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 47
Chapter Six
Let us
recapitulate the course of our inquiry thus far. Our
premise has been that we can learn something about life
and the art of living, or attain to a kind of spiritual
enlightenment, by playing music (or making art), and so
we need to ask about the nature of that experience. We
began, however, by asking how best to make great music
from a psychological and spiritual point of view. These
are not really separate questions. They both depend on a
clear understanding of our own individual identity. But
we have also seen that, wherever and however we may
search for it, our own individual identity eludes us in
all directions of space and time. We saw that we are not
objects that can be observed and defined. We saw that our
ordinary sense of self, the Ego, arises together with
things, in a sort of grammatical construction. But we saw
also how things, per se, are not to be taken as gross
realities, but rather as a mediation of foregrounds and
backgrounds by the discriminating intellect. Moreover,
our psychological mediation of foregrounds and
backgrounds is characterized by our western or eastern
cultural predisposition, as evidenced in many ways,
including each culture’s distinctly different
approach to the arts.
Let us also
remember that, in this book, we are looking to the East
for the possibility of a renewed spiritualization of our
lives as artists. Our interest stems from the fact that
spiritual enlightenment is both the method and the aim of
the arts in eastern culture. The arts of enlightenment
are the means and the end all summed up in one.
Thus, we saw how,
in the martial arts, for example, practice aims at an
integration of foreground and background in every
situation – a process through which victory is
assured by an infallible readiness and alertness. Keep in
mind that discrimination between the foreground and the
background of things is a function of the Ego. The reader
might deduce from this that enlightenment may be simply a
matter of making the Ego more and more conscious,
gobbling up more and more of the background into a newer
and more fully comprehensive foreground. But, just how
capacious can a self-respecting Ego manage to be?
There’s the rub.
We come back now
to the central conundrum of things and the Ego. Things
exist only as functions of the focus applied by the
spotlight of the Ego. But, measured against the full
range of human experience, the individual Ego must remain
forever pitifully limited. A spotlight can only
illuminate one thing at a time. It takes time to move the
focus of attention. The Ego trying to be really
comprehensive in its grasp is like a limitlessly thirsty
man trying to drink the ocean with a spoon.
The Ego is
ineluctably bound in the web of time and space. True, we
have television to show us the world, and long gone are
the days when most people lived their entire lives in one
house or hamlet (it has been estimated that the medieval
peasant saw no more than 250 people in an entire
lifetime). But the limitations of today still
tremendously outweigh the expanded horizons we may only
dream of enjoying. How many ways of life (or lifestyles
as we often placidly put it) can a single person cram
into a span of, say, four score years? Even the most
advanced linguist can only master a small handful of
languages. The most widely traveled explorer sets foot on
only a relatively tiny part of the globe and sees nothing
of the outer reaches of space. Our vividly colored
satellite pictures of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter whet our
appetites for more. They make us conscious of the
mightily compressed compass marking the boundaries of our
little Earth. (Next
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