Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential

WAKING UP

by Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.

Published by Fearless Books

© 2017 BY CHARLES T. TART, PHD.

SMASHWORDS EDITION

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE: POSSIBILITIES

1. States of Consciousness and Enlightenment

PART TWO: PROBLEMS

2. God and Reality

3. Automatization

4. Evolving Intelligence

5. Operational Thinking

6. Living in the World Simulator

7. Emotions

8. Conditioning

9. Hypnosis

10. Consensus Trance: The Sleep of Everyday Life

11. Identification

12. Identity States

13. Defense Mechanisms

14. Balance and Imbalance in Three-Brained Beings

15. False Personality and Essence

PART THREE: PRACTICES

16. Toward Awakening

17. Self-Observation

18. Self-Remembering

19. Higher Levels of Consciousness

20. Spiritual Reality, Work, and Prayer

21. Group Work and Teachers

22. Problems with the Work Process

23. Compassion

24. Selecting a Spiritual Path

Reality and God

Appendix A: Recommended Readings

Appendix B: Finding a Gurdjieff-Oriented Group

Notes

References

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated to all who seek more understanding of themselves and others, and who wish to awaken from the narrow and twisted dream called ordinary consciousness. I am especially indebted to G. I. Gurdjieff and his students, whose writings and practices were the central stimulation for this book. The idea for this book originated with Henry Rolfs of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Henry has had a long-standing interest in Gurdjieff and was looking for someone to undertake a modern interpretation of Gurdjieff's work when he sought me out. I have had a similar interest for many years. Henry and the Institute of Noetic Sciences proceeded to provide generous financial support that gave me the time to write this book, for which I am very grateful.

My students Christie Atkinson-Meyers, Etzel Cardena, David Gabriel, and John Price were especially helpful in suggesting clarifications and expansions of an earlier draft of this work, and my wife, Judy, provided the indispensable support and encouragement (as well as much editorial assistance) needed to create this book. Special thanks are also due to David Daniels, Henry Korman, Claudio Naranjo, Kathy Speeth, and others who taught me much about the Gurdjieff work.

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to help you find what you think you already have, namely free will, intelligence, and self-consciousness.

I expect you to find this idea preposterous.

I shall provide information to demonstrate that your will is largely a mechanical reaction based on your conditioning, that your intelligence is severely limited compared to what it could be, and that there is no true self controlling your life from a state of genuine self-consciousness. Then we can consider what to do about this situation. You can be far more than you are now!

To demonstrate the problem succinctly at the start, do the following exercise. Look at the sweep second hand or the digital readout of seconds on your watch. Note the time. Now use what will you have and resolve that for the next five minutes you will pay full attention to the movement of the second hand or every change of the digital display while simultaneously being aware of your breathing, and that you will not think about anything else.

If you cannot use your will and awareness to do this simple, emotionally neutral exercise, what can you do in the real stress of real life? If you maintain continual awareness of the seconds display and your breathing without thinking of anything else for the next five minutes, you have an extraordinary ability to concentrate. Concentration isn't enough, though, as this book will show.

Try the exercise now, before reading on.

With the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over the world, we all agree that establishing foundations for permanent peace is our most important task. The psychological and spiritual aspects of that task are more important than the more obvious political and economic aspects, for without firm psychological and spiritual foundations, our so-called practical tasks, the political and economic actions, will not be effective.

Recently I heard a great spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, talk about promoting world peace. I was very moved by his lecture, for he spoke from his heart as well as his mind. He stressed the many ways that external conflicts between people and nations stem from internal conflicts within ourselves, rather than arising only from external sources. We have to work on the external reasons for conflict, but if we want lasting external peace, we must work for it from a solid, inner foundation of personal peace.

There were several other speakers at this meeting. Immediately following His Holiness's talk, a woman commented from a feminist perspective on peace. She spoke of the way women have been mistreated in our own and other cultures, the ways in which war is a masculine activity that hurts women, and the need for women to use their power to stop war. Her analysis of the way sexism supports war opened new understandings to me. Intellectually, I agreed with all the points she made. They were clear, incisive, and very practical.

