From eluna@coil.com Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 03:35:40 -0400 (EDT) From: eluna To: mwraves Subject: yin/yang...um... [a late reply...i'm pretending someone will care] it's not a question of either/or, nor are the black & white halves of the yin/yang symbol "opposites" in any sense of the term. i think that's a western corruption of the symbol which removes the subtlety of what it really represents. western culture has always had this tendency to divide things into dualities, into either/or's...good vs. evil, male vs. female, black vs. white, liberal vs. conservative, ad infinitum. this has been a strong current from the ancient greeks all the way to the 20th century structuralists. but the whole point of yin/yang, or at least the way i have begun to understand it (and i am NO expert by any means), has more to do with wholeness than opposition. yeah, you look at the symbol and it seems like a battle between two opposite-colored swirls with elements of each other...but that's almost like a cartoon reading. it's not about forces fighting or even opposition at all, what matters more is _the circle in which they exist_. it really reminds me of john cage's decades-long attempt to understand sound. he grew up learning how to be a composer in the old sense, but even early on, he knew he wanted to explore more than just melody and harmony, which he thought was boring...so he went off and did mostly percussion music to explore the nature of sounds themselves. as opposed to how most classical music is obsessed with the same ol' instruments and structures, cage used just about anything he had laying around as an instrument: flowerpots, turntables, buzzers, bells, junk...and so on. the more he got into these experiments of "organizing sound," the more he began to realize that music was just as much about the emptiness between the notes as it was about the sounds. this realization of the musicailty of silence culminated in his "4'33"" piece from 1952 which is just 4 minutes and 33 seconds of a performer sitting in front of a closed piano! sounds like a joke, i know, but his intentions were dead serious. he was trying to get everyone to listen to the random sounds which are around us all the time. the problem with "4'33"" was that in a way, it became impossible to make music afterwards. i mean, if everything we hear is music, then what's the point of making music? cage's answer came from his growing interest in buddhism and especially zen, so he began to say that the role of the composer was to create sounds that could allow "divine influences" to affect the listener. he later elaborated these views a little differently, and this is the point to which i have been building up through this entire post. lemme quote james pritchett on this one, because his book on cage is the one that crystallized these thought for me: "to summarize cage's model of composition: there exisits an infinite, completely _non-dual space of unique but interconnected sounds_; by means of chance techniques, the composer can empty [the] mind of thoughts about sounds, and thus identify with this infinite space." [emphasis mine] this is some seriously deep shit. my point is that in our culture, we really do tend to stick to the paradigm of opposition: we either say something's good or bad, etc. the real truth, as far as i have been able to see it, is much closer to the way cage approached sound. it's like an infinitely vast and complex array of options, from which we get certain clues about things...but we'll never really get to see the whole picture nor explore every option. this is much more complicated than just either/or, but it's also somehow liberating (and to me, more satisfying). i wish i could follow up on these thoughts a little better, but unfortunately the net is not the place for serious dialogue like this and hell i've gone way too long already. i will say that the road i took to get to this point was a roundabout and haphazard, one which i wouldnt recommend travelling in fact...but somehow i got here and i hope i can build on what i've learned. i do have some concrete suggestions, though, especially with respect to other cultural perspectives than our own (that's pretty much what prompted me to reply to the spirituality thread at all). i dont want anyone out there thinking that life is just about black vs. white or whatever, i feel strongly that life is both more complex and more simple and unified than that duality view would lead us to believe. other cultures, for example, have totally different concepts of time than we do, and a lot of what you or i might agree on would seem strange to them. and that's just the beginning. so i would recommend finding out about other cultures, whether they are in your own town or thousands of miles away...if you make an attempt to learn about them you'll cover a lot of ground in a hurry. you dont have to go far, either. try riding the bus if you never have...sit at a cafe in a strange part of town...read some recent anthropology books...or just observe people (and i mean really observe) and how they interact. it can be very very revealing. a final suggestion: approach these other people and cultures with an empty cup...as empty of pre-conceived notions as you possibly can be; or you will get nowhere. good luck to everyone who is searching. as many thinkers have suggested in the past, perhaps it is that search in and of itself that is the most meaningful. (okay i'm done now ;) ++ e d ele-mental.coil.com/