The Real Secret....

Back when I was playing drums for the great downbeat poll winning, grammy winning, Buddy Montgomery,He said, "Playing time is concentration." [time being swing, groove, the pocket, soul: the life force of the music] He also added, "You got to have the fahr!! (fire). Concentration? The secret? The key? The meaning of life? concentration?! Usually the answer has been, "I don't know man. I just play."

But when a Buddy Montgomery tells you something, you take it as a koan and wrestle with it. What he was talking about was Flow (c.f. below). All of those elements obtain.

And what of "fire?" Obviously, passion ....

What is concentrated is not a grimacing ego-directed focus, but the 'psyche' the aggregates ... The physical body, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.

1. "form" or "matter"[4] (Skt., Pāli rūpa, Tib. gzugs):
external and internal matter. Externally, rupa is the physical world. Internally, rupa includes the material body and the physical sense organs.[5]
2. "sensation" or "feeling" (Skt., Pāli vedanā, Tib. tshor-ba):
sensing an object[6] as either pleasant or unpleasant or neutral.[7][8]
3. "perception", "conception", "apperception", "cognition", or "discrimination" (Skt. samjñā, Pāli saññā, Tib. 'du-shes):
registers whether an object is recognized or not (for instance, the sound of a bell or the shape of a tree).
4. "mental formations", "volition", or "compositional factors" (Skt. samskāra, Pāli saṅkhāra, Tib. 'du-byed) :
all types of mental habits, thoughts, ideas, opinions, compulsions, and decisions triggered by an object.[9]
5. "consciousness" (Skt. vijñāna, Pāli viññāṇa[10], Tib. rnam-par-shes-pa):

(a) In the Nikayas: cognizance.[11][12]
(b) In the Abhidhamma: a series of rapidly changing interconnected discrete acts of cognizance.[13]
(c) In Mahayana sources: the base that supports all experience.[14]

So what Buddy laid out was not only the secret of swing, but a key insight into Buddhism, not to mention David Hume's notion of "the self is a bundle of perceptions."

And what of "the fire?"

From the Greek,

Psyche: 1647, "animating spirit," from L. psyche, from Gk. psykhe "the soul, mind, spirit, breath, life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body" (personified as Psykhe, the lover of Eros), akin to psykhein "to blow, cool," from PIE base *bhes- "to blow" (cf. Skt. bhas-). The word had extensive sense development in Platonic philosophy and Jewish-infl. theological writing of St. Paul. In Eng., psychological sense is from 1910.

Maybe Freud said it best when describing the sublimation of libidinal energy.

So what is to swing? The concentration of the body-mind in the one-pointed sublimation of sexual energy.