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 36
But who needs to
be told that this kind of social pathology leads
ultimately to instability and breakdown? This way of
seeing things is the product of a distorted awareness,
compulsively obsessed with whatever it may be that it
places in the foreground of its consciousness. A healthy
awareness never loses sight of the background, since
foreground and background cannot exist one apart from the
other.
For
understandable reasons, the human being finds it hard to
come to terms with a world in which (under the best of
circumstances) a foreground of pleasure must be
accompanied by a background of pain. It is, of course,
our nature to prefer the former to the latter. But there
are consequences. We will come later in this inquiry to
ponder the principle of dialectical change. For now,
suffice to say that, according to it, the more things are
taken to an extreme, the more they tend to be
transformed, almost magically, into their opposites. Make
a fire hot enough, and it will go out, getting cold. Make
a city bright enough, and its greenhouse gasses will
obscure the Sun, bringing darkness. Thus, the more
desperately we persist in clinging to pleasure, the more
surely the world is transformed into a background of
pleasure and a foreground of pain.
And again,
remembering what has already been said about the
attachment of the Ego to things, we may see clearly that
it is the Ego, specifically, that resists the obvious
consequences, and clings always to the foreground. The
Ego is, itself, the foreground of foregrounds, and it is
born into a state of bitter alienation. It views itself
as the primary subject surrounded by opposed objects on
which by choice it may or may not direct its attention.
The Ego sees itself as sovereign, brought into the world
by God to dominate all things, to cultivate good, to
drive out evil. In the end, our western Ego posits a
foreground of infinite good for itself, around which no
background of evil may be tolerated. It creates the
belief that it can be a subject without any objects, and
the many forms of religious thinking which posit the
western God as completely self-sufficient are in
themselves nothing but a disguised attempt to make the
Ego into something absolute. The Ego copes with
inevitable contradiction in this world by imagining
itself in a state of eternal bliss in the next. As the
Divine Spirit that it projects itself to be, the Ego
says, “I came into the world, and I will go out of
the world, alone and uncontaminated.”
The song about
accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative
has become a virtual hymn in the liturgy of positive
religion, or the “Science of Religion,” as some
nervously self-conscious churchmen are wont to call it.[1] Can we not instead try to understand that
our efforts to rid ourselves entirely of the dark have
imperiled the very future of the light; that our world is
divided into nations, each one placed in its own
exclusive foreground, horrifically armed, preparing
methodically to press the button of mass-suicide in order
to prevent some other nation from doing it first. As
never before, the dire consequences of our mental and
spiritual orientation are being impressed upon us.
|
