This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Hearing and Listening; The Six Sense Spheres, Our Worlds (2of5) The Ear & Sounds. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by an unknown speaker at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Today is the second day of my week subbing for Gil, who’s teaching a retreat at IRC, and I’m very happy to be here with everyone. This 7:00 a.m. sangha, as we call it, since it’s 7:00 a.m. Pacific time, is such a delightful part of the whole IMC world. It’s come to be very important in our dharma world.
I’ll carry on from yesterday, where I introduced the theme of what is defined in the suttas as “the world”—that in the world by which we perceive and conceive the world. These six sense spheres: the eyes and what is seen, ears and sounds, nose and what is smelled, the tongue and what is tasted, the body and what is sensed tactually, and the mind with all its activities, its mind objects.
The relationship between what comes to us through our physical senses, all our interactions with the world that is, and what we make of what comes in—the mental activity that arises conditioned on those six senses—that’s the ground where we find freedom. It is our world, and our freedom is found in that world, and so are the obstacles to that freedom. That’s what I’m focusing on this week: the sense spaces and what arises in relation to them that creates obstacles to clear seeing and the insight that can arise as a result of clear seeing.
Our experience of the whole world comes to us through these five physical senses and the mind. Of course, the mind is considered a sense in the Buddhist traditions. There is no world outside of what we sense. Maybe it’s obvious, but I don’t think we really think of it that way. Then the mind attempts to make sense of it, to create a concept of it—many concepts of it—all based on what comes in through these physical senses. The conditioned interactions of all of these make up our experience of the world, of our lives.
There is a sutta in the Samyutta Nikaya1, one of the collections of discourses of the Buddha, the connected discourses. It’s called the Sabba Sutta2, which means “The All,” the teaching on the all. “The all,” just like “the world,” is, according to the Buddha in the sutta, the six senses and their objects. Remember, the Buddha said that we can’t reach the end of suffering unless we reach the end of the world. It’s a slightly curious statement, I think. I hope it’ll be responded to during this week.
My intention is to encourage inquiry, to encourage investigation into how we relate to each of these spheres of our experience of life. Yesterday, I spoke a bit about the first sense in this list, the sense of seeing, sight. And today, the focus will be on hearing. But first, let’s sit. Let’s meditate.
If you’ll take your useful, upright meditation posture—upright metaphorically, so even if you’re lying down, you can have that sense of uprightness in the spine. I think especially the kind of sense of dignity that can be felt when there is uprightness, along with ease, along with letting go of any tension, any kind of muscular activity that isn’t necessary in order to keep us upright.
As we usually do, maybe a brief body scan, just touching with our awareness areas of tension in the body, breathing into them, and then on the exhale, just letting them ease up. We all have our own areas that we habitually carry tension, maybe in the face or throat, shoulders, the chest, the gut, belly. Just breathing into any kind of tight places, any kind of places that feel constricted, and letting them ease up. You might let your breath be a little bit deeper as you do this, really allowing the sensations of breathing to help with the easing, the calming of tensions in the body. For most of us, the breath can have that effect—calming, settling.
Letting your breathing be just happening at its normal rhythm, whatever that happens to be right now. And letting your attention, your awareness, be with the breathing for a little bit.
And now, just letting your awareness be receptive to sound. Noticing the sounds that arise. The sound of my voice, the sounds where you are, wherever you are, inside the building you’re in. Maybe sounds coming from outside. The sound of your own breathing, if you can hear that. Sounds coming from within the body, other sounds besides the breathing.
Just as we can see what is present around us if our eyes are open and functioning well, we can also hear if our ears are working well, working well enough, maybe with the help of hearing aids. It’s true for a lot of older folks. We don’t need to reach out in order to hear. It happens naturally when a sound arises.
So as sounds arise, just notice them and let them be heard. And also notice if the initial hearing leads to an urge to actively listen, to try to hear. It’s normal, of course, especially if a sound is new or unusual. But if you find yourself leaning into hearing, trying to hear something, trying to identify what’s making the sound or what the sound might mean, just notice the effect of that in your body. Notice if there’s any tension that arises, a sense of constriction, tightness anywhere, and in your mind as well.
As much as possible, just let hearing happen without leaning forward, without the mind getting involved in conceiving ideas about what you’re hearing. Just rest in that way, receptive, awake, alert, but not grasping at sound, not grasping at meaning about sound.
If you’re aware of any tension that’s arising due to attending to hearing, some subtle way that the mind is tightening up around trying to hear, it’s really good to notice that. And if you like, it’s fine to let go of attending to hearing and just rest with your usual way of practicing—with the breath or another object, or open awareness, just allowing whatever arises to be known. But if you’d like to continue with just attending to sound as it arises and noticing the effect in the body and the mind, that can be really useful.
