NEW PATHWAYS TO PIANO TECHNIQUE A Study of the Relations Between Mind and Body with Special Reference to Piano Playing By LUIGE BONPENSIERE $ Foreword By Atpous Huxtar PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY New YorNEW PATHWAYS TO PIANO TECHNIQUE Copyright, 1933, by Maria Bonpensiere Printed in the United Stes of America. Ab rights in thie book are reserved. No part of ashes t0 quote bri Sow in magasine or newspaper or radio broudcest. For "The Philosophical Library, Ine. 15 East Ath Steet, New York 16, N. Ys ok may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without he fom the older a hee ahs excent by @ nevi, wo pss In connection ath review writen oy in FOREWORD By Avvous HuxLey ‘THe worth is a continuum; but in order to act upon it sue cessfully, we have to analyse it into casily comprehensible elements. The cake of experience can be cut in many differ- ent ways, and none of the systems of slicing ean express the molar fact completely; each, however, may be useful for some particular purpose. ‘There have been literally hundreds of analyses of human nature, some excellent, others less good, others again posi- tively misleading. What follows is a very rough and per- functory kind of analysis which, while obviously inadequate to the total fact, may yet be of some value in the present context. For our present purposes, then, we may say that every self is associated, below the level of consciousness, with a notself—or, to be more accurate, with a merging and inseparable trinity of not-selves. There is first of all the personal and parily home-made not-self, the notself of con- itioned reflexes, of impulses repressed but still obscurely active, of buried-alive reactions to remote events and for- gotten words, of fossil infancy and the festering remains of a past that refuses to dic. Next comes the not-self of bodily Sunctioning—the vegetative notself of muscular activity, of digestion and respiration, of heart action, body chemis: try, glandular and nervous interactions. And finally there is the not-self whose manifestations are primarily mental— the notself which is responsible for hunches, inspirations, sudden accessions of insight and power, the not-self which Socrates described as his Daimon, which Christians call their Good Angel or even the Holy Spirit, which the Hindus equate with Atman-Brahman and the Mahayanists with Mind, Suchness, Buddha Nature. Di. f3-/705 07 PAYOR EE BO. nik TURCE eeNEW PATHWAYS TO PIANO TECHNIQUE A self can affect and be affected by its associated not. selves in many different ways, Here, for example, is a self which, like all too many of its fellows, reacts inappro- priately to circumstances. Such a self is apt to people the personal notself with all kinds of chronic fears, greeds, hates, wrong judgments, undesivable habits. Thus distorted, the personal notself reacts upon the conscious self, forcing it to think, feel and act even more inappropriately than be- fore. And so the game gocs on, each party contributing to the delinquency of the other in a pattern which is, at the best, a vicious eitcle, at the worst a descending spiral. Self and’ personal not-self have set up a mutual deterioration society, ef For the vegetative notself of bodily funetion, their ac- tivities are disastrous, Crazed by aversion and concupis- cence, haunted by the bogeys with which it has stocked the personal not-self, the ego starts to trespass upon the terri- tory which rightfully belongs to the vegetative soul. The result is that everything gocs wrong. Left to itself, the phys- iological intelligence is almost incapahle of making a mis- take. Interfered with by the craving and abhorring self, it loses its native infallibility. Bodily functioning is impaired and the ego finds itself saddled with yet another grievance against the Order of Things—an acute or chronic illness, none the less distressing and none the less dangerous for having heen produced by its own unvealistie thoughts and inappropriate emotions. ‘The ego and its personal not-self play their game of mutual deterioration, and the body res- ponds now with heart trouble, now with a defect of vision, now with gastric uleer, now with pulmonary tuberculosis, “You pays your money, and you takes your choice.” And whai, meanwhile, of the third not-self—the Daimon, the Good Angel, the divine Paramatman with whom, in es: sence, the personal Jiva is identical? The ego has power to ruin the hody, but can do no hurt to the spirit, which re. mains in all circumstances impassible, What it can do, FOREWORD however, and what it actually does do for almost everybody, almost all the time, is to eclipse the spirit, The self sets up a screen between the inner light and the waking conscious- ness—a sereen not, indeed, perfectly opaque, but so nearly light-proof as to render the visitations of the third not-self rare, fleeting and ineffective, _A fully integrated person is one who is at peace within his own being and at peace, in consequence, with his envi- ronment. He accepts what happens and makes the best of its and he knows how to make the best of it because his self and his personal sub-conscious are not insane and therefore do not interfere with the working of the vegetative soul and the spirit. Such fully integrated persons are very uncom- mon. To a greater or less degree, most of us are the victims of the ego and its personal notself, We make ourselves ill and stop up the source of all wisdom, And being sick, unin- spired and pathologically self-centered, we get on’ hadly with our fellows and live in a state, not of creative harmony with our fate, but of futile and destructive rebellion against it. All the world’s great cultures and religions have devel- oped their special disciplines of integration—integration with persons and integration of persons with their sub- human, human and spiritual environment, ‘Thus, in the Far East, we find the disciplines of Taoism and Zen; in India, the various yogas of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism; in the Near East, Sufism and its derivatives; and, in the West, the ‘ways of perfection’ Iaid down by the masters of Christian spirituality. For the last twenty-five centuries, at least, all the world’s seers, all its saints and wise men have agreed that the ubimate purpose of human existence is complete integration; and for the last twenty-five centuries the great majority of their fellow men have been content to say, “Amen”, and go about their business and pleasures as usual. Their attitude is all too comprehensible. Distant goods tend to shrink into insienificance when compared