Listening

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely - the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears- when you give your whole attention to it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To listen is to do nothing to prevent yourself from seeing completely
Jiddu Krishnamurti

To listen means one''s mental chatter must be silent.
Don''t try to stop chattering, that is impossible. Instead take action. Listening is an action.

Once you begin to listen actively, thought chatter dies down, and listening and seeing become one.

The sound of the universe and the visual language of sight fill consciousness overflowing. How loud the silence is.

The Mechanics of Hearing

How can we fully and objectively understand the phenomenon of hearing if we do not understand the actual, physical mechanics of this sense? I have recently been reading a most excellent book titled On the Sensations of Tone 4th edition written by Hermann Helmholtz, a German, in 1877. I will be quoting extensively from the 2nd Edition of a good English translation published in 1954. This book is of such high quality I cannot but help to recommend it to all. It contains so much practical information related to sound and music that any person, of any discipline, can reap significant benefits if only they had a mind which "cross-pollinates."

Sound is the oscillation or vibration of some physical medium. Lets use a violin string as an example. When the string is plucked it begins to vibrate with a specific frequency. The vibration of the string causes the surrounding air to vibrate with the same frequency. Helmholtz writes, "although in daily experience sound at first seems to be some agent, which is constantly advancing through the air, and propagating itself further and further. We must, however, here distinguish between the motion of the individual particles of air--which takes place periodically backwards and forwards within very narrow limits--and the propagation of the sonorous tremor. The latter is constantly advancing by the constant attraction of fresh particles into its sphere of tremor."

I can use an illustration to make this clear. Imagine you throw a rock into a pond. When the rock hits the surface of the water rings of waves propagate from that spot outwards to the edges of the pond. One might think that the water from the point of impact has traveled to the edge of the pond. This is not so. If you were to put a cork in the water you would observe that the cork simply bobs up and down as the waves pass. Similarly, the individual particles of water do not move laterally, only up and down. The wave itself is always composed of fresh particles of water as it propagates across the pond.

Sound is a longitudinal wave which means the particles of the medium travel in the direction and the opposite direction of the wave. As the waves travel, the particles in the medium vibrate to produce density and pressure changes along the direction of the motion of the wave. These changes result in a series of high and low pressure regions. The sound which the human ear hears is limited to a narrow range of frequency, from 20 Hz to 20000 Hz. 1 Hz is one oscillation per second. Permeating the entire world are interweaving vibrations, some resonating and others dissonant, blending into what can be referred to as the sound of the world. Infrasonic waves are waves having frequencies below our human audible range. One example of this are earthquakes. Believe it or not earthquakes can be regarded as sound. This is deep bass. Ultrasonic waves are waves having frequencies above the audible range. Ultrasonic waves are used to "see" the growth of a baby in the womb. Other examples include dog whistles and ultrasonic waves can be induced in a quartz crystal with an applied alternating electric field. Much research into this phenomenon might yield interesting results. We have only begun to tap the power of sound. Some theorize that ancient peoples used ultrasonic crystal sound to lift incredibly heavy objects or for healing.

The vibrations of air which propagate to your ear cause an elastic membrane called the ear drum to vibrate at the same frequency.

These vibrations pass through a set of three small bones and then through a spiral formation called the cochlea. Here the vibrations are converted into electric signals patterns which the brain learns to recognize and identify. Our greatest human pattern--pattern recognition---synergistic synthesense.

Listening is being attentive to all sound or lack thereof. Silence cannot be heard but listening to silence's deafening roar is pure clarity. Attention to sound is attention to the movement of waves in air. Attention to silence is attention to stillness. Attention to hearing is attention to the patterns of movement of all objects. This is exactly the same as sight, the difference being the medium through which the effects of movement propagate. In a way our ears are "tuned" to a different octave of energy. Our ears are unique because although our skin or even eyes can feel the vibrations of air they do not translate that feeling into hearing. Like touch, hearing requires sensitivity to the movement of molecules in the world outside the organism. Both hearing and touch are types of mechanosensation and therefore related.