I’ve heard teachers say—I think I’ve heard Gil say it and others as well—that our attention, when we’re being mindful, is a kind of love. I don’t know if you feel that; I certainly feel it. To give something attention is a kind of love. And we can take that attention, that love, and maybe turn it outward right now towards the world, the big, wide world beyond our own world, beyond our senses and our mind states about them. The physical world out there and all the other beings, and wish them well. Wish them well wherever they are, in whatever state they’re in. May they be safe. May all beings be happy. May all beings have as much health as is possible to them. May all beings have ease in their lives. May all beings be free.
Welcome again. We’ll continue this exploration of the sense spaces and their objects. There is seeing and what is seen, there’s hearing and what is heard, tasting and what is tasted, and the rest of them. Between each of the sense organs and what they sense, there is a connection. There is something that allows that connection to happen. And that connection can be pretty simple, or it can get quite complicated by mental activity.
I’m focusing this week on the kind of mental activity that makes it difficult to see with the clarity that’s needed for insight to arise. In the texts, this kind of complication between the seeing and the seen, the hearing and the heard, is called a fetter. A fetter that arises dependent on the seeing and what is seen, on the hearing and what is heard. A kind of unwholesome hook that gets created between each sense organ and its object that ties us down, in a sense, that keeps us caught.
“Fetter” is a kind of unusual word in our daily life, but I like it. It has a lot of use in the Buddhist world and in translations of the word samyojana3, which is the word in Pali. I like this word “fetter.” Gil uses the translation “knot” for this word recently, which is also really evocative of what’s going on, I think. But I like this word “fetter” because I’m a birder. I love birds, and fetters are what go on a hawk or falcon’s foot in order to tie it to its perch in falconry. I’m definitely not a falconer; I like to watch the birds, not hold them to their perches. So a fetter is a way of keeping the bird from flying free, and that’s what these fetters do to us.
There’s a list of ten fetters that’s quoted often, that are defined as the main obstacles to being liberated. But I think what’s really important to keep in mind is that a fetter is any mind state—like desire or ill will, resentment, pride, envy, agitation, just trying to make something happen—any kind of a mental state or activity that keeps us from being free, that ties us down, that keeps us looking for stability, looking for happiness in all the wrong places. In the big picture, when no fetters are operating in us, then we’re free. We’re liberated, in a sense.
These sense spheres are the area where these fetters arise. The second of the sense spheres is the ear, the hearing apparatus, and the sounds that come to it. I think we’re aware of how what we hear can give rise to fetters, to knots, to strong emotions that either keep us tied to the sounds or that make us push to get away from the sound.
I recently received a gift from a Dharma friend: a charming little plastic monk who is sitting and holding a mālā4 of beads and hitting a little wooden gong, a Zen-style wooden gong. He runs on solar power. He’s right here next to me. Because he runs on solar power, he goes really fast on sunshiny days and slower on cloudy days. It’s quite foggy and cloudy right now here. He’s sitting on a pile of dharma books that are always right next to me, next to a south-facing window, so he gets all the sunlight that comes through that window. I notice that when the little guy is going fast, really hitting that gong at a rate of like eight or ten beats per second, it’s a little bit agitating to my mind. I feel like the sound is pushing me to go faster in whatever task I’m doing on my computer, which is usually where I’m sitting.
That’s not objectively true, of course. This little plastic guy is just responding to the amount of energy that the sun is producing from the tiny little solar panel that’s on the platform he’s sitting on. But a fetter arises when my ears hear that sound. It’s a little bit aversive, the feeling. A very subtle feeling of being pushed unfairly. There, I’ve just added another layer, blaming the monk for that. It’s not a big deal, of course, and I have a lot of options to reduce the agitation. I can move the little guy out of the sunshine. And I can also see if it’s possible to just hear the sound without assigning this meaning that arises out of the aversive hook that has arisen—to just rest in the hearing. It’s just a ticking sound, like a clock.
During the meditation, it started out relatively early in the morning here. The little guy was tapping the gong quite slowly, and then as it got brighter, as the sky got brighter, it went a little bit faster. I was able during the meditation to just hear it, not really listen in an active way, and no fetter arose. But when it does, the fetter of aversion, it arises in the mind dependent on hearing the sound. So it arises sort of between the ear and the sound that’s being heard, in a kind of metaphorical way. And the mind gives meaning to the feeling of aversion. It assigns the intention of pushing me to work faster to this innocent sound that the little plastic monk is making.
