D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• Conscious thought and verbal expression. • Einstein’s testimony. • To understand something is to see how it is ordered. • Conscious thought and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. • The “monkey mind.” and its antics. • Inner talk and the perception of meaning. • Concentration as full attention. Flow. • The thinking of the “unconscious” or “sub-conscious” mind. • Experience, education and habitual thinking. • Art is what we crave. Talk and analysis are extra and optional.

Scholarship, science, art, everyday life, involve searching for coherence (“making sense of things”) and dealing suitably with the innumerable contingent elements which impede, divert, or inspire the search. This is an abstract description of what we are doing all the time.…Because of the endlessly contingent nature of our existence this quest can never reach a “totalised” conclusion. The conscientious historian (to take an example which can serve as an image for other cases) goes on trying to make sense of heterogeneous data, to understand and illuminate the separate pieces by classifying them, placing them, at a proper moment and not prematurely, into groups and systems. He continually notes, draws attention and returns to, the recalcitrant incoherent pieces which refuse to fit in. These may be the pieces which will alter his method of assembly, refute one of his theories, inspire him to invent a more truthful way of looking. This is what we all do when reflecting on a moral problem, and indeed intuitively in all our thinking. . . .

[Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p 195]

All conscious thought is a process of choosing, of putting experience into categories, aided (or confused) by memory and imagination. “I like this and I don't like that. This is like that. This can be used in connection with that. If I choose this, maybe the result will be that.” It is the same whether the thinker is planning strategy in a downhill ski race or working on a problem in advanced mathematics. “Surely it is more complicated than

that!” we may say, but the process is fundamentally one of categorization and comparison, of working with relationships among objects, whether the objects are blocks of granite or ideas. Most people believe that they think only in words, but verbal expression is in fact a final product rather than the fundamental activity in creative thinking. Albert Einstein, in answer to a questionnaire about his thought processes sent to him by a psychologist, divided his answer into two parts. He wrote:

(A) The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.

There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

(B) The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

[Albert Einstein, quoted in Brewster Ghiselin ed., The Creative Process: A Symposium, p 43]

Einstein is often described as a “visual” thinker, but it seems more likely that he was unusually capable of observing the mental processes involved in thought, and that what we designate as “conscious” and “unconscious” minds—the verbal and the non-verbal—work together, creative thought being essentially non-verbal. We long to make sense of the world, both inside and outside our own skins, to “arrive finally at logically connected concepts.” We are intrigued when we can detect some sort of order in things: a Harvard astronomer, recent discoverer of a new galaxy, explained that in a telescope’s scanning of the visible universe, an area unexpectedly exhibited an apparent order, and was therefore “interesting.”[1] To understand something is to see how it is ordered. The desire for understanding has made possible the survival of our species, a survival founded in our ability to make connections, to plan, to control. The fact that this process of thinking is to us a kind of play is important; thinking gives us pleasure. Except in meditation or contemplation, we are restless to the point of pain when a situation goes on for too long without the need for some kind of conscious thought.

But at the same time conscious thought is the dark fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which grows in the midst of the Garden of Eden: our choosing, categorization, analysis, and synthesis of verbal ideas about the world separate and alienate us from the world. We designate one aspect of reality as being to our advantage—good—another as being potentially detrimental to us—bad. In contemporary popular culture it is assumed that the forbidden fruit of the Tree is carnal knowledge, and that the forbidden is sexual. After eating of the fruit, Adam and Eve saw their nakedness as shameful, identified it as evil. However it is the relentless and constant categorizing of the world as Good or Evil, as what we like and what we don’t like, that removes us from the Garden of Eden, as the Eastern philosophies teach. Only in ego-less contemplation do we see clearly.

The Eastern concept of the “monkey mind” is useful here. This is the mind when it is neither thinking nor contemplating: it is unfocused, disordered, chaotic, jumping from idea to image to memory to prejudice to slogan, to wish to nonsense to a fragment of song, chattering endlessly. It is often compared to a radio left playing when no one is listening. Once recognized, it can be seen to be our most constant companion, getting between us and all our experience, and falsely coloring that experience. It is the voice of the insatiable ego, which understands everything only in relation to itself.

