Tag Archives: listening

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Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

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GD. Goethean Experimental Observations for 12/06/2012

(noticing the phenomena of sounds arising from within);

Prelude: I have relocated to a big old house near the beach, with a forest across the road. To honour the occasion, we had a fire ceremony at the beach on the evening of the 12th June. After enjoying the beautiful starlit evening we returned to the house, after I have settled my son I settle into sitting meditation on the mat in front of the altar.

I sound the singing bowl, chant Aum and then sit with my double dorje in my hands, contemplating the energetic nexus that it represents, and creatively imagining the dynamic structure which it represents the underpinnings of.

 

I begin to feel the arising of kundalini shakti, gently undulating through my subtle energetic system and up my spine, out through the top of my head with a tingling sensation and into the familiar fountain-like pattern of return to the overflowing pool at the base chakra where the flow continues up the central channel and back out my head. After sitting like this for some time I feel the need to surrender into savasana (corpse pose) however I am also feeling chilled as it is mid winter so I take my body to bed and continue my meditation there.

At this point my body begins to tremble and shake, to vibrate from a deep-down-phenomenon of silent sound arising in the very core of every atom and cell. I note my heart rate increasing, and breathing deepening and lengthening. I am surrendered, all action taking place now is spontaneously arising of its own accord, I am remaining in lucid awareness and observing.

With the deepening of the breath I note an expansion of the abdomen, accompanied by deep creaking and groaning sounds, my chest and throat are also expanding to the sounds of cartilage creaking. My vertebrae are aligning and stretching apart. From a place deep within my skull a secretion of cool, sweet liquid begins to flow into my throat and upper nasal passages. This flow of (?) seems to precipitate an intensification of the phenomenon.

 

I begin to feel pressure stretching me from the inside like a balloon being filled, the air flowing into my lungs seems to penetrate every organ, membrane and cell of my physical body beyond their capacity to contain it in their present shape. I feel like I am being tickled from within, I am laughing intermittently and potent “chemical” tears are streaming from my eyes. My hands move to hover over my sacral and solar plexus chakras, the hands are moving in rapid circles counter rotational to each other, the chakras feel like ‘solid’ balls of whirling energy. The trembling in my body intensifies, my heart rate is still accelerating and my breathing seems to have stopped at a full in-breath. Part of my mind is cautioning me about the possibility of having a heart attack or brain anurism because of the unusual conditions. I consciously make the decision to surrender and trust the experience, even if it means I do in fact die as a result (!).

At this point an impossibly bright yet cool light erupts in both my heart and head (witnessed in the third eye) which expands out to include my whole body. Now all my physical bodily components seem to completely liquify, there is a sensation of dissolving and (hard to describe what) I imagine being like a chrysalis undergoing the metamorphic process. The level of inner sound which is accompanying this event is tremendous yet also very difficult to describe, something like a howling storm perhaps (I will try to find an approximation on mp3 somewhere). My inner eye is registering myriad complex fluidic geometric structures dynamically interacting and energised by seemingly liquid light throughout my field of awareness, all emanating from the core of my being. My physical body feels like it is a writhing mass of system interactions from the cellular level through to the level of organs, tissues and bones. This is a full spectrum immersive experience of something extraordinary!

The complex “body of light” which it appears to my inner eye that I have become is expanding to fill the room, expanding out across the forest, across the ocean and encompassing the whole planet, the expansion continues, waves of energetic intensification continue, I now contain the whole galaxy, and continue to expand and absorb greater and greater spheres of (?) perhaps awareness of consciousness – I am the universal essence in all its forms for a ‘moment’ – it is almost totally overwhelming. I am not breathing and my heart seems to be stuck on full throttle.

Sound begins to emit from my expansive throat, a deep moaning nameless sound. The observational part of my mind is still restless and registering cautions about the possibilities of damage to the physical vehicle. I decide that I need to ‘ground’ the experience and that I can Aum with it as a means of fully embodying that which is flowing through me (rather than becoming fully disembodied by its raw power). So I begin to Aum, low and deep into the lower chakra triad, and then a higher tone, into the heart, and higher again into the upper chakra triad. I slowly begin to reintegrate and re-inhabit my physical vehicle. The toning is re-establishing a breathing rhythm, my heart rate begins to decelerate somewhat.

