Once upon a time there was a man who believed consciousness was like playing the piano: he was at once the player and the listener, the hand striking the keys and the ear that received their sound. He thought this must be by design. After all, he had two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs. The doctors spoke of the brain’s right and left hemispheres. Why shouldn’t the mind itself be divided? To him, it seemed obvious that consciousness was composed of at least two parts perhaps many more but never just one. This left him uneasy, for it meant his own perspective was never quite trustworthy. How could he know whether he was the active or the passive, the one shaping or the one being shaped? He was convinced he contained two selves, yet the world insisted on treating him as though he were only one. And here lay the great problem: the two selves did not always agree. One urged him to act, to strike the chord, to press forward. The other urged him to wait, to listen, to hold silence. Sometimes he followed the first and was reckless; sometimes he obeyed the second and was paralyzed. The quarrel within him became so constant that he feared he would never know harmony. If he was both musician and audience, who was writing the score and what if no score existed at all? In time, he found an answer of sorts, though it was no answer at all. He realized that the hands did not ask which one was leading; they only played together. He noticed that the ear never questioned whether it was master or servant; it simply received. So he stopped searching for the author of the music. He sat at the piano and listened until the keys pressed themselves.