This is not at all to say that we ought to avoid conscious thought! It is only to say that productive thought is focused and concentrated. The conscious, thinking mind is essential to us as human beings, but it should be understood as only one of our tools for living—a tool which can be set aside when it is appropriate to do so. When we are climbing stairs it is not useful to think about how we are doing it (left foot there, now at the same time, raise the right foot, shifting that weight to the left. . . etc. etc.). It is no more useful when we are riding a bicycle in the country on a perfect day, or making love, or looking at Art. In fact, it is a distraction. What is appropriate then is contemplation: wordless but intense attention.

[T]o understand and appreciate [primitive art], it is more important to look at it than to learn the history of primitive peoples, their religions and social customs. Some such knowledge may be useful and help us to look more sympathetically, and the interesting titbits of information on the labels attached to the carving in the Museum can serve a useful purpose by giving the mind a needful rest from the concentration of intense looking. But all that is really needed is response to the carvings themselves, which have a constant life of their own, independent of whenever and however they came to be made, and they remain as full of sculptural meaning today to those open and sensitive enough to perceive it as on the day they were finished.

[Henry Moore, in Robert L. Herbert, ed., Modern Artists on Art, p. 149]

If we are to be “open and sensitive” enough to perceive sculptural (or any other) meaning it is essential that the chattering mind be silent. Labels, historical and cultural facts, gossip about the artist's private life, may all be useful as a rest from the concentration of intense looking or listening, but it is an ardent and intentional sensory awareness which allows us to experience the being of the work or of the experience. The work has its own “constant life” no matter when or how or by whom it was made. An intense awareness of the actual is the mental and physical condition necessary for the experience of < >´. The “monkey mind” inevitably subverts it. “If your mind says ‘green’ you lose the grass.” I once showed a friend a completely non-objective painting, recently finished. After looking at it for a few anxious seconds, she said “Tell me something to help me to relate to this.” She had immediately identified it as alien, and could go no further without verbal direction. By contrast, one day when I was driving with some children through the French countryside, the eldest said crossly to me, “Please don't tell me all the things to look at! I want to see for myself!”—in which of course she was quite right.

+

To master an activity is to arrive at the point where we can perform it without conscious thought of the steps involved. In fact conscious thought about a movement, separating the whole into parts, interferes with action. Thinking is itself a vital human activity, but we can’t think about it and do it at the same time. Perfect concentration is perfect happiness—bliss, and we love to do things which allow us to concentrate fully, undisturbed by thoughts about our own capacity for the activity or the rewards of doing it, or about anything else whatever. Zen tells us to live all of our lives this way.

When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit.

It appears that only two kinds of attention are useful. One is “attention open”—in which one simply observes the phenomena of the world, “the ten thousand things,” in all their multiplicity and activity, without judgment, analysis, or comment, letting things “go as they go.” The other is “attention focused,” “one-pointed,” whether in contemplation or in thought. In both cases the antics of the monkey mind are ignored or banished.

The pleasures of concentration, that is, of full attention, have been studied by Western science from several directions. The areas of activity in the thinking and experiencing living brain can now be observed by electronic fMRI scanning combined with a viewing monitor. It has been found that in general, in the process of learning, unfamiliar activities and information are first tackled at the front of the brain, while the adrenalin of anxiety is produced by the body. At the other extreme, when task or information is completely familiar and the action becomes automatic and boring, the electronic scanner shows that the necessary mental activity is occurring at the back of the brain, and is to some degree “below” the level of the conscious mind. In a third scenario, when the work at hand is challenging but achievable, the mind is active, concentrated, focused but relaxed, and the subject experiences enjoyment. In this state, mental action can be observed at the middle of the brain, and the endorphins of pleasure are released. This blissful mental condition is one of enlivened, but relatively confident, awareness.

