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 53
The metaphor we
choose, machine or music, depends on who is doing the
choosing. The Ego’s world is a mechanical
Multiverse. The Self’s world is a musical Universe.
The Ego is continually dividing, judging, and repelling.
Do you remember your first look at an X-ray picture of
yourself? Many people feel a slight uneasiness that wants
to say, “That’s not ME!” But the Self
looks at everything with recognition and acceptance. It
sees the distant galaxies in photos from the Hubble
Observatory, and says, “That’s ME!” When
you draw a line between yourself and everything else, you
find yourself “in” the world. But when you stop
making this wholly unnecessary distinction, you
“are” the world, a singular organism pulsing
and undulating through eternity.
In this
non-discriminatory mode of perception, we see that
everything in the Universe is the Self. We have
been looking everywhere for ourselves, our personal and
individual identity. Aren’t we a little like the
absent-minded professor who searches all day long for his
spectacles, only to find them, at last, perched on his
nose? The conscious Ego can grasp so little of this. Its
intellect fails to reason beyond the otherness of things.
The Ego is dumbfounded and numbed by the contextual
reality of our real existence. But the Self transcends
all the formulations of the Ego. The within and the
without of things, like all opposites, are but two sides
of a single coin - the currency of the Self.
The Ego’s
distinctions between things are not as formidable as
might be supposed. Nearly every human being experiences a
healthy breakdown of the Ego at one time or another in
the natural course of living. Love between people is the
quintessential form of it. We often hear that romantic
love is pure madness, but it is only the Ego that thinks
it so. It looks at the object of our affections in the
bright glare of the Sun, in which every blemish stands
out. Thankfully, we also have the light of the Moon,
withal its precious lunacy. In that softer glow, we see
the Divine in our beloved. And, if we succeed in uniting
with our beloved, we attain in that way to a kind of
enlightenment – a realization of the Self that
transcends two individual Egos embracing, whether we
think of it that way or not. In the East, of course, we
find a much clearer understanding of this process, which
is why the architects of Hindu temples sometimes employ
sculptural ornamentations that to the western eye seem
pornographic. Our own western neurotically inconsistent
distaste for images of sexual intercourse is but a
measure of our enslavement to the Ego.
The Divine
Madness of love may be the only sure and true sanity we
can experience. If we are lucky enough to experience it,
we enjoy life with greater intensity and involvement.
Colors shine brighter, music sounds lighter, and things
acquire a kind of luminosity. But, curiously, everything
also seems more “real” when we are in love. To
be in love is to really live. And this is sanity in its
core meaning of health.[1]
[1] From the Latin sanus, meaning
healthy. (Next
Page)
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