I find myself glowing and buzzing, it is as if I have just been born, My body feels like a fresh new organism, weightless for a while, tingling and throbbing with light and sound – I seem to be in psychic contact with every mind I have ever contacted, all of you are right here with me, I hear your voices and feel you in me. We are all connected to this vast and fathomless energy source which is still flowing through me, as me (and everything and everyone). My subtle sensitivities appear to have been enhanced, yet so has my capacity to accept being in such a state.

At the time of writing, 5 days later, I am still in this ‘renewed’ state. Speaking with the Goethe track group (16/06/2012) helped me ground the experience a bit more, thank God for these eminently qualified comrades. Many of the images which have sprung unbidden to my mind over the last 20 years are now relating to each other in my mind in ways that they have not done before – so many symbols of a pre-cognised experience which only now is unfolding – the whole concept of time and space is so plastic. And underpinning the whole experiential context – the sound which arises from within – what a revelation.

Conclusion: No amount of theory can adequately describe a knowing which only direct experience can deliver.

The lucid contemplative reflections continue….

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Flow.

Following up on my conversation with John Davis this morning, I have this to offer.

When I am learning at my best, it is like a flowing river. Receiving, effortless, gifting, nourishing, relational, with a source and a destination which are connected and continuous. The river itself has no agenda.

I have reflected upon the nature of flow before and this is what came through;

 

Energy flows in both directions at once.

Both out from the source as a result of the process of creation and back to the source from all that is created as a result of the centered, focused attention upon the source of the peripheral manifestations of its creation.

This Flow is the the underlying reason for the “all that is” coming into manifestation and for its going ‘out’ of manifestation again (as far as we can ascertain from our perspective).

When we become aware of the Flow, then we can become aligned with its nature and realise ourselves in relation to it, it flows through us, that is how we come to ‘be’.

In just being and allowing the Flow to move us we find that all is as it is meant to be, we can relax and enjoy life without struggling to adapt to each new thing that crosses our path.

We can become more open to spontaneous responses to the flow of events rather than seeking to control the situation, we realise that we are not in control and that it is not possible to be in control.

All events are a result of the dynamic process of the Flow, eternally interacting and creating us and all that we can perceive (and all that we can not perceive as well).

from Cybershaman

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Listening from Being | Listening from Oblivion

“Where listening really is well rooted in the bodies felt sense of being, it makes contact with our primal, opening relationship to being as a whole, and can retrieve the implicate, pre-ontological understanding of being that the body has always silently borne — always and already, long before we are mature enough to care about its retrieval. What are listening really is deeply rooted in the bodies felt sense of being, it is opened out to the sonorous field as a whole and becomes thereby an organ of being, an organ of recollection, gathering up into itself this sound fullness of the field.”   ~ David Michael Levin

Last night a group of friends gathered to talk about poetry and in particular three poems from W.S. Merwin’s work, The Vixen.  We looked at the opening poem of that volume which sets the stage for the ensuing poetic examination and then at the last two poems which point to a kind of closure of sorts. These poems are rich with the imagery of the fox who, from Zen traditions, is a portal of transformation.  In many ways, Merwin’s work in here is about death but death of a very particular kind.  The penultimate poem of the work goes like this:

VIXEN

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words warden of where the river went
touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
window onto the hidden place and the other time
at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
even now you are unharmed even now perfect
as you have always been now when your light paws are running
on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer
when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
from the creeds of difference and the contradictions
that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted until something that we were
had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
places in the silence after the animals

There is in the poem something that goes beyond being into the rootedness of being itself; of something which cannot be spoken (unlike capacity to speak to the existence of being – which is palpable and, while subtle, clearly knowable). Levin’s work, for me, speaks beautifully to this grounded sense of Being, and the consequent practices of listening from this causal space for the emergence of the particular from that Ground of Being. But his work is also arduously convoluted and requires, in practice, an attention to a particular kind of state awareness that will give rise to the particulars of subject and object in the field of the sonorous.  He struggles mightily to speak about it, to speak to it, to speak with it.  And in the process he seems to be missing a core dynamic.

This all causes me to inquire into the relation of this Being and Oblivion.