Such technological observation of the brain actually at work supports the findings of research psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.[2] Over a period of a dozen years, Professor Csikszentmihalyi and his associates gathered data from thousands of people from different social and ethnic groups and from many countries. At first only those performing unusually difficult tasks over long periods of time were interviewed—rock climbers, composers of music, amateur athletes, chess players, and so on. Later the researchers worked with subjects doing more common things, people such as young mothers, assembly-line workers, surgeons, retired people, and teenagers. The initially surprising finding was that the enjoyment produced by widely differing activities was described in remarkably similar ways by all the persons interviewed. The activities that the subjects most enjoyed varied greatly, but they described how they felt when they thus enjoyed themselves in almost identical terms, and the activities they loved could be seen to have definite characteristics in common. Eight major “components of enjoyment” were identified. Of these eight, one was a sense that the activity can be completed in the time available; a second was the feeling of personal control, based on a clear goal and a degree of confidence in one’s own ability. The other six were directly related to the experience of concentration. Concentration is clearly the central characteristic of enjoyment.[3]

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.…When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed by the activity. There’s no excess psychic energy left over to process any information but what the activity offers. All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli.…The concentration …provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy…[there is a] sense of being in a world where entropy [the chaos of the world and of the monkey mind’s chaotic activity] is suspended. . . .

[Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, p 52-61]

This begins to explain the rewards available to us in the arts, the combined stimulation and reassurance found “at the boundary between boredom and anxiety.” If we can experience no order whatever within the work, if the so-called “art” which we contemplate, whether music or literature, dance or architecture or painting, is itself predominantly chaotic—it is unbearable, and no amount of theory will make it bearable. In fact it is not art. It must be said, however, that it is not only possible but common for a work to appear chaotic on our first experience of it, its particular form of orderliness becoming apparent only as we become more familiar with it.

Professor Csikszentmihalyi’s findings can take us further:

[The] loss of self-consciousness [in concentration] does not involve a loss of self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self.… Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence.…

This feeling is not just a fancy of the imagination, but is based on a concrete experience of close interaction with some Other, an interaction that produces a rare sense of unity.… During the long watches of the night the solitary sailor begins to feel that the boat is an extension of himself, moving to the same rhythms toward a common goal. The violinist, wrapped in the stream of sound she helps to create, feels as if she is part of the “harmony of the spheres.” The climber… speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock, between the frail body and the context of stone, sky, and wind.… Surgeons say that during a difficult operation they have the sensation that the entire operating team is a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as a “ballet” in which the individual is subordinated to the group performance, and all involved share in a feeling of harmony and power.

One could treat these testimonials as poetic metaphors and leave them at that. But it is important to realize that they refer to experiences that are just as real as being hungry, or as concrete as bumping into a wall. There is nothing mysterious or mystical about them.… [italics mine]

[Ibid. p 64-65]

We can probably agree out of our own experience that concentration brings great rewards—but concentration on what? Certainly not on chaos, which is the opposite of harmony and power. Rather: concentration on an attempt to bring things into a condition of lively order, or on an experience of < >´ in that which is—in contemplation, the mind fully alert to every nuance.

Professor Csikszentmihalyi says further that the self, which has, through concentration, become part of a larger system, “expands its boundaries and becomes more complex than what it had been.” But also, and importantly, “This growth of the self occurs only if the interaction is an enjoyable one, that is, it offers nontrivial opportunities for action and requires a constant perfection of skills.”[4] As we have seen, Longinus observed this nearly two millennia ago, and wrote that the human soul is uplifted by the “true sublime;” that “it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard.” In an experience of the sublime in art, of < >´, one feels joyfully proud to belong to a species which now and then is able to produce it.