Of course, that’s a very simple example, but I think its ordinariness points to how easy it is for some kind of fetter to arise in dependence on what we hear. There are sounds that have the potential to give rise to a lot more discomfort and stress in the mind because of the associations we have with them. A siren, some kind of emergency vehicle or police vehicle close by. Someone screaming—a person screaming, a baby or a child or an adult who’s crying, who’s weeping. Natural sounds like thunder for some of us, whistling wind, the screech of brakes, and the sound of a car skidding, hitting something. Lots of instances of hearing something where some kind of reactivity is immediately likely to pop up.
Sometimes it might be very sensible. If we’re crossing a street and suddenly hear the screech of a car’s brakes, we don’t need to examine the fetter that’s arising in our minds. We need to just look around and see if there is danger, or if there is danger for someone else, if not for me. But there are also many times when we hear a sound that gives rise to strong reactivity, some form of grasping or aversion, and there is no pressing need to understand the source of the sound or to take action. There is instead just this hook. The sound of a particular person’s voice, maybe. We hear it, and immediately we turn away from it. Maybe we turn off the radio. We heard the sound, the fetter arose, and there we found ourselves, maybe with our chest constricted, heart beating faster, mind kind of darkened, closed.
There’s a story that Ajahn Chah5, the very highly regarded Thai master of the last century, a monastic teacher of many of our teachers, told. He was staying in a hut outside a village in Thailand for a period of intensive meditation practice, and the people in the village were having some kind of a celebration, a festival. They had loudspeakers up around the village, in trees and whatnot, different high places, and they were pumping out really loud Thai pop music. Ajahn Chah reacted by just getting livid. He stormed around his hut, he said, asking himself how those disrespectful villagers could be so thoughtless, with no regard for this monastic who’s trying to become free of suffering right outside the village. It was an honor for the village to have a meditating monk staying there, and they should show respect, etc., etc. He was just going on in this kind of thinking. He acknowledged it went on for a couple of days. And then he said he had a sudden recognition. “It’s not the sound bothering me,” he thought. “I’m bothering the sound. It’s me bothering the sound.” And his mind quieted. The sound ceased to be a problem. The problem was the bothering that was in his mind, the aversive reaction, the fetter.
On the other end of the spectrum from aversion, we might hear the sound of a chocolate bar being unwrapped in the next room, and suddenly there’s a strong desire for chocolate in the mind. We can just take a piece, we can enjoy it and be done with it. But if we hadn’t heard the sound, would we have even thought about chocolate? The sound was familiar, and the mental associations that were already present in us gave rise to a fetter: “Maybe I want some.”
In both those cases, the mind can tend to blame the sound we heard for the feeling that arises. I can think it’s the little monk hitting that gong that is bothering me, or it’s the fault of the person who unwrapped the chocolate that now I want some. But if we really look at what’s happening, we can see that sound is just sound. It’s the reactivity that arises in the mind that’s the source of our irritation, our hunger for chocolate.
That’s what the texts ask us to do: to recognize the fetter that has arisen between the sense of hearing and the sound we’ve heard, and to let it go. And how do we let it go? Well, a practice that can be helpful is to relax the mind, moving from listening to simply hearing, letting the sound be sound instead of “bothering the sound,” to use Ajahn Chah’s expression.
Yesterday, I asked you to experiment with the difference between seeing and looking, and that’s an exercise that we can do any time, to just notice the difference in the mind, in the body, between these two ways of using the auditory sense. I asked you to do that a little bit in the meditation, just to notice when this urge towards listening arises and what’s driving that urge.
Did something happen when I rang the bell? Was there a fetter, a hook? Or was it just a sound, maybe a pleasant sound while it lasted? Just notice.
So today, I want to encourage you to attend to what arises when you hear different sounds during the day. As you go through your life, what’s the mental response? Is there reactivity? Is there some flavor of desire, some flavor of aversion? I think each of us probably has a vast library of sound memories that hold connotations for us. Some will condition the arising of joy, of love, maybe of appreciation or gratitude—beautiful qualities. And with some, there might just be a hook, something that isn’t so lovely. It’s really good to see those, because obstacles we don’t see, they continue to drive us. But once we do see them, we can eventually let go. Seeing them is the first step.
Thank you for your attention today. Have a good day.
Samyutta Nikaya: A collection of the Buddha’s discourses, part of the Pali Canon, known as the “Connected Discourses.” ↩
Sabba Sutta: A famous discourse from the Samyutta Nikaya where the Buddha defines “The All” (sabba) as the six internal and six external sense bases. ↩
Samyojana: A Pali term for “fetter,” “bond,” or “chain” that binds beings to the cycle of rebirth and suffering (samsara). There are traditionally ten such fetters. ↩
Mālā: A string of beads used for counting during meditation or chanting, similar to a rosary. ↩
Ajahn Chah (1918-1992): A highly influential Thai Buddhist monk and meditation master in the Thai Forest Tradition. He was a key figure in establishing Theravada Buddhism in the West. ↩