This talk was given on November 12, 1997 at the Religion Studies Department at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Thanks to Professor Norman Girardot for sponsoring the talk and to Steve Plimpton for transcribing the tape. Cosponsored by the Lehigh University Religion Studies Department, Chaplain's Office, Philosophy Department, Science-Technology-Society Program, Asian Studies Program, and the Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges. Copyright ©1997 by Stephen Nachmanovitch; all rights reserved.

Norman Girardot: Steve Nachmanovitch is, as that famous anthropologist Levi-Strauss put it, a bricoleur (a Jack of all trades). He choose not to walk his path in the academic world, but to take that much more difficult path in that other world "out there" (wherever that is). He's done many things - he's a violinist, a composer, he has academic degrees from Harvard and the University of California, he's an author, he's a software designer, he's a businessman, he's a trickster as well I suppose I could say. The posters that you see refer to the ostensible title of the presentation as "Tao, Creativity, and Music." Last week he notified me that he had changed the title. The actual title of the talk here is "All About Frogs." He gave no explanation. We are delighted to have him with us.

S.N.: Well, thanks, it's a pleasure to be here again, after just a few hours. We had a wonderful meditation class this morning, and I'd like to capture just a little bit of that atmosphere in this larger group. Since so many of us are packed into every corner of this room, why don't we take just a minute or two of silence to get comfortable where we are, whether we are sitting in chairs, squatting on the floor, standing, sitting on someone's lap, or whatever; let's become settled and quiet, allow an opportunity to find our balance and let leak away all the concerns and preoccupations that we brought with us.

… [Silence] …

This morning, and again now, we heard that wonderful bass hum of the heating system as it whirs away up in the ceiling. In the silence of this room the sound of that motor became very prominent in our consciousness. Usually, while talking and listening, thinking and worrying, we don't notice it. That motor reminds me of a wonderful realization I had in the hotel room where I'm staying a couple of blocks from here. There's a refrigerator in the room, and of course the refrigerator goes on and off as its thermostat switches in and out. I was lying in bed, with the low, continuous drone of the refrigerator (which is something like the sound of this heater) and then suddenly Pop! - the refrigerator turned off. Even though the machine made a very subtle noise, its cessation in the quiet and dark of the night seemed almost like the wonderful moment when someone is repeatedly beating you over the head and then they stop. How good it feels! The acute silence that occurred when the refrigerator shut off was an extraordinary event, as I lay there in the dark smiling with a great contentment. It sounds silly but I'm almost tempted to cut out all the other titles of this talk and simply talk about the refrigerator. Spiritual realization is often sparked by the most humdrum events.

While we were sitting here in our brief meditation, somebody coughed. You may have noticed how beautiful and resonant that cough sounded. When we're just going about our business and somebody coughs, it's just a noise, a distraction, but against the background of the minute of silent concentration and clarity that we have shared here, that cough was just a marvelous sound that went out into the universe; it had a wonderful clear resonance and a structure. It lasted only a half a second, but you could almost hear the different phases of the cough so that it became something rather beautiful in its own way. Later on, I hope to return to the cough and the silence of the refrigerator because they are of fundamental significance to our purpose here.

Now let's talk about frogs. In the 1950's and 60's a group of neuroscientists and cyberneticians led by Warren McCulloch at MIT were trying to figure out how vision works at the level of single nerve and brain cells, how information arises from the raw stimulus of light and darkness. In particular they were studying the retinas and visual cortex of various animals. They created electrodes that could follow the firing of a single nerve cell. With such electrodes in place they would show various visual stimuli to the animals, to see which cells fire under what conditions.

One of the seminal papers that came out of this research was called "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain." We think of the eye as a camera that takes in, in the modern-day computer analogy, pixels of light, and the information about the pixels gets transferred up into the brain and the brain does processing on it and recognizes faces or letters of the alphabet or all the things we're used to recognizing. Well, it turns out that in the case of the frog the recognition happens not even in the brain, but in the nerve cells in the retina at the back of the eye. These cells are predisposed to fire most strongly when what they see is small, dark dots moving around, i.e. flies. This of course is because frogs eat flies. Finding flies is vitally important to frogs and it turns out that what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain is whether or not flies seem to be present - everything else is secondary. McCulloch and his researchers would put various types of stimuli in front of the frogs, big open areas or colors or different shapes and they'd all produce a mild excitation in the nerve cells in the eye, but the nerve cells would really be jumping around when something that could have been a fly (a moving black dot) is presented.

