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 31
The baby at first
makes no distinctions between things, and so we see that
it is the eventuality of real experience in the world and
the conditioning of acculturation that give rise to these
distinctions. When acculturation (not experience) is
given paramount sway, as in the West, where all
distinctions are made a priori in principle by God
(or by Newton and Einstein), then the world of things
takes on a great weight and substance. But, when direct
experience itself is accorded dominance, as in the East,
where the meditative void is considered the fundamental
ground of reality, then the world of things is viewed as
a play of illusion (or Maya, to use the Sanskrit
word). Discreet and distinct things, in the eastern view,
never truly exist as separate entities in actuality. The
chicken does not in fact come out of the egg in neatly
cut up pieces ready for frying.
In the same
spirit, we are saying here that the separation between
the knower and the known may exist only in the flawed
logic of language and in its grammar, wherein subjects
are forever separate from their predicates.[1] If this is true, the many perceived splits
that we perceived in our identity may not actually exist.
We may be whole and undivided after all, without knowing
ourselves as such. Life, mercifully, is not a grammatical
construction. Anyone who has ever made love knows this.
Language gives us only pseudo conjugations.
The distinction
between things occurs when they become the focus of your
conscious attention. Think of yourself as peering out
from behind your eyes (your I’s) at the world.
Behind your eyes, everything is dark, but in front
everything is illuminated. You are like a ship sailing on
a moonless night over uncharted waters, projecting a
moving spotlight before you as you go. What happens if
you never encounter anything?
It was noted in
the previous chapter that when your knowledge of a thing
becomes conscious, it becomes conscious for you in
the guise of your Ego. Without things, therefore, you
would be conscious of nothing, and then nothing would be
made conscious for you. Your consciousness would
have no content. We can see now how indispensable is the
“thing” to the Ego. Conscious knowledge, as the
province of the Ego, is a product of a focus on things.
The Ego and things arise together; they cannot exist
without each other.
We ought now to
reflect more deeply on how things arise out of our
focused attention. In order to know a thing, it must
first be distinguished from all other things. Using the
illustration in the following ideogram, we need to focus
the spotlight of attention on one thing, designated as a
foreground, and separate it from everything around it,
which is its background. Accordingly, one may see in this
graphic image either two faces kissing in the foreground,
in which case the center field is in the background, or
one may see a flower vase in the foreground, in which
case the two outer fields are in the background.
If one makes no
distinction between foreground and background in this
picture, one sees nothing but a squiggly black line
across a field of white, which is to say that one sees
everything and nothing at the same time. In other words,
to make no distinction between foreground and background
is to see the void. (Remember, the void is not empty
– only without recognizable form.)
[1] We can only speculate about the ways in
which different kinds of written and spoken language may
result in different views and attitudes to the world.
There are languages in our world that do not make such a
big thing of the noun. With reference to a house, one of
these languages might use a verb instead, as in
“people-housing.” At any rate, it is not
difficult to imagine that our world might go in a
different direction if our computer keyboards were
composed of Chinese characters rather than letters of the
alphabet. We may not be able to study the question at
leisure, for even now the globe is becoming, with the
Internet, Anglicized. It is a fact, reported in the New
York Times in 2001, that people who grew up in China, in
the traditional way, copying their lexicographical
calligraphy through long years of painstakingly
discipline, now report that using computers is making
them forget how to do it. (Next Page)
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