The contemplation of great art in any of its forms is an interaction of this kind. The full experience involves all one’s resources of heart and mind, discernment and insight, and produces growth of the self. As life goes on and our experience deepens it happens that we “outgrow” certain works of art. When I was a child I found Tchaikowsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” to be precisely what I wanted, and I found Bach boring. Now the opposite is true. Neither position is ridiculous…it’s just a matter of where we are at the moment. Hatha Yoga teachings state this clearly. The most fully realized master is not “better” than the stiff and pudgy novice. What matters is that both are on the developmental path, gaining in physical and mental skills and in understanding, and enjoying the journey.[5]

Thought is thus entirely different from the chattering of the “monkey mind,” which keeps up a constant commentary, goes off on trails of connections and allusions, repeats the same tune over and over. This automatic activity is what people generally mean when they say that they can't meditate because they can't stop “thinking.” But real thinking is different from this; it is the conscious mind consciously applied to a puzzle or problem, the mind used as a tool for sorting and categorizing and connecting, focused and intent. It is what we have for so long claimed makes us Homo Sapiens—ignoring, until recently, its obvious presence in the activities of other species. The duration of the activity of thinking can range from a split second in an emergency to days of concentrated attention.

The “thinking” that goes on in the so-called “unconscious” or “subconscious” mind is something we know very little about so far, and we appear to be unable to do much to influence it. Einstein’s description of his own thought processes suggests a conscious awareness of it, as if he could employ it by an act of will and could, to a degree, observe its working. When painting or drawing or playing the piano, I have experienced the mute but consciously experienced operation of a non-verbal but “working” mind. . . as Einstein says, it feels somehow “muscular,” a matter of contraction and movement. How difficult it is to try to put this purely mental, and both nonverbal and often nonvisual, experience into words! But we all know it, if we’ve paid attention. The so-called “unconscious” has been a subject of great interest at least since early in the 19th century. Freud saw it as the dark reservoir of urges repressed by the conscious mind out of fear and shame, but certainly our most transcendent and beautiful dream images come from that source. It is the great font of creativity, a land of mystery, of demons, and of infinite riches, yet we know almost nothing about it.

Why is all this relevant here, in this book? Because only by silencing the monkey mind for a time can we experience < >´, which is my subject. When the internal chatter is stilled we are able to see what is, now—the Buddhist tathata or suchness of things, whether in our own minds or bodies or in all that lies outside ourselves. When asked what “creativity” means, the influential thinker-composer John Cage replied that it consists in paying full attention.

+

Like other animals, we build through increments of experience and observation a structure of habit and ritual which allows us to live efficiently—performing actions like walking or eating or driving a car without having to attend to each aspect of the action (once we’ve learned it), and avoiding actions which lead to pain and chaos. But this structure of mental habit increasingly lessens our freedom, since the accumulation becomes more and more complicated and rigid, until eventually we try to fit reality to our mental constructs rather than vice versa. Two young physicists described how their specialized education had established such limiting habits of mind:

“The idea that all these classical deterministic systems we'd learned about could generate randomness was intriguing… You can't appreciate the kind of revelation that is unless you've been brainwashed by six or seven years of a typical physics curriculum. You're taught that there are classical models where everything is determined by initial conditions, and then there are quantum mechanical models where things are determined but you have to contend with a limit on how much initial information you can gather. Nonlinear was a word that you only encountered in the back of the book.

…[I]f you take regular physical systems which have been analyzed to death in classical physics, but you take one little step away in parameter space, you end up with something to which all of this huge body of analysis does not apply.”

[Doyne Farmer & Norman Packard, quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, p 250, 251]

This is why broad experience and broad education are both so vital. Often, our minds long patterned, we simply rearrange our prejudices to fit the occasion, rather than actually thinking. Paradoxically, we must learn as much as possible and at the same time do conscious work to keep the mind open and free. It is by the process of mental habit formation that we gradually lose our spontaneity and leave the garden of childhood, which nowadays seems to happen earlier and earlier. How rare and beautiful, in this age of Little Consumers, Little Performers, Little Photographer’s Models, is an un-self-conscious child! We find utter spontaneity and freshness of vision again only rarely and by luck, unless we practice some kind of spiritual discipline such as meditation.

