Distraction to exhaustion
Engulfed by life’s daily unfolding, much like riding the flashy carousel at an unsettlingly loud amusement park, we have sensations of vertigo and might not even realize it. Deep listening as an anchor for our souls is unheard of.
Each of us has sat so long on those rides of self-deceit, that we have accepted senseless spinning to whatever white-noise music for an affordable fee – as the “dance of life”.
We work all our lives to earn the right to experience this psychedelic twirl until we just cannot hold on any longer. Once out of the seat, out of the system. Out of a life-long lifeline of illusion.
The illusion of living and the reality of distraction from life.
The result: a handicapped exhaustion.
Not something to die for, much rather to die from.
The missing note
Life as usual, this illusory and shallow breathing in-breathing out, with our senses overentertained to the point where they are robbed from their essence, is missing a humble, yet essential note.
That of silence…
It is the trace element of life which the majority of present-day humankind is chronically deficient in.
We are looking at a multidimensional phenomenon of depletion.
That’s right. Besides the most obvious lack of silence in the soundscape, we are literally looking at a void of silence and calm in the visual field surrounding us.
Then, there is a scarcity of peaceful harmony on our palate, perhaps our most intimate way of taking in and digesting all that Earth has to tell us.
Amidst a constant rallying through a perfume emporium of synthetic temptations, our noses are desensitized from our own body odors that gave birth to smelling itself.
We can hardly scent-identify ourselves anymore, yet have life-lasting memories of branded whiff trails.
Perhaps the only quiet we get to experience, all too often, is the detrimentally dull environment the skin, our largest organ is subjected to nowadays.
The toneless bland smoothness we wrap our physical beings in from pregnancy to eld fragility, is the equivalent of near-deaf quietude, which is not the quality of silence we are advocating for here.
An inspirational quiet
By no surprise, the sixth sense, intuition, falls on the wayside and stays marginalized in this reign of a steelheaded confusion.
Somewhere along this prolonged “moment”, the drawn-out breath-hold of dumbfounded thrill, comes an awakening ring in our superficial consciousness. An out-of-tune ring that demands attention.
Suddenly, we manage to focus on the bizarre situation we have gotten ourselves into, entirely antagonistic with life’s essence.
One by one, our senses start awakening to their starvation. To being overfed, yet starving. They crave something so badly in this tumult. What are they not getting?
The remedy for the poison may lie in deep listening…
It has to be found elsewhere, some place we have almost forgotten it existed – when, in fact, not even the most lunatic of us all could exist without for longer than mere fleeting seconds.
It is the all-encompassing Nature, that allowed this madness in its lap, we are looking for. Nature, holding a funhouse mirror before us to note our delinquent idiocy.
Finally, each at our own instant of enlightenment, decide to turn our senses toward nature.
Nature for soul-saving inspiration.
Respite from ourselves
In a visceral response to this out of tune with the rest of the background noise ring, we quickly come to realize that what we really need to escape, is – in a way – ourselves.
To be more precise, what we need to be able to retreat from at our own free will, is our human societal and cultural selves, in order to refind and reunite with our individual human selves, in deep listening.
You would have noticed by now, the most obnoxious noise maker in the world, what’s more: the only obnoxious noise maker is the human race.
As a species, we have long formed a fetish of constantly having to hear the sound of our own voices. Our own noises – any noise to reiterate our presence, our supremacy.
Of course, a big part of this fetish has to do with fear. Fear of the other-than-human world, fear of being alone in nature, fear of being alone with our own thoughts and feelings.
Overcome fear, discover quiet
Fear is in our heads – we have all heard that several times. But we must penetrate through fear’s illusion. We ought to realize that this self-generated and -perpetuated phony fear is precisely what has held us back from living full lives.
Because the right to quiet and the enjoyment of deep listening is an integral regenerative part of a meaningful existence.
Stepping outside the “magic circle”, pulling away from the familiar cacophony, will likely come with its own mild discomforts. That proverbial ringing of ears in a deep quiet that suddenly collapses on us. However, these discomforts are surprisingly easy to overcome – mentally.
For our bodies have nothing to overcome.
The body thrives in quiet, instantly! The heart, the entire cardiovascular system, all our cells rejuvenate in quiet.
In what sort of quiet?
Nature’s quiet. Which is never absolute.
Even if it’s only a light breeze moving in the air and your ear, or water dripping to a sparse rhythm in a cave, you can trust the relative overcoming the absolute.
This relativity is what makes quiet so refreshing, as long as silence is punctuated with nature sounds.
Anything of human and domestic origin tends to make the person immersed in quiet ever more alert.
Coming to understand quiet
High alert, alert in general, is what we are trying to heal, to gain independence and respite from.
Seekers of quietude, become ever more conscious of the quality of silence they enjoy. Soon they learn to deliberately position themselves to an adequate, non-bothersome distance from sources of human interference and domestic pollution of the soundscape.
This can be done in both spacial and temporal sense. Obviously, most effective being when the two are combined. Say, at or well before dawn, at or outside the fringes of human settlements.
Human-created or -induced sounds way too often litter the harmony wedging themselves in, rather self-righteously. They tend to shatter the beauty that preexisted there. For the ear-witness, the consciousness of an unprepared listener is like forcefully being immersed in someone’s wicked glitter bath, unable to rinse off, to dissociate, for quite some time.
Ground yourself in nature
By choosing the right place and moment to plunge into the dynamic, soothing sea of silence, we open our way to heavenly realms of universal discovery and self-discovery within that.
Focusing on the sounds of nature, however predictable or random those may be, we are connecting ourselves to the infinite. We are incorporating infinite space into our hearts and condensing timelessness into the moment of silent observation.
All we need to do is to allow ourselves to dissolve into this eternal wisdom. The sounds of nature, soft or harsh, are the best conduit for such uplifting experiences.
By comparison, artificial and human-introduced sounds tend to grip the awareness and strike at this harmonious continuum we seek to merge. They keep attention in uncomfortable suspense, expecting more and more dissonance to emerge, rather than less.
When you desire an experience of deep listening to quiet, avoid any human sound-interference, including your own.
Hold your breath and let go of everything.
Now, that you understand why.
Nurture quiet, listen carefully
Once you have gotten the hang of and formed the habit of tapping into the regenerative powers of silence, cherish those moments. Make these experiences the beacon of your life.
Go after them, let them come to you as often as possible, even daily.
Cultivate this intimate relationship with the Universe in your heart.
And also help cultivate it in the hearts of those that are the dearest to you.
Your loved one, your child, your friend.
Share the treasure and art of deep listening to that mystical nothing and everything in one, which quiet is.
The more we live our lives offline, and the more of us conscious people do it, the more harmony we’ll be able to bring into the world.
The Earth aches for this understanding!
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