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 49
We often dispense
with wonderment over our wonderfully multiplex mental and
physical systems by making a completely pro forma
distinction between instinct and conscious will. There is
no real substantial basis on which to make this
distinction, however appealing it may be to our fancy for
mechanical explanations for everything (for instinct is
but a refined aspect of mechanism). In fact, in other
creatures beside ourselves, it is impossible in principle
to draw the line because we have not as yet devised any
infallible means of scientifically detecting
consciousness in any organism, including the human.[1] At most, we infer consciousness through
structures of rational logic, but this is a far cry from
detecting it and measuring it in the laboratory, as it
were. In any case, even when we infer that it is present
in the organism, it is not easy to draw a line between
behaviors based on instinct and those based on conscious
intent.
If you think the
line is best drawn with respect to the functions of the
autonomous nervous system and the organs it regulates,
consider the tremendous revelation the phenomenon of
bio-feedback has been in our understanding of the
mind/body relationship. Believe it or not, it has been
shown that the human being is capable of exercising
conscious control literally over even single cells in the
body. Various kinds of stress reduction that have been
developed in recent years are recalibrations of what
turns out to be a fuzzy and highly permeable line between
instinct and conscious will.
The line is
hardest to draw in purely mental activities. For example,
we think of the peculiar talents of the idiot savant
as a product of some special kind of cultivated instinct.
When such a person tells us, instantly and correctly, the
day of the week that fell on any particular date in the
last or the next 10,000 years, we ask, “How did you
know?” The reply is always, “I just know.”
The savant has no consciousness of any intentional
mental search or calculation that we suppose must be
occurring in order for him to “read” the
calendar in this way. He just knows.
Now consider what
happens when you meet someone new and introduce yourself
by name. Are you conscious of dipping into your memory
banks (if indeed this is what you actually do) in order
to retrieve the name in the file drawer with your picture
on it? When you are asked for it, how do you know your
name? Of course, you just know.
Happily, we do
not need to focus our conscious attention on most of the
things that we do. Conscious awareness is superfluous in
most activities, and the conscious awareness of the
willing Ego is only one kind of awareness that is
available to us. The capacities of the Self reveal that
the human body-brain is aware of vastly more than the Ego
ever imagines it to be. Experiments have demonstrated the
unfathomable depth of the field of human knowing. We are
beginning to understand that consciousness is but the
surface of a bottomless pool of awareness. From a
physical standpoint, for example, our brains are aware at
every moment of the precise oxygen content of our blood,
and our circulation is regulated accordingly. But the
awareness of the physical body is possibly the smallest
part of it, for our experience of the world is also much
richer than fully conscious awareness permits by itself.
Through psychiatric regression, for example, or surgical
stimulation, it is discovered that events wholly eclipsed
in the darkness of the forgotten past are a living
presence in the depths of the mind. Likewise, through
hypnotic trance, we may uncover troubling words in a
conversation sub-consciously heard across a crowded room,
or the numerals of a license plate from a hit-and-run.
What is not noticed consciously often turns out to be
just as important as what is.
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