In our everyday life, direct intuitive insights into the nature of things are normally limited to extremely brief moments. Not so in Eastern mysticism where they are extended to long periods and, ultimately, become a constant awareness. The preparation of the mind for this awareness—for the immediate, nonconceptual awareness of reality—is the main purpose of all schools of Eastern mysticism, and of many aspects of the Eastern way of life. During the long cultural history of India, China, and Japan, an enormous variety of techniques, rituals and art forms have been developed to achieve this purpose, all of which may be called meditation in the widest sense of the word.

[Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, p 37]

As Henry Moore said about looking at “primitive” art in the quotation given earlier in this chapter: contemplation is the essential activity in the experience of art. Everything else interferes with that, although other information may be interesting. Talking about art—categorizing, comparing, discriminating, whether internally or externally—is a separate activity. In such activity, contemplation is impossible, and so full experience of that which we see and hear is impossible. [6]

A friend of mine, a clever writer, chatted to me about the personal lives of the pre-Raphaelite painters (unfaithful husbands!) as we walked along at an exhibition of their work. When I desperately suggested that for a time at least we simply look at the work, she said, “But I thought you were supposed to talk about it!" At a cocktail party on a Maine island I met a psychiatrist who told me that he was on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Symphony. He said that he loved music, and I asked him to tell me what was in his mind when he listened to it—what it was he enjoyed so much. (I was interested in why many people seemed to find the abstract so much easier to accept in music than in the visual arts.) His answer was: “I sit there and think about what I know of the composer, about how this compares with his other works and with the works of other composers, about all that I know about this particular piece….” Listening to the music—giving the full attention of his fresh and silent mind to the evidence of his sense of hearing, and supportively, of his sense of sight—was apparently not a major part of the experience that he so loved. He did not contemplate the music.

In Hebraic culture, where historically the making of images was forbidden, (as it was/is to a slightly lesser degree in Islam) the most respected intellectual activity until fairly recently was analysis of, and exposition on, the Torah and the scriptures. Some of that zeal for analysis may now have been shifted to the arts, and perhaps has contributed to current widespread misconceptions about what the activity of the viewer or listener should most profitably be. Certainly analysis of many kinds (of color or tonal quality, of message, composition, symbolism, or technique) and the discussion of historical context and possible psychological motivation can be interesting in themselves, but they are additions to the experience of art. They are not in any way essential to it or even necessarily relevant to it, as artists of all kinds have long insisted.

To quote Henry Moore once more, works of art “have a constant life of their own… they remain as full of sculptural meaning today to those open and sensitive enough to perceive it as on the day they were finished.” I once heard the eminent anthropologist Edmund Carpenter state, in a lecture, that the marks on a certain mask had nothing to do with “aesthetics,” that seeing the mask as art is a mistake; those yellow spots simply meant measles in that culture. But the fact that the yellow spots indicated measles had nothing to do with the deeper, aesthetic meaning of the work—in that realm the yellow spots function as yellow areas of a certain size and shape, placed thus in relation to the other elements in the mask and to the mask as a whole, as a work of art. And art is what we crave. Meaning in any art form is entirely different from message, a fact that will be discussed in chapter 9. The message derives much of its power from the existential meaning of the work, a meaning inherent in its physical presence, of which the yellow spots or the minor chords are an essential part. They mean themselves exactly, within the world which is the work.

If < >´ is there, it is in awareness (or in a sudden startled awakening) that we will experience it. The Chicago psychiatrist probably experiences the music unconsciously, and that is what is really sending him home in an elevated state, though he may recognize only his pleasure in his own erudition. The cells of our eardrums vibrate with the music, but so do our other cells—our whole bodies are in a sense played upon like instruments by the music itself. When listening completely, one feels sometimes that the music is playing within one’s body. The anti-heartbeat drumbeat used by the Rolling Stones is an obvious example of this—it was designed to beat at the same tempo as the human heart, but to reverse the emphasis. This is both familiar and disorienting, and therefore exciting. At concerts of contemporary popular music, it’s possible to fear that the hugely-amplified drum beat will disturb and even take the place of the natural rhythm of one’s own heart. The relationships of tone and time and nuance within all kinds of music affect us physically as well as mentally. They order (or disorder) our physical and mental being. [7]

