Above for your edification and enjoyment is a video of an amazing and masterful performance of Bach's famous Toccata and Fugue in D-minor, played by Gert van Hoef of the Netherlands upon the organ in the church of St Stephen in Hasselt (Stephanuskerk Hasselt), built between 1380 and 1466.
The towering piece of music, reverberating through the acoustic space of the gothic church, builds a glorious stairway connecting the finite to the infinite, like the ladder in Jacob's vision described in Genesis 28.
The incredible performance by the young Gert van Hoef (born in 1994) displays a level of virtuosity that is a joy to behold and which exemplifies the connection between the artist's "challenge to achieve a pitch of mastery within a difficult medium" and the "continuous exercise in the development of human consciousness" described by John Anthony West in his writing, cited in this previous post entitled "The Pursuit of Mastery and the Road to Consciousness."
As I argue in that blog post, one of the reasons that there is a connection between the long road to achievement of such level of mastery and the critical quest for recovery of the connection to the Authentic Self is that performing at such a level necessarily involves the transcendence of the endless doubting and analyzing and hesitating which characterizes the egoic mind, writing that
the kind of mastery demonstrated in the keyboard videos above, for example, facilitates (and even at some level requires) the transcendence of the chattering, doubting, endlessly analyzing, endlessly assessing and comparing persona of the "egoic mind." At first, of course, the egoic mind will be very much involved (and even very necessary) in the initial hours of practice and skill-building -- but at some point, after hundreds of hours have been devoted towards the chosen form of expression, the level of skill that begins to develop will enable the state of "flow" or "no mind" or "playing above yourself" which transcends the egoic self and facilitates the emergence of the (often repressed and therefore elusive) authentic self.You can almost see the external reflection of the internal connection to the infinite in the facial expression and entire overall demeanor of the virtuoso artist during the performance, in which at times he appears to enter into a kind of reverie.
The look on Gert van Hoef's face after he plays the final chord of the piece and removes his hands from the keyboard appears to me to express a kind of awe at what has just taken place.