Emotionally, though, it was a different story. Illogically I found myself growing increasingly angry at her and everything she represented. My wife felt the same way, as did every other person in the audience with whom we later spoke. I was disturbed at feeling angry, as I knew it was both irrational and contrary to my own positive feelings toward feminist perspectives.

Through self-examination I realized that while the conceptual content of what she said was fine, indeed noble, the emotional tone of her talk was angry and aggressive, and aroused an automatic emotional opposition. Conditioned emotional reactions were aroused in spite of intellectual acceptance. She illustrated, unfortunately, His Holiness's main point. If you don't have peace within yourself, your attempts to create peace in the outer world can backfire, and may create even more hostility than if you hadn't done anything. This book is about the unconscious aspects of our selves that destroy our chances for real peace.

The fact that I and others automatically grew angry illustrates another aspect of the horror of the human situation, of course. We are far too automatic; indeed, we are automatons, another point this book will focus on.

Our discussion of the human condition will center on a central but seldom accepted or understood idea: we are asleep, compared with what we could be. We are dreaming. We are entranced. We are automatized. We are caught in illusions while thinking we are perceiving reality. The woman who spoke after the Dalai Lama's talk was asleep, dreaming, entranced, unaware that parts of herself contradicted and sabotaged other parts. Her condition is our condition. We need to awaken to reality, the reality of the problems caused by our fragmented selves, so we can discover our deeper selves and the reality of our world, undistorted by our entranced condition.

This book is about waking up, a necessary step to create the foundation for inner peace as well as greater effectiveness in the world. It is about the psychological and cultural processes that create inner conflict, delusion, needless suffering, and hostility in us, that unnecessarily divide us from others, that deepen our sleep. Few of us may be in a position to have a decisive influence on world peace, but the cultivation of our own inner resources can create peacefulness and effectiveness in action in ourselves and the people we come into contact with, and this can spread. As we attack those near us less and care for them more, we start to have an effect on the kinds of political processes that need enemies for hidden psychological reasons. It is my hope that furthering the creation of inner peace in people will contribute to outer peace in the world.

THE INNER LIGHT

William Wordsworth in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality aptly described an all too common human condition. The personal recognition of this condition can be very depressing, or can start a journey of discovery:

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth and every common sight

Did seem to me

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

There was a time, a state, in our childhood, when there was a vitality, a freshness, a zest, a longing for and loving of beauty that could make the earth a heaven. Light is a good metaphor for it, a metaphor that is literally true in some ways. Unfortunately, the light we once experienced gets covered over and seems lost. Reverting to an adult perspective, Wordsworth laments:

It is not now as it hath been of yore.

Turn whereso'er I may,

By night or day,

The light which I have seen I now can see no more.

No one likes this sense that something precious has been lost. Indeed, your personal loss of the light is also a loss to everyone else. You want to do something about it. The recognition of loss can be depressing, and/or can start you on a journey of growth. As adults we sometimes have brief glimpses of the light, which motivates us to seek it.

Many of the searches tried eventually lead to disappointment. You can drown out the voice of discontent by living harder, for example, striving for the ordinary kind of more: more money, more power, more sex, more fame, more excitement, more glamour. You can dull the recognition of emptiness with alcohol or other drugs. You can turn bitter and attack the world that has taken something precious from you, even if you don't know exactly what you have lost. Too often we resent and' attack those who seem to have the light, for they remind us of our emptiness. You can try to console yourself with some religion that tells you all will be well in some future state, but the now remains empty.

Or you can look within to seek the light.

There are many paths available for seeking the light within. To start, you have to recognize that there is something precious within to be found, in spite of our culture's pressure to keep us externally oriented, looking for happiness by being consumers of external goods. You have to continually struggle against the social current, of course: people who go within are dangerous and unpredictable, so society distrusts, discourages, and often punishes them.

The paths have led some people to happiness, some to disappointment, some to mild delusions, some to insanity. Some paths are powerful, some may have been effective in the past but no longer work, and some are dangerous. Some are merely fantasies about paths; some are dangerous neuroses disguised as paths. All genuine paths require cour-age: courage to buck the social tide, courage to see yourself as you really are, courage to take risks. Progress on any genuine path is a gift to us all, as well as a gain for yourself.