In the presence of art, many people believe that somehow they should be analyzing what's there, and taking note of its historical and contemporary connections. They stand in front of a painting listening to their own internal comments, or to a teacher or friend, or to a recorded voice through the earphones clamped around their heads, all telling them relevant facts and opinions in the solemn tones suitable to incontestable information. In reality all of this talk is extra—the experience available in the work is provided by the work itself, in its uniqueness and power, and only our own sensory equipment and fully responsive mind can give us access to it. It cannot be described in words—otherwise, wall texts and program notes would be all we’d need. Such verbal information can serve to make us pay attention, and can add another level of interest, or as Henry Moore reminded us it can offer a rest for the brain tired from the activity of intense looking and/or listening, that is, of active contemplation. Museum goers commonly walk right by works which are not discussed on the soundtrack playing in their ears. They presume that if there is nothing theoretical or art historical being said about such works they are not worth looking at, are probably less “good”.[8] How different the attitude of 19th century French painters, seeing for the first time Japanese woodcuts printed on the cheap paper used to wrap porcelain. Those unfamiliar images were a revelation and a profound influence and source of joy, even though the product of a little-known country on the other side of the world, only recently forced to open its ports to foreign trade.

The great psychologist Carl Rogers wrote of such experience:

I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect. . . I have learned to suspect it is wiser than my intellect…

Experience is for me the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again. . . Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience. . .[it] is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. "

[Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person, pp 18 -24]

+

We are kept from the Garden of Eden by the very capacities for conscious choice and free will which we like to believe make us superior to other animals. The experience of joy is the experience of analysis and judgement suspended in wonder; it is a return to the Garden. This dichotomy—between verbal thinking, knowledge, judgement, and anxiety on one side, and contemplation, unknowing, wordlessness, bliss on the other—is a permanent paradox in human experience. We long for the latter side of the paradox, and determinedly apply the former in our attempts to get there. Or we resort to alcohol, drugs, and so on as means of gaining access to the experiences of peace, spontaneity and freedom which are available when the monkey mind is silenced. All this is inevitably self-defeating, as Eastern sages and Western mystics have long known.

The experience of the arts is sensual before it is mental, and without clear and uncompromised sensual information the mind cannot take its full part. Beginning in childhood, we learn to interpret what the eyes see and the ears hear, and the information of all the other senses; the form of the eye, for instance, is such that we actually physically see things upside down, but we soon learn to “see” them right side up. Further, and more subtly, anyone who takes photographs may observe the difference between an image seen by the eye and that photographed by the camera, even though the lenses of eye and camera are exactly homologous. The eye/mind has access simultaneously to multiple focal lengths and can focus on multiple elements in the same instant, without distortion.

That which most of us characterize as “thinking” remains the skill which we believe is more highly developed in us than in any other creature, and has made us triumphant over almost all the others. It has, some believe, freed us of God. We search for meaning by conscious verbal thinking, though the deepest meaning is inaccessible to such thought. In part because of this, our sense of alienation, of expulsion from any kind of garden, is increasing—as individuals and as members of a world culture.

[1] Smithsonian Museum documentary shown on PBS pre-1994.

[2] Published in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, and in other writings.

[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

[4] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, p 65

[5] This understanding is of course fundamental in all Yoga, which is a Way, in the sense of a way of being.

[6] Years after I—like so many others throughout history—recognized this fact, fMRI-supported studies on the brain at work appear to have confirmed it, as we will see in the final chapters here.

[7] For a revelatory exposition on this subject by the percussionist and composer Dame Evelyn Glennie, who is almost completely deaf, please find and listen to her 2003 video talk at ted.com. http://video.ted.com/talk/podcast/2003/None/EvelynGlennie_2003.mp3

[8]. Of course the choice among works is made in relation to what (if anything) can be said about a work—its place in art history, its subject matter, or how it serves to illustrate an aesthetic theory.