One Hand
Clapping:
The Taoe of Music
WholeArts and
The Psychic Internet is proud to present the
"Preface" and "Part One" of this
remarkable book by Daniel d'Quincy. "One Hand
Clapping: The Tao of Music," originally published by
WholeArts in 1991, is a book-length essay on the
performance of music from the perspective of Eastern
philosophy and religion. Mr. d'Quincy is a noted
composer, musician, author, inventor, educator, speaker,
and photographer. Please visit his unique music sites at WholeArts: syNThony, and the WholeArts Online Music Conservatory.
Page 24
Besides, it must
be remembered that our experience of the present moment
is the veritable meeting place between past and future?
Our memories of the past, and our anticipations of the
future, exist only in the present. This is the moment in
which we must intuitively grasp our existence. Those who
live in the past deceive themselves into a waste of the
present, and those prudent enough to live for the future
are a gift to the insurance industry. The insurance agent
knows, as we do not, that, in Zeno's way of putting it,
the hare can never catch the tortoise, and the future is
a time that never properly arrives.[1] If we are capable only of locating
ourselves in the past or the future, the present moment
seems to shrink into an infinitesimal point of
non-existence. In that negligible dimension there is no
longer any time for philosophy and questions such as
ours.
There really is
no choice between the past and the future. We are
blessed, or condemned, to live in the present, like it or
not. Is it good? Is it bad? Shakespeare has Hamlet say
that “Nothing is good nor bad but thinking makes it
so.” The fact is that you cannot now be the
person you were in the past, or the person you hope to be
in the future. You can be only the person that you
actually are in the present. Therefore, for the purposes
of this inquiry (again, in the spirit of Zen), we will
limit ourselves for now to being mindful of whomever it
is that we actually are in the present.
You have looked
and looked. Is it possible that your identity does not
exist?
Oh, this is
insufferable, you will say. Haven’t we assumed at
least as much as that? But, imagine if you will (even if
only for the sake of opening up an unexpected new avenue
of approach - rather in the way that dynamite opens a
road), the following stereotyped encounter with a Zen
Master.
A person comes
along with a very common problem, suffering, and seeking
help. He says, “Master, my mind is confused and
agitated. Can you pacify my mind?” The Master says,
“Where is your mind. Show it to me.” The man
says, “I have tried to find it, and I cannot.”
The Master says, “There. You see! It is
pacified.”[2]
If it does exist
– your identity, your mind, or your soul, or
whatever you want to call it (that is, the real you)
- then you should be able to isolate it through careful
observation – by way of distinguishing between what
it is and what it is not.
In the paragraph
above, we reintroduced the word “soul” despite
having setting it aside earlier as too abstract, and to
dependent on belief, for our purpose. It can’t be
denied that the word has a certain utility: it conveys
the idea of an entity transcending the physical limits of
space and time that we have found to be so daunting. Let
us, then, see if we can somehow adapt the idea and make
it still more useful for us in this discussion.
The soul is
commonly thought to be eternal, and its place in the body
merely a transitory, a nearly accidental, feature of its
being. As noted above, its principle defect as an idea is
that it requires belief as the measure of its existence.
Belief structures are always rendered in cultural terms,
which means that any word like “soul” comes
encumbered with a great weight of intrinsic connotations.
In Christian mythology, belief in the soul has never been
easy to maintain due to the extreme conditions that it is
constrained to obey. According to doctrine, the time of
the soul’s dalliance with the body can scarcely be
measured against its eternal life after death, though of
course that comparatively minute span of time is imbued
with infinite significance and purport. In no more time
than it takes for the soul to eat an apple, the whole
project of earthly life may be spoiled from its beginning
to the everlasting end. Viewing it this way has at least
the effect of concentrating the mind on the subject. But,
at the same time, it tends to blast reason and logic.
Indeed, the idea brings God Himself into disrepute. Thus,
not only our ingrained “mechanical” theory of
the Universe, but the cultural baggage of religion itself
militates against belief in the soul, making it in the
West at the present time a thorough non-starter. So then,
we are doubly motivated once again to try to find another
way of getting at the soul without the apparatus of
mythology and belief.
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