Who Hears?

Very lively tonight, our last night, with much said. I will endeavor to get as much of the gist of it as I can.

Jeff talked about teaching his music students about three kinds of listening:
1. Pre attention
2. Attention - just hearing
3. Assimilation - judging

Meditation = listening
Not naming things = "trading experience for a label"

One guy said that his hips were hurting in zazen and when I spoke the koan and his focus went to listening, it stopped. He said some interesting things about how it's all part of a stream, that the hearing and listening is happening inside and outside.

One person said there is no I apart from the sound.

One guy talked about the book Getting There Without Drugs. He had an experience of being there when a tree fell in the forest, actually. He asked "What was I tasting the moment the tree fell?" He said something interesting about experiencing satori "and then you are already falling out of it".

Two other people talked about the strangeness of bearing witness to a tree falling. One woman talked about how much she saw long before she heard any sound.

People talked about what animals experience. One said it was the way a cat hears "response without elaboration". We also talked about "pre-thought" the sensitivity of babies, and the longing for a pure state: (cats, crows, dogs).

"The whole you hears"

One person talked about experiencing the noise of New York City as if it was the sound of the surf; lights change cars lurch ahead like waves, light changes again waves retreat and it's quiet again.

One guy talked about how funny it is that we can hear ourselves. Thought happens, I make sound, I hear sound, thought happens......

Jeff was really intrigued by the mention of John Cage. He picked up my pen and tapped it on the floor showing us that there is no such thing as rhythm and pitch there is only rhythm. Sure enough, yes, everything that starts in stuccato pieces when going fast enough becomes one continuous sound, like a singing bowl or wine glass someone said.

Indeed, we talked about sound waves. In this way if a tree falls and there's no one there at the time, there is no instrument to hear it in fact.

Tenkan sent in this quote from Stephen Batchelor's "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist"

"Heidegger had entirely abandoned any dualistic assumption of a separation between mind and matter . . .
This resonated with my own experience of practicing mindfullness. I had noticed that when listening to the song of a bird, it was impossible to differentiate between the cooing of the wood pigeon, on the one hand , and my own hearing of it, on the other. Conceptually, the two were clearly different, but, in immediate experience, I could not have one without the other, I could not draw a line between them, I could not say where the birdsong stopped and my hearing of it began. There was just a single, primary, undifferentiated me-hearing-the-birdsong."

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