This book is my sharing of some understandings that have helped me see why we are cut off from the light, and a sharing of some tools that have helped me and others see enough glimpses of the light to travel toward it. My understandings are a combination of my professional psychological knowledge and researches with the results of my personal search through several traditional spiritual paths.

My previous books have been scientific studies. Although many of the ideas I will present have scientific backing from modern psychology, the search for the light cannot limit itself to what has been scientifically researched to date: science is too young, too specialized, too narrow as yet, and it may never be able to deal with some of the most important aspects of human life. Deeper meaning in life must be found now, without putting off the search in the vague hope that science will make it all easy some day. Thus I write this book primarily as a fellow seeker of the light, secondarily as a psychologist.

I have also deliberately avoided the scholarly style of using numerous references to back up every point: I want you to test the things I say in your own experience, not to be impressed by distant authorities. Indeed, the material in this book must be grasped in an experiential way, as knowledge about your own being. A more scholarly style might produce intellectual conviction about what happens in other people, but if that were all that reading this book produced, I would be disappointed.

My engineering background will also show in this book, for it is a nuts and bolts approach. I am all for beautiful and transcendent goals, but I want to know as specifically as possible how things work. You will find much detail on our problems that allows specific actions to be planned for correcting them.

The way I present here is not The Path: God forbid that I ever think I have found an exclusive franchise on truth! I doubt that there is any one path for all people. Different types of people profit from different types of path, even though the ultimate goal is the same.

I don't know how practical the particular path I have followed is for everyone. I know how useful it has been to me, though, and since there must be many other people who are like me in important ways, what I understand of this path may be helpful to them. It may be particularly useful for those who can't or don't want to retreat from ordinary life, as it is based on a path that stresses being in the world but not of it.

G. I. GURDJIEFF

Of the several paths I have explored, the one called the Fourth Way, presented in the West by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, has been the most helpful to me. My interpretation of and additions to it are the organizing core of this book.

Gurdjieff was a seeker after the light. Born in Alexandropol in the Caucasus, somewhere between 1872 and 1877, he traveled through the East at the turn of the century, when such travel was a heroic undertaking. He studied with Christians, Muslims, Indians, Tibetans, and secret groups, looking for the core of spiritual truth he was convinced was hidden under the degenerated external forms of conventional religion.

He found an enormous amount of theoretical and practical knowledge that was largely unknown in the Western world. He wanted to share what he had found, and he was intelligent enough to understand that he couldn't transport his understandings in a wholesale fashion. What made sense for Easterners of a certain culture might not be effective in contemporary Western society, so he worked on developing a system adapted to Westerners living in the first half of our century. Gurdjieff died in 1946, but his work is still carried out by many people.

Gurdjieff intimated that the core of his work was based on the deliberate efforts of a secret school of wise men, a school some have claimed to be the mythical Sarmouni Brotherhood. I find this idea appealing, as I want to believe that there are advanced and wise people who are trying to help the rest of us evolve. We certainly need them! I do not know if there are such secret schools of the wise, and for our purposes in this book, it doesn't matter. As a psychologist with both practical and theoretical knowledge of the human mind, and as a person who has learned a little in my attempts to seek the light, I know that Gurdjieff's formulations of the human condition and many of his techniques for working on oneself are accurate, ingenious, and effective. That is what makes them worth sharing.

After Gurdjieff's death, various groups grew up to foster his ideas and work. As is unfortunately typical, most of these groups tend to think that they have the real teaching and that the other groups are, at best, well-intentioned imitators who waste people's time or, at worst, charlatans who harm people under the guise of liberating them. Gurdjieff's work does lend itself to abuse, as we shall discuss in Chapter 22. I try to avoid getting entangled with disputes about this kind of doctrinal purity, though, and I make no claim to purity in presenting Gurdjieff's ideas myself.

This book is centered on my understanding of Gurdjieff's psychological ideas. I have added to them when I think my ideas or modern psychological findings are useful. I have not dealt with some of Gurdjieff's ideas, especially his cosmological ones, either because I don't trust my comprehension of them or because I am not sure of their validity. Gurdjieff was a genius, but geniuses can be wrong about many things, just like the rest of us. If you find the ideas and techniques in this book useful in your personal quest for the light, good. Then you may wish to go on to other writings by or about Gurdjieff: Appendix A provides some direction. In the end, though, we can never be given knowledge by others; we can only be stimulated. We must develop our own knowledge.

