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... at we think are part of our identity and then, if we " re lucky, we discover later on that we can actually step out of that identity and we are actually not confined by that identity that's been laid upon us. Back to our frog. The world becomes very simple if all you " re looking for, all your epistemology encompasses, is flies or not-flies. Even your need to eat flies may suffer, because the frog can be easily tricked into swallowing other moving black objects which are not flies. Human beings may be just as easily deceived, and are on a regular basis.
We greedily swallow so many things that are not nourishment. One antidote is meditation in its many forms - we can get some practice at going behind that programmed fly-concept to experience the nature of our own minds, then it is easier to actually walk in the redwood forest and try to learn about what's in front of us without a priori placing labels on it. Then later, indeed we do at some point want to communicate our experience with people and to communicate we use words, labels and concepts; and we can enjoy the delicious, variegated play of concepts that are given to us by our languages and all our wonderful academic traditions - but we can learn to use those in a provisional way, understanding that we " re looking at a map of reality and not at reality itself. The McCulloch frog is looking not at reality, but at a map of reality which predisposes it to see in a certain way.
The Bash frog's Plop! is about breaking through perceptual and experiential barriers. Plop! is the sound of breaking through the surface of things so that you can see more and hear more. The surface of the pond is the surface of consciousness - the mysterious watery barrier between reflection and reality. Psychologists at the turn of the century, in the William James era, came up with the term "ascetic sentience" to describe this state of mind: in other words, sentience which is without or prior to cognitive processing.
To actually just be in this room, to see and hear what's here without putting labels on it. We can experience the difficulty of this as we sit back and look around this room - we cannot help recognizing the faces of our friends and we know that a chair is a chair and likewise for all of these wonderful maps and concepts that have been trained into us. Yet it is possible to some extent, provisionally and for a while to go underneath that. Anoetic sentience is literally impossible, but we can approach a bit closer to it than we usually are, eliminate some barriers, some surfaces, see a little more cleanly and clearly, a little less muddled by the mind's constant activity of picking and choosing. Anoetic sentience is also impossible because if we were to somehow neutralize all of our neural, educational, cultural, evolutionary wiring, and see just what's "out there" - the ding an sich or thing-in-itself as Kant called it, we would discover that thing-out-there to be empty of inherent existence.
This is the fundamental insight of Buddhism, shunyata, the emptiness of inherent existence. Not that things don't exist, but that their existence is not inherent but rather interdependent. Everything exists in a complex network of interdependence on every other element of the universe through complex chains of cause-and-effect (karma) - perhaps the best model we now have for understanding this is the notion of ecosystem. The existence of the pond depends on everything else, including the rigid wiring of the frog's retinal ganglion cells. That is why Ronald Reagan's notion of redwood trees is the ultimate, most destructive, and at the same time most common epistemological error. Yet this destructive error too is an inextricably necessary part of our interdependent world.
I found in my life that music is a very profound path to going underneath that kind of processing because it is essentially and fundamentally non-verbal and it is essentially and fundamentally meaningless. How many people here play an instrument? When you play are you playing notes on your instrument? [Someone says yes, of course]. But the answer is no! Here are two completely different words: n-o-t-e and t-o-n-e. A tone is the actual sound that you make on an instrument, the actual sound that we hear - the actual sound of the refrigerator or the cough that we talked about at the beginning.
A note is a notation. It's a little symbol like this that we may label "B flat. " It is specific to Western culture, does not necessarily have any meaning in another culture, and doesn't have any meaning in terms of sound waves; it is a way of classifying and communicating to other people how to play something. But in fact, if you play an instrument like the violin, or the double-bass, or the slide trombone, or your vocal chords, which are analog instruments that can be varied continuously, you discover that "B flat" actually represents a whole range of tones. It's easy to see this on a big instrument on the cello double-bass because the strings are so long. You put your finger down on the string here for a B flat and here for a C.
The distance between B flat and C is like this, it's a couple of inches. What's going on in those inches? Is it no-man's land? No! there's a continuous variation of real finger positions and real tones; they " re all real sounds whether or not they have names. The symbol system cannot contain the musical reality.
When the frog (either McCulloch's or Bash's) jumps in the pond, the surface radiates waves and ripples of energy - sound. The plop makes neither a B nor a B flat. We the observers may classify the sound that way after the fact, we cognize sound into B's and B flats just as McCulloch's frog cognizes light into flies and not-flies, and even as Bash cognizes a simple amphibian who is looking out for flies into a way of teaching us about enlightened mind. Hsi K'ang (223 - 262) in his classic essay on the ch " in or Chinese lute, talks not only about tunes and tones, but also devotes about a quarter of his book to where the instrument comes from, the trees, their history, the type of soil that nurtured them, the waters that nurtured them. All that biology is for him part of the music. As a Western violinist, I find that I have a similar attitude toward the Italian violin, "purely" musical issues being mixed up with love of the instrument, the wood, the lore of the makers, a kind of sensual violin-porn.
Such concern for the instrument and the world from which it arises is not just rhapsodizing, Taoist love of nature, it is telling us that the voice that emits the music is paramount, and that is never just a voice, it is always in context, a voice that arises from a beautifully complex, interconnected ecosystem of nature and culture, music and matter. Context and context of context, the instrument is simply one part of the world that happens to have a voice. Music to some extent is described by a symbol system, but the real music, the actual sound that you hear cannot be described. It can only be experienced.