You could almost say that, before the information even gets to the brain, that the frog's eye has an epistemology. Epistemology is about the question "What is knowledge? What is real? What is illusory knowledge? Verifiable knowledge? What is important?" And all of that. Even at the neuronal level, the frog is predisposed to see flies and predisposed to classify the universe into flies and not-flies. Epistemology is a necessary function of all sentient beings, and is also necessarily limiting. Imagine a pond at sunset, the beautiful lily pads, the blazing sky, the frog. The frog sits there thinking "not-flies."

In the case of ourselves, who are much more grandiose epistemological organisms we don't have that specific processing for flies; but we do have, even at the retinal level, processing for edges and differences. If you look behind me at these blackboards and the panels of yellow wood that separate them, the retinal ganglion cells in the back your eyes are going to fire more when they see the edges than when they see the middle of the blackboard. As the information gets bumped up through more and more levels of brain cells, more and more information is squeezed out of those edges. We're looking for shapes and forms and moving things and so forth, but first of all we're looking for edges because that presumably is where the information is. There isn't necessarily that much information in the middle area of the blackboard here, though if I now make this line across the blackboard, then there's a piece of information there and your eye gravitates there. This line has divided the blackboard into two pieces. It is now understood that information is measurable in bits or binary digits - a single distinction. So this mark on the blackboard creates one bit of information - either a yes or no, on or off, one or zero, this side of the line or that side of the line. Logicians, philosophers, and neurologists, people who are involved in the question of how the mind works, realize that the fundamental unit of mentation is a single discrimination.

In biblical terms, the universe begins with a single binary distinction: "Let there be light" cleaves the unformed void into light and darkness, and everything develops from there. If you look at the first page of Genesis, the page that is entirely in consonance with the theory of evolution, you see how more advanced life forms evolved from less advanced life forms. By advanced I mean more differentiation, more divisions. First there's the division between light and darkness. Then the division between above and below. Then the division between wet and dry; between land and sea; living things and non-living things; plants and animals; and you know how it goes, by powers of two. Just as in the human zygote, we all begin as one fertilized cell and it divides into two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etc., and pretty soon you have (and are) a very complicated, advanced, sentient organism. It all comes out of one distinction, one binary division, one mark on the blackboard. "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain" tells us that we're programmed, hardwired, to look for these distinctions.

Now let's jump our frog from the realm of retinas, brain cells, and epistemology to a famous frog painting by Sengai, the great Japanese Zen artist. In Zen Buddhism, there is a long tradition of drawing pictures of frogs and talking about frogs. Frogs were very interesting to Zen and Taoist masters throughout the centuries. There's a famous poem by Bashô, on which this painting is partly a comment:

An old pond.
A frog jumps in.
Plop!

Now to Bashô and Sengai, that Plop! is like the moment of shocking, blissful clarity that came for me in the middle of the night when the steady background noise of the refrigerator suddenly ceased. Or, yet again, this from Genesis: "Let there be light" - that starkly amazing moment of illumination, literal enlightenment, when something arises from nothing and the universe comes into being. Plop! in a way, is the Zen equivalent of "Let there be light." Plop! and "Let there be light" represent a moment of creativity that is potentially available to us at every moment, right before our eyes, right under our fingertips. But usually we are too busy looking out for flies.

In the case of "What the frog's eye and the frog's brain," there is a predisposition to see the universe in terms of one question, whether or not there's a fly there. That question is hard-wired right into the nerve cells of the frog's eyes, and for good survival reasons, for the frog must eat. Yet there's something else to the universe of the pond, behind and before and above and beyond that question. Many American institutions in the 1990's have their own version of the frog's-eye-frog's-brain question - seeing the universe in terms of a single question, "Is there a profit there? What's the bottom line?" Everyone in this room who studies religion believes that there is more to the universe than flies and profit. We are interested in ways of getting some personal experience of that bigger universe. That's the Plop! of Bashô's frog. We don't need to take exotic journeys to realize that experience. It is available to us here, now, and at every instant of our lives. Now. Raise your right hands and repeat after me: "Plop!" [Audience repeats].

Louder! [Audience plops louder]. Louder! [Louder again].

All right! Wonderful! [Laughter]. When we meditate or engage in the spiritual practices from the many traditions that led us to be together in this room, we're attempting to get behind and before the epistemological distinctions that we normally accept … what was on that blackboard before I drew the line? In Zen they often ask you "What was your original face?" "What was the face you had before you were born?" before all of those millions of cell divisions.