There is something else entirely going on in Merwin’s poem.  It is as though Merwin is not speaking to something, but speaking from someplace.  He manages to evoke what Levin can only describe. Levin talks of the felt sense, but cannot seem to conjur it.  Merwin can.  And the quality of listening is so very different in these two places. Levin’s world involves a kind of agenda – a striving – that he describes variously in the piece. It has to do with the reconciliation of fundamental existential dread and finding something that is missing – the construction of meaning from meaninglessness through an affirmation of Being.  It feels to me like a full out assault on the proximity of  Nonbeing.  Merwin on the other hand has given up completely on that project – there is no longer anything – and he speaks from a kind of radical acceptance of oblivion that allows for a different kind of attention towards this entirely.  It seems Merwin cannot take it anywhere near as seriously as does Levin – or at least takes it seriously in a very different way.  Merwin’s languid acceptance of the whole from this Other place – without judgment or meaningful distinction, but with clear precision and acute awareness – is unmistakeable.  If we listen carefully, he is able to allow us to feel what he hears. Merwin’s resultant attention is effortless, but it is built only after heartbreak and the crumbling of fabrications. This oblivion – this death – is the prolegomena to a sort of transfiguration.

In the first poem of the book, Merwin speaks first of nature, then of human artifact, then says this:

What I thought I had left I kept finding again
but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered
as anyone could have foretold it was not there
when I went away looking for what I had to do
I found that I was living where I was a stranger
but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision
turned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places
and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me
to be where I had been at home called by name and answering
getting ready to go away and going away

This stanza becomes the pivot by which he introduces us to the vixen who will play the role of portal of transformation later on.  And this entire stanza feels to me like the practice to which Levin invites us.  Confused and confusing – twisted in upon itself in recursion as it attempts to untangle simplicity itself.

Merwin’s journey, in parallel to Levin’s, seems to be about moving through a deeper inquiry from nature into humanity – first of artifice and then of Being.  But Merwin takes us to a place further on – to what I am inclined to call, for want of a better term, the post-human. This quest, the spiritual journey, seems to me to be these days so much about the shriving away of the human in favor of the post-human. In that respect, it seems like death; like a kind of abdication of the movements of mere mortals into passageways that allow one to move between worlds untouched and unmoved in the deepest cores by these passages.  And while this oblivion removes us from concourse with normal human experience, it opens a kind of deeper compassion and engagement that hosts the world in a different way. This oblivion, this calamity, this death, out of which Being itself arises, mocks the very shape and nature of listening and out contextualizes any possible or conceivable context that can be created or imagined. I am a mere novice in this field beyond fields which is not a field  - indeed sometimes I “see” it so very clearly at other times I’m only dimly aware of Oblivion. Yet when I am honest with myself, this Oblivion is my constant companion -it is my original face, it is the sound of one hand clapping, it is mu. And upon it the unbearable lightness of being floats suspended in something that is not anything.  In it Absolute and Relative both arise and disappear.

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Harkening: Compassion and Listening

“The echo has much to teach us if we listen for a code to listen to them are listening can grow in its wisdom.  The echo is a precious gift to hearing.”

~ David Michael Levin

I was “listening” to the typed words of the message of someone I have grown to respect and care for from a distance. The message was filled with the heartbreak of loss, the emptiness of an uncertain future, the dissolution of the center of coherence, and the consequent draining of creative energies. How is it that we can take these written words and impute such depth of heart?  How do they provide such windows into the heart of another?  And does this listening transform the pain and suffering of the world  in meaningful ways? I am told it does, but I’m not so sure.  There are parts of me that want to do something. To take some action that alleviates the very particular suffering of those particular people who have been brought in to my life.  To care for those I am come to learn to love each in their own way.  And yet I find there is a kind of helplessness and a recognition that even those closest to me – and whom I count as friends -  are on their own paths. In the end there really isn’t much I can do except to lend a listening ear and an open support of heart that bears listening witness to the flow of  journey they are on.

It is hard for those in times of transition when an old life is disappearing and there is the grief of loss. These dark places seem to require a special kind of listening within them; a listening that is is interior and withdrawn in which the darkness seeks, whether willingly or not,  to envelop the soul. There is in me a tug of desire to comfort and rescue and to make things better. But that is not my place. The most it seems I can do is sit in solidarity and to hold a kind of  proxy hope for those who find hope hard to find in their present aloneness. We all know that this too shall pass, but that makes it no less real or painful in the moment. I suppose that most, it helps to be heard, though even that is small consolation. Hopefully at least that bit of consolation is the case here.