A riff on the violin or saxophone is utterly meaningless, hence utterly real. In the case of vocal music, we have words or poetry that are set to sounds, words which represent concepts and things and so forth in our discursive universe. But I would propose to you that vocal music ennobles words, allows them to gain an intensity, because they are allowed through music to dip into the much vaster realm of meaninglessness. Plop! And that realm of ascetic sentience, prior to the fly in the frog's eye / brain , prior to the first distinction beginning from let-there-be-light and let's-separate-the-light-from-the-darkness - this realm of unclassified direct experience, is attainable to some extent through music. It is attainable also to some extent through many other artistic modalities.
It's attainable through dreams and through myth, which uses words and storytelling to undercut the limitations of consciousness and go to a deeper level where we " re actually able to connect with what's out there in some more interesting way. You may ask if it is ever possible to listen to music without some type of thinking or classification. Certainly on hearing something you instantly think Classical or Country Western or Japanese. A highly trained musician may have trouble listening to any music without analyzing the rhythms and harmonies. But while music rests in a cognitive and cultural space, nevertheless when it's art something else happens, an arm of the music dips us into the ascetic or spiritual space, let's call that emptiness, that's where the magic happens, the known contaminated and spiced up with the unknown. Eventually we do come back to this ordinary world where we talk to each other and use ordinary concepts to communicate and do commerce and do all the business of life.
But through music, myth, art, dream, we " re able to come back to this universe in a way that is more interesting, richer. I'm the parent of a four month old boy, Gregory, and a four year old boy, Jack, and I am constantly being taught by them about just how real and immediate our universe can be felt, how constantly surprising and funny it is, how easy it really is to make a little shift and see things from a new angle. There's a verse from Chuang Tzu that I would like to add to the pile of images that we " ve been contemplating here: Later in the same poem, Lao-Tzu's disciple asked, "Is this perfection?" He's asking a very real question: babies are wonderful, babies point us to an amazing kind of bliss, but should we just blubber and google, indiscriminately sticking anything and everything into our mouths, and forget everything we have learned through our schooling and our experience as grown-ups? "Only the beginning. " The Sengai frog picture we examined earlier has a double meaning: yes, the frog jumps in and makes his Plop! but Sengai also said that if all there was to spiritual attainment was sitting contentedly and naturally, then frogs would themselves be enlightened Buddhas. In Zen art there are so many pictures of frogs, partly because the sitting frog looks like a person sitting in zazen posture. This silly animal, like all beings, is innately a Buddha, but it is also an animal who superficially looks like a Buddha yet is actually a phony Buddha like many people who take on the outward form of spirituality.
Infants have Buddha nature, but they are not fully realized Buddhas, nor are schizophrenics. My baby son needs an adult to help him discriminate between swallowing food and swallowing thumbtacks. We cannot avoid growing up and developing our minds, and it's unquestionably good to discriminate between nourishment and its opposite. But still, let us try to recover, to some extent, that consciousness of the infant, who's able to see everything for the first time. This baby-consciousness "melts the ice" on the path to real mastery of the Tao, so that we " re able, finally, to be grown-ups, know what we know, use language, use knowledge, but do so in an open easy going fashion that allows us to see what is really in front of us. It enables us to unlearn so that we "can be lead by Tao, be a child of Tao. " William Blake taught that we find enlightenment in the "minute particulars" of Creation, like a child closely studying the worms and bugs and frogs, really seeing the details that are there, unclouded by our programming, our "mind-forged manacles. " The Tao is ever-present, in the simplest, things, which is why I have devoted so much time to talking about silly matters like refrigerator noise and a cough.
The great 9 th Century Zen master, Chao-Chou, asked his teacher, "What is the Tao?" Nan-Chuan replied, "Your ordinary mind is the Tao. " The cough that I found so beautiful when we did our little meditation at the beginning of the hour could, in another context, have been just background noise, an irritation, or something to make us worry about contagion. But it was something exquisite, like the cessation of the refrigerator noise, like the frog's divine Plop! , because our minds were open, free, and clear. I spoke with John Cage, the composer, shortly before he died. Cage was famous for his view that all the sounds around us are music; he lived in New York City and the traffic sound and the honking and the screaming and everything else was music; he felt that we live in a continuous texture of music and he worked that into his pieces. Personally I don't quite share this view because I tend to like beautiful instrumental sounds; I like violins, and I'm not a fan of noise. Those are my frog's-eye-frog's-brain preferences.
But the interesting thing, John said to me, was that now that he was old, he was no longer so interested in randomly intrusive noises like the horns honking on the street below, he was now more interested in the continuous and subtle sounds that permeate the environment, like his refrigerator. At the time, I found that a rather charming statement, a statement of a man who understood how to be at peace with the universe in which he lives; but I was wrong, it was more than a charming statement. I never fully got what he was saying until a couple nights ago in the hotel room here in Bethlehem when that refrigerator went off and it was so delicious. Buddhists talk about the Third Noble Truth, the Cessation of Suffering. Suffering, great and small, is an ongoing part of life, but it can cease the moment we wake up through clarifying mind and seeing what is before us, a complex world of interdependent co-evolving that cannot be pinned down by names and concepts, cannot be pinned down as flies or not-flies, profit or not-profit. The cessation of the refrigerator noise is the tiny cessation of a tiny little suffering.
But pop! we wake up. Through these little teachings of everyday life we wake up and know that such cessation is possible. But that cessation was also a musical sound in itself, the sound of silence, with its own beauty, like the cough - when we meditate and tune up our senses, every sound, or the cessation thereof, is so crisp and clear. Bash's frog may or may not have been looking for flies, but with an exquisite startling little noise he Plopped into that pond, breaking through the reflective surface of mind and matter, and Bash woke up, and we with him. Bibliography:
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