Take the ideas and practices in this book as stimulation. If they resonate with something in you, try them out. Do they fit in your personal experience? Do they expand your understandings? Do they need modification? Are they appealing to the better or worse sides of your personality? Should some be rejected? As Gurdjieff emphasized, you should believe nothing about his teachings or, for that matter, my version of them. If the ideas and practices appeal to you, be open to them until you feel you have a basic understanding, and then test them. If they work for you, build on them and go on.

A man whose life was rather dull and unhealthy began to become aware of his condition and decided that he wanted to grow beautiful flowers and nutritious vegetables in his yard. He wasn't sure how to go about it, so he went to a local store and looked around. There were packs of seed with marvelous illustrations of beautiful flowers and nutritious vegetables on them, and boxes and jars of fertilizers. Naturally these seemed just what he wanted.

As he was preparing to buy them, a friend who was somewhat wiser happened by and asked him what he was planning. After listening, the friend, who had seen the man's yard, was compelled to give him some advice: Your ultimate aim is very good, but I've seen your yard. It is already fertile and is overgrown with flourishing weeds. You won't need seeds and fertilizer for a long time; you need information on recognizing weeds and tools for thoroughly digging them out. If you use seeds and fertilizer now, the weeds will flourish even more and the flowers and vegetables will be choked out.

I would prefer to write about just the flowers and nutritious vegetables, but, as an old weed grower, I have learned about the importance of weeding. This book is about looking for the light, but much emphasis is put on recognizing and dealing with the weeds of sleep, trance, defenses, and the like that use up our energy and choke out our deeper side. I am sorry that so much of this book will focus on the causes and exact nature of human foolishness and suffering, but the aim is to prepare for cultivation of the light. I believe the material in this book can be useful to anyone seeking truth, whether scientist or mystic. All of us have a lot of weeding to do.

This book is divided into three main sections. The first briefly deals with the nature of enlightenment and the possibilities of drawing on resources from many states of consciousness for our full evolution. The second is a detailed discussion of weeds, the automatisms and defenses that limit us. The third is about weeding techniques and some of the results that may occur.

There is an inner light, an inner peace, that can be found. There is an awakening of your mind possible that will indeed make ordinary consciousness seem like a state of sleep. It will make you more, not less, effective in the ordinary world, and allow you to give more genuine at-tention, care, and compassion to others. I have tasted it, not just thought about it. I know it leads to an inner peace that facilitates an outer peace. I am happy to share what I can of this knowledge with you.

A note about footnotes: Footnotes are numbered in this text in this format: (00) and are listed in numerical order at the end of the book. At the end of each chapter there is a link to those chapter's footnotes, and then a link to the succeeding chapter.

Part One

POSSIBILITIES

1. States of Consciousness and Enlightenment

This book is about enlightenment and states of consciousness, about methods for pursuing an important aspect of enlightenment, and, particularly, about the obstacles that keep us in an unenlightened, ignorant state.

The terms states of consciousness and enlightenment are relatively new to our culture. Although personal experimentation with altered states of consciousness and a desire for enlightenment are now important in some people's lives, the ideas associated with these terms are seldom clear. Indeed, there is an unnecessary mystification clinging to them that interferes with our growth and understanding, so this chapter will be devoted to clarifying what we mean by states, by altered states, and by enlightenment. This will set up a general perspective on our possibilities. It will also give an overview of the obstacles to full realization of our potentials that will be helpful to us as we become involved in the detailed understanding of obstacles to enlightenment that the next part of this book deals with.

In this chapter I will deal with three main ideas: What do we mean by enlightenment? What are altered states of consciousness? In what ways can altered states be used for growth toward enlightenment, or be part of enlightenment?

STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Let us start by sharpening our use of the term state of consciousness. There is a common but unhelpful use of the phrase to mean whatever one is experiencing at the moment. Thus, when you eat a cookie, you are in a taste of cookie state of consciousness. If you then think about some financial problem, you are in a financial state of consciousness, and so on. This is too broad for the term to be useful. For precise scientific use, I proposed in my book States of Consciousness that we reserve the term state for major alterations in the way the mind functions. (1)

For example, if I ask you, Are you experiencing a nighttime dream right now, just dreaming that you are reading this book, but soon you'll wake up at home in bed?, I would not expect you to say yes. Actually, I've occasionally had someone raise his hand (2) when I've asked this in large lectures, but such people want to play word games. If I ask such a person whether he is willing to bet me fifty dollars that he will wake up in bed from this dream in five minutes, he admits that he certainly knows he is not dreaming.

What I'm illustrating is that we make commonsense distinctions about states. There is usually a pattern to our mental functioning that we can examine and then classify. If you examine the pattern of your mental functioning at this moment, it doesn't feel like the pattern you usually call dreaming. It feels like the pattern you call waking or ordinary consciousness. The difference is quite clear, and for the vast majority of us, dreaming is discretely different from waking.

To be more precise, in my systems approach to understanding altered states, I defined a discrete state of consciousness for a given individual (individual differences are very important) as a unique configuration or system of psychological structures or subsystems. The parts or aspects of the mind that we can distinguish for analytical purposes (such as memory, evaluation processes, and the sense of identity function) are arranged in a certain kind of pattern or system. The pattern or system is the state of consciousness. The nature of the pattern and the elements that make up the pattern determine what you can and cannot do in that state. In dreaming, flying by an act of will is possible. I wouldn't want to say it is totally impossible in consensus consciousness, but it certainly isn't easy!

A state of consciousness is a dynamic process; aspects of it are constantly changing in their particulars even while the overall pattern remains recognizably the same. The particular content of my last few thoughts, for example, has been different from thought to thought, but all my thoughts are obviously occurring as parts of a pattern I call my or-dinary consciousness. I sometimes think of a state as being like a juggler throwing several balls around and around in a circle: the balls are always moving, but the pattern they form stays circular.

The pattern of a state of consciousness deliberately maintains its integrity in a changing world. The structures operative within a discrete state of consciousness make up a system where the operation of the parts, the psychological structures, . . . stabilize each other's functioning by means of feedback control, so that the system [the discrete state of consciousness] maintains its overall pattern of functioning in spite of changes in the environment (3) . If I were physically present with you now and suddenly clapped my hands, you would be startled. There would be a change in the environment and your momentary internal mental functioning, but you probably wouldn't suddenly go into some sort of trance, attain enlightenment, pass out, or anything like that. Your state of consciousness maintains its integrity in a changing world.

A state is an altered state if it is discretely different from some baseline state we want to compare things to. Since we usually take ordinary waking consciousness as our standard of comparison, a state such as nocturnal dreaming is thus an altered state. Other well-known examples of altered states are the hypnotic state, states induced by psychoactive drugs such as alcohol, states centered on strong emotions such as rage, panic, depression, and elation, (4) and states induced by meditative practices.'

My personal interest in altered states began when I was a child. For as far back as I can remember, my dream life was real and vivid. My parents, being quite normal for our culture, taught me that dreams were not real and that I needn't pay attention to them, but my direct experience contradicted this typically Western point of view. How could people dismiss such real aspects of life? Why did I forget my dreams so readily? How could I improve the quality of my dream life? One question especially intrigued me: I could fly in dreams by a certain act of will: why couldn't I make that same act of will work in waking life so that I could fly here?

THE POWER OF ALTERED STATES: HYPNOSIS

My childhood interest in dreams was one factor in my choosing to become a psychologist, and many of my early research projects involved dreaming. The altered state that most impressed me early in my research career, though, was hypnosis, and it can serve briefly to illustrate the enormous power that altered states have to change what we perceive as reality. (We will look at hypnosis in detail in Chapter 9, as it tells us much about the problems of ordinary consciousness.)

In inducing hypnosis I would sit down with a volunteer who wanted to be hypnotized. We were presumably both normal people. With our eyes we presumably saw the same room around us that others saw; with our ears we presumably heard the ordinary and real sounds in the room. We smelled what smells were there and felt the solidity of the real objects in the room.

Then I began to talk to the subject. Researchers give the style of talking the special name of hypnotic induction procedure, but basically it was just talking. The subject was given no powerful drugs, was not in a special environment, had nothing external done to his brain—and yet in twenty minutes I could drastically change the universe he lived in.

With a few words, the subject could not lift his arm. With a few more he heard voices talking when no one was there. A few more words and he could open his eyes and see something that no one else could see, or, with the right suggestion, a real object in plain sight in the room would be invisible to him.

Another suggestion and the subject would have a dream, sometimes as vivid as or more vivid than his nighttime dreams. Another suggestion and the subject would forget the present and be five years old, feeling and acting as he did at that age. Another suggestion and he would not remember what happened while he was hypnotized after he woke up.

A sense as basic as pain could be abolished. In spite of the number of times I have seen it, a test procedure we called anosmia to ammonia still amazes me. I would tell a subject that he could no longer smell anything. Then I would hold a bottle of household ammonia an inch under his nose and ask him to take a good sniff. The smell of ammonia is not only a strong smell, it is an extremely painful sensation, as if your nostrils were set on fire. A talented hypnotic subject would take a deep sniff, while I winced. No reaction. No tears would form in his eyes, and he wouldn't jerk his head away or show any other reaction. Did you smell anything? No.

For those readers inclined to refresh their memory of the smell of ammonia, I would advise starting with a very small sniff!

Our commonsense view is that we live in the real world and perceive it essentially as it is. The book in your hands is real, it feels solid because it is solid, you see the words because they are really there. Yet this commonsense reality can disappear as a result of a few minutes of talking. The book in your hands could disappear altogether, it could feel soft instead of hard, and the English words could turn into gibberish. Can we, then, really take the commonsense wisdom of ordinary consciousness for granted?

WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?

A part of my mind is highly amused that I plan to write about the nature of enlightenment. What presumption! Isn't enlightenment something possessed and understood only by superhuman beings? What in the world can a Western psychologist have to say about it?

As I will elaborate later, many of the most important aspects of enlightenment are nonverbal in nature. Words cannot capture the essence of this knowledge. Further, enlightenment involves certain kinds of knowledge, state-specific knowledge, that cannot be adequately comprehended in our ordinary state of consciousness, a point that I will also elaborate upon later. Here we are, right now, using words in our ordinary state of consciousness. It certainly is silly, in one sense, to use words about enlightenment. Nevertheless, words in our ordinary state can be useful in thinking about enlightenment, especially if we are careful not to confuse the words with the realities. With this caution in mind, let us go on and consider some aspects of what enlightenment is, and later see how altered states fit in with it.

To begin with, I find it helpful to think about enlightenment as a continuum of development rather than an all-or-none state. Just seeing it as a totally-incomprehensible-to-us end point, with no intermediate steps, does make it difficult to talk about, and difficult to do anything about. Compared to the rest of us, a pilot is enlightened about flying airplanes, but he didn't get that way in a single magical act; he studied for a long time, moving along a continuum from being completely unenlightened about flying to knowing more and more about it. When we think about enlightenment on a continuum, we can see it as a process, not just a final state.

Within this overall continuum of enlightenment there are jumps, though, created by the functioning of altered states, and this is where state-specific knowledge becomes important.

The phenomenon of state-specific knowledge is important in understanding why complete enlightenment must involve access to altered states of consciousness. In a particular state of consciousness you may have access to and/or deeper understanding of certain kinds of knowledge that you cannot adequately comprehend in other states of consciousness. Thus, if you cannot enter a certain state, you can never fully understand certain things. Insofar as these items of state-specific knowledge are important, your life without them is impoverished: you have to settle for partial and often distorted understanding of them based on others' descriptions.

Consider a person with no musical training or talent hearing a symphony for the first time. It may have a strong emotional impact on him, and afterward he may tell his friends that the symphony was beautiful or deeply moving or full of sound. That sort of description is like someone else telling you that in an altered state I directly experienced the Infinite Love at the core of the universe! It's impressive-sounding but not very specific or useful if your goal is to reproduce the sounds of the symphony.

Now consider a trained musician hearing the same symphony. In addition to being moved by it, the musician can describe it (at least to other musicians) in quite precise terms of notes, keys, and movements, and even write it out in a musical notation so precise that other musicians can recreate the symphony almost exactly as it was originally played. The musician has far greater understanding (of a specialized kind) of the symphony than the untrained listener. The musician's knowledge is analogous to state-specific