Here's this wonderful text by Seng-Tsan, the Third Patriarch of Zen in China, called the Hsin Hsin Ming, which means "Verses on the Faith Mind." He says the "Great Way" (meaning the Great Tao) "is not difficult - just avoid picking and choosing." Another translation says

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meanings of things are not understood
the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

The Way is perfect like vast space
where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.
Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject
that we do not see the true nature of things.

It's a strange thing that we're looking at here, because he's saying you can find the Great Way by going beyond preferences, by having no preferences. This, of course, is a paradox, because people had a preference to come to this room at 4 o'clock and that's why we're here listening to Seng-Tsan talk about how wonderful it is to have no preferences. We had preferences to put on whatever clothes we put on, we had preferences to come to this building and study religion. Life is full of preferences. Every time you open your mouth your making preferences. Yet he's saying that you can see things more clearly - you can get to what's behind there when you have no preferences. Even hard-wired as our brain cells may seem to be, it is possible to get beneath that programming to a place where it's possible to see things clearly, as though for the first time.

We all have had the contrary experience, of having our understanding of something stopped by knowing the name for it. I come from California, where we used to have a governor called Ronald Reagan who was famous for the statement: "If you've seen one redwood tree you've seen them all." This was his justification for allowing the logging companies to come in and chop down our precious forests of 2,000 year old redwood trees. In a sense, from his limited point of view he was right, because as soon as you put the label "redwood tree" on a natural phenomenon then you begin to see the name and not the thing itself. Then I guess you only need one. It is so easy to look around the world and put names and concepts on things and dismissively say "I know what that is, I've heard that before, that's old hat." In Zen, in many spiritual traditions, we're often pull our lessons from the most everyday and ordinary things, things that can sound silly when you talk about them, like the noise of the refrigerator. "Everyone knows that." Except that, as soon as we think we know it we don't really know it any more because to actually walk into to the redwood forest and see the unique, minutely delineated structure of each of those trees, and see them as individuals and see the amazing ecological system that you are standing in the middle of, how the tiny insects and the huge redwood trees are feeding each other and how all the species of plants and animals are interconnected into a single biological flow which is interconnected and intricate so that if you take one piece out of the system the whole system can collapse. That's an extraordinary thing. So if with your words you place a simple identity on the redwood tree then you're mentally stuck; the redwood tree loses its meaning and loses its context. The karmic consequences are immense, because in your mental stuckness you give permission for the tree and its forest to be killed, and the consequences of that flow back onto the viability of the human species as well.

In the same way, we falsify ourselves by placing a sense of identity on ourselves. I have run into so many people who were told in the fourth grade that they couldn't carry a tune or they tried to play the piano and somebody told them they're making too many mistakes; and they were told about these mistakes in such a way that stuck to them, that made them never want to walk into that room again, never touch another musical instrument again, never sing again. I'll bet that many people in this room have had that experience. That teacher has laid a container around you, laid an identity on you as somebody who is not a musician or who can't hear a tune or something like that. And we carry that with us. The entertainment industries, by pushing highly produced media performances before our eyes, by emphasizing superstars, do the same thing. Why try being creative when there is such a gap between what we can do and what is promoted "out there"? There are so many things that we carry with us that 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.

"There is nothing either good or bad," says Shakespeare, "but thinking makes it so."

The McCulloch frog is looking not at reality, but at a map of reality which predisposes it to see in a certain way. The Bashô 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 "anoetic 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 Bashô'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 Bashô 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 anoetic 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 anoetic 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:

Can you be like an infant
That cries all day
Without getting a sore throat
Or clenches his fist all day
Without getting a sore hand
Or gazes all day
Without eyestrain?
You want the first elements?
The infant has them.
Free from care, unaware of self,
He acts without reflection.

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 googoo, indiscriminately sticking anything and everything into our mouths, and forget everything we have learned through our schooling and our experience as grown-ups?

Lao Tzu replied: "Not at all..
It is only the beginning;
This melts the ice.
This enables you to unlearn,
So that you can be led by the Tao,
Be a child of the Tao.

"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. Buddha means One Who Woke Up. The cessation of the refrigerator noise is the tiny cessation of a tiny little suffering. Yet through these little teachings of everyday life we wake up and know that such cessation is possible. Pop! goes the refrigerator, plop! goes the frog, and we wake up.

That cessation was also a musical sound in itself, the sound of silence, with its own beauty, like the cough that began this hour. When we meditate and tune up our senses, every sound, or the cessation thereof, is so crisp and clear.

Bashô’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 Bashô woke up, and we with him.