Listening as Practice

“Sit quietly and attend to the presence of sounds. You can use speech, music, or any sounds that happen to appear. Do not get trapped in the labels and significations that sounds bear, but concentrate on the quality of the sounds themselves. This amounts to learning to see more deeply into all communicated presences, rather than being stopped by their surface partitioning.” - Tarthang Tulku, Time Space and Knowledge 

Listening is an activity that can be taken in its mundane sense, or it can be broadened to encapsulate a liberative, transformative state of openness. This latter definition of listening is less sensory experience interpreted literally by a mechanistic mind, and more an active gentleness that dissolves the barriers between subject and object.

This mode of listening is experienced as a creation of space where each sensory input has room to be experienced in richer detail. There is an innate creativity, wakefulness, and aliveness that occurs when we are able to access this space.

The fodder for listening is with us every moment. External sensory stimulus of all kinds can be listened to, not just what is processed by our ears. Our ear drums are the most sensitive organ where we receive the vibrations of sound waves, but they collide with our entire body. Further, we can take the same approach and apply it to all of our sense experience: we can listen to a flower with our eyes, to a smell, and to any manner of touch. Every iota of our bodies is sense-able — and by opening to hear them, an unfolding and expansion occurs.

When this approach is applied to trusted sounds of nature or music created with a certain intention, it can give way to transformative states — and indeed the ritual use of music is understood in many cultures to be a gateway to bliss and altered states. While music mostly fills a role of entertainment in modern culture, you can see how this human impulse to experience the transcendent through collective sound ritual is reflected in many modern concert cultures.

By learning to listen, we let go of the discursive impulse to make sense of the world through ontological categorization. Listening is a form of deep acceptance of what is at any given moment.