Do you hear what I hear?
This is a continuation of this post, where I brought your attention to the fact that when we focus on the moving things that automatically attract our eyes, we lose sight of the richness of the things around us that aren’t moving.
It’s also true that the same could be said for our sense of hearing. Our ears are attracted by whatever is loudest around us, rather than the things which are quiet. But unlike our vision, which only required us to look at something else, listening may require us to do two different things.
We often intentionally fill our ears with sound in an effort to keep ourselves from hearing anything unpleasant, or just to keep our ears from getting bored. It should be obvious that if you want to hear the breath of the world, the first thing you need to do it turn off the television, hang up the phone, switch off the radio, and put down the iPoo. You need to stop intentionally blocking your ears with aural fluff.
The other thing we need to do is what we did with our vision: stop following your body’s natural impulse to pay attention to what’s loudest. Hear the ventilation equipment and the key-clicks in your office, not the voices around you. Hear the birds and the wind in the trees, rather than passing automobile engines. Hear your cat’s footfalls as he comes to greet you at the door.
If you stop and listen to the silence behind all the noise of our daily lives, you may find those sounds much richer and more satisfying than you’d ever considered before.
Of course, this practice can also be extended to the other senses. What would you find if you really paid attention to the subtler scents your nose comes across each day, rather than simply ignoring your nose all day?
On the other hand, we’re pretty well attuned to subtlety of taste and touch. We have our favorite foods and have created a very complex set of meanings for all kinds of human touch. But that’s not to say that there isn’t more depth to experience by focusing on those sensations and taking the time to explore them more fully.
In Buddhist philosophy, thought represents a sixth sense. Thoughts are things that come and go, and we sense their passage. In fact, much of Buddhism and meditation centers around the idea of taking the time to stop and look at the thoughts that arise in our minds, and whether they’re actually beneficial or not. Do you allow your mind to be continually distracted by whatever exerts a momentary attraction, the way you allow you eyes to flicker from thing to thing, without ever staying on one subject long enough to fully experience and appreciate it? Or do you observe your thoughts and consciously direct them in more productive directions?
We spend so much of our lives unconsciously, not seeing deeply, not hearing anything and completely out of touch with one another and the miraculous world around us. Even our thoughts, the thing we most associate with our “self”, usually operate in a purely reactive way. We wander around this world, seeing little, hearing little, tasting little, mostly unconscious except for an overriding sense that we’re not happy.
The Buddha was right about the secret of happiness being found in deeply experiencing the present moment. By activating all our physical senses, as well as thought, we transform the world around us into something wondrous and vivid that we’d never see otherwise.
Now—and everything it encompasses—is truly a holy thing, to be honored and cherished above all else. I invite you to open your eyes to it. Your world will never be the same.
