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 50
Many factors are
crying out for a revision of our concept of awareness and
the senses that open us up to the world. Ordinarily, we
are accustomed to thinking of five senses – sight,
hearing, taste, touch, and smell - and some among us seem
to believe in a sixth – the psychic sense. The
inimitable science writer, Guy Murchie, sat down one day
to see if he could think of any more.
So, out of more than
idle curiosity, I've jotted down a list of all I could
think of and it came to 48, not even counting the
stage-in-space ‘sense’ previously described.
Then, by combining the most closely related ones, I
trimmed the number to 32. Of course a lot depends on how
one defines a sense, and on arbitrary choices, like
whether you decide to lump the sense of warmth and
coolness or the sense of dryness and dampness in with the
sense of feeling, and whether you want to include the
senses (or are they instincts?) that animals, plants and
(conceivably) rocks have but most humans evidently don't.[1]
Along the way he
described sensitivity to electromagnetic fields,
including an awareness of magnetic polarity that can be
found in some insects; awareness of visibility in the
environment which is part of the chameleon’s ability
to camouflage itself; awareness of pressure, as with the
lateral line organ of fish; the so-called Coriolis sense
having to do with effects induced by rotation of the
earth; the sense of earth tremor found in burrowers,
cats, and dogs; the sense of weight and balance, space
and proximity; appetite, thirst, and the ability to sense
distant locations of water; a sense for navigation;
awareness of external, internal, mental or spiritual
pain; the sense of fear and dread; territorial sense; sex
awareness leading to procreation; the biological clock;
intuition; the sense of imminent death; and many more.
If we employ the
knowing awareness of the Self, in all of its
multitudinous aspects, we will tend to interpret life in
ways that are wholly alien to our western habits of
thought and feeling. In the light of the Self, can we
still persist in seeing our world and ourselves as an
assembly of parts, as in a complex machine? See how
differently questions appear in the light of the Self.
When we examined the Ego, we referred to the organs of
the body, and the physical evolution that shaped their
development. Now, in the light of the Self, can we
continue to wonder as we did before, “Am I in my
brain?”
Can we still say,
as nearly every good western philosopher teaches, the
nobility of the brain is the reason for being of the
stomach? After all, evolutionary mechanisms suggest that
neural improvements in primitive forms of life were
designed to facilitate the organism's search for food.
What holds precedence in the great chain of being? Is
intelligent life the crowning glory of cosmic history?
Does humanity depend on the rice plant, or does the rice
plant depend on humanity?
[1] From The Seven Mysteries of Life. (Next Page)
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