And so what is this power of listening?  Is it merely self-indulgent? Or is it the space in which healing transformation happens?  I would very much like to believe it is the latter and I know that at times it can be – but not always. I wish my dear friend deep grace as she navigates the passage from the current context of her older self to whatever rebirth awaits. I stand by helpless but listening.

posted by Matt Wesley

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Harkening: Listening to Birdsong

“Because we are forgetful of the ground, the vibrant matrix from which we emerged, the hearing subject loses contact with the sonorous objects as it passes through the process of differentiation. We lose contact not only because we ourselves are alienated from the matrix, but also because they’re forgetting of the matrix detaches the object from its ground. This is not without effects, for this detachment separates the object from the dimensionality of its resonance and causes it to lose much of its vibrancy, its atmospheric music. This is the loss, then, which corresponds to the adults lots of joy has it been gifted with the capacity to listen in here.”

I sit in the slingback chair on a splendid spring day in Western Washington. Following some mysterious injunction, the clouds seem to have renounced their usual stubborn residency this year and we have been blessed with long awaited sun. This welcome abeyance has contained its own invitation and Spring, that ever eager guest, has arrived early in full and profligate celebration. I sit now surrounded by trees that wear the cloak of full translucent tender green leaf of new growth that captures the sun just so at the kisses of wind. The temperature is neither warm nor cold but contains bit of each – too cold for shorts and jeans seem too heavy.  I have opted for shorts.

I sit amidst flowers with blooms and buds promising more color to come. The sun warms my face. My eyes are open now and I look at the trees allowing – my gaze fixing, then moving, then fixing.  I’m thinking of nothing except being aware of an impulse to pay a particular attention – my mind is quiet, just listening and watching leaves move. I’ve been following the sounds of birds for awhile though I didn’t really realize it until now. The chirps of sparrows, the song of a warbler a bit off, more distant cackles of ravens; all making small impressions that have now gained the full weight of awareness’ attention which realizes I have been listening all along, but not hearing. I name the common avian names to the sounds I hear, but there is bird song I cannot recognize and my ignorance elicits a small smile of the wisdom of ignorance.

And then, suddenly, because I am now listening for birds, I am visited by the welcome sound of the beating wings of the tiny hummingbird as it buzzes past a bit off to my left. I seem to hold a special place of lifted joy for hummingbirds – their iridescent vibrancy, their sheer determination, their alertness and surreal energy all become a happy annunciation of arrival whenever they come to visit.  They always bring a bit of joy when they flit into my life. In this broader silence in this place – within me – it feels as though I could hear its beating heart.  But I know that as a mere auditory hallucination.  Yet it is a very particular and precise conceit that could not have existed except for my sitting in this common silence watching a common spring day.  It seems revelation is made of such tiny things.

Marcia comes with an iced tea and sits beside me, indifferent to my reflections and a much different, even sweeter, conversation begins.  One not driven by the dictates and secret agendas of the natural world, but one reflecting the familiar rhythms human dimensionality; the concerns of the day, the making of weekend plans and talking about the mundane in lazy associations that make sense only because we have known each other for years – as though these things didn’t matter much and yet recognizing that this conversation contains the echoes of years of love and struggle and joy and sorrow that have brought us to this moment as we talk about groceries. It is as though everything is summed up in Just This.

Apparently I am in a state. Good to know.

And there is a silent place, beneath the conversation, and it feels as though we connect here. My hearing of Marcia is enveloped by the matrix of the bird song and the warmth of the air and the sheer exultation of life bursting forth on a spring day. And all of this infuses our more verbal conversation, which skims the surface of things but really mirrors the Sacred Eternal. This brings its own kind of listening layered upon these other listenings.  And because I am paying attention to listening these days, I notice this too.

This willingness to take time, to become open to the merely ordinary, and to do so such a way that not only hearing but sight itself is transformed as the heart is stirred, seems a kind of practice that moves quickly from transient phenomenon into the more stable ground from which it all arises. This sense of spaciousness changes everything. Dissolves everything. Creates everything.

For me, this is not so much a recovery of a childhood joy so much as it is a post-adult homecoming. It is a profligate casting off of maturity in favor of a profound innocence – but it is not the innocence of youth, so naïve to the harsher edges of reality that await.  Rather it is innocence founded stillness – stillness that provides no surface on which that sharper reality can find purchase to cut and cleave. The joy is not the giddy delight of childhood fantasy and newness, but more profound upwelling of both an intimacy with complexity and a discovery of the utter simplicity that lies beneath it.  A passing beyