But aside from them I'm still not thrilled by the writing or what's on top (nothing against Sammy, I wish I liked it more).

One of the greatest, game-changing electric guitarists of all time was black. The other was . . . Asian American?! I'm still trying to get my head around that one. I was born too late to appreciate Jimi Hendrix, but then got it when I realized what he did to electric guitar in the 60s is analogous to what Eddie Van Halen did in the 70s. I just couldn't hear it because I didn't experience it and everyone was standing on Jimi's shoulders by the time I came of age. They were like a two-stage rocket with Jimi taking off into space and then Eddie blasting into hyperdrive 10 years later.

14 min. clip from the Mean Street Tour supporting Fair Warning, a year and a half before I saw them. No ass-less chaps, but that's quite a bulge Diamond Dave is sporting.

For the past several months I've been focusing morning sitting on the Tibetan Buddhist concepts of sem and rigpa. Both of those terms are translated as "mind", but distinguish between different types of mind. Sem is mind as manifested in our perceived reality and it is also divided in two. One aspect of sem mind is how we subjectively perceive things, what is received through our senses and how our brains integrate them and interpret reality. The other aspect of sem is what's out there, what's being perceived and is also a product of mind. It's not to say that without us being here that it would disappear, that would be a misinterpretation of it being "product of the mind", but rather establishing the non-duality between reality and mind – what's "out there" IS our mind. That takes a bit to get one's sem around. 

The focus on sem is also good for returning the wandering discursive mind back to the breath – Zen focus on breathing – that I perennially wrangle with. I start by identifying breath as being representative of sem, so as soon as I think "sem" my mind immediately goes to my breath and the sensation of breathing and then that expands to focusing on all senses and what they're doing, as well as the discursive mind and the thoughts which are also sem. It sometimes takes a while for the thought of sem to trigger the focus, sometimes it's there from the start or even before starting (although once it came to me literally right before the 46-minute timer went off (sem! *beep beep beep*), which wasn't ideal). Doesn't matter. And once the focus on the perceiving is there, it spreads to the objects of perception, the other side of sem.

Rigpa is a more elusive concept of mind; it is mind as the ground of all being. Sem mind is merely the projection or manifestation of rigpa. Sem is how mind appears as our perceived reality and with what and how we interact in our lives, but rigpa is the true mind, the true ground of existence. Imagine seeing the trees (sem) but being unable to see the forest (rigpa), or the waves but unable to see the ocean. You look as hard as you can and you can see the trees and the waves, but for the life of you you fail at the challenge of seeing the forest or the ocean. The problem with the analogy is that we can see the forest and the ocean, but that's also the conceptual difficulty of rigpa where everything is rigpa, rigpa is imbued through everything around us, but we can't see it or point to it. 

Rigpa can't be learned or taught, but must be experienced, it is said, and experiencing rigpa is akin to enlightenment. And as I understand it, it is the "clear light" or "pristine cognition" (or many other terms) described in the death-point between in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. There's a point in the death process where all beings experience enlightenment but it is so subtle that beings generally blow through it without any recognition or notice of it. It is possible to train oneself to try to recognize it, and enlightenment can be achieved during the death-point bardo if successful. 

Of course, not having a teacher I haven't received any instructions on it, but maybe while alive keeping a meditative focus on the understanding that rigpa is life and reality itself all around us and we are experiencing it, just not noticing it, will help recognize it when encountered in death. During the death process, not succumbing to the fear and tumult of the death process and concentrating on recognizing the clear light/pristine cognition so that when it occurs it's the most obvious thing because we just lived our entire life marinating in it. It's something that becomes obvious at that point along with the recognition, finally, that it's been there all along. 

Both of these focuses on sem and rigpa are ideally maintained or returned to throughout the day and not just for the cushion.

Recognition of experiencing rigpa is described as something very familiar, like the meeting of mother and child. I hope I can be forgiven if that analogy is somewhat lost on me. I mean, yeah, familiar – I've never failed to recognize my parents whenever they or I came out of customs at the airport no matter how many years have passed, but any implication of a pleasant familiar reunion would be pushing it. I suppose the analogy may have been a sentimental expression of what Tibetans believed was universal. Even Paul Simon wrote a song about it, so OK, fine. 

Me? I'd go for a familiarity that's less sentimental and perhaps even more universal than the mother and child reunion that's only a motion away. I'm thinking the familiarity more like whenever we wake up and we know who we are and that this is reality. We aren't repeatedly freaked whenever we wake up wondering who or where we are. It's just here immediately, not frightening, not necessarily comforting, just fact and possibly profoundly familiar if you think about it. I also like that familiarity being of oneself as similar to The Conference of the Birds when the thirty birds reach their stated goal of meeting the Simorgh, which we find can be translated to "thirty birds" in I think Persian or Farsi. You reach the clear light/pristine cognition state and its basically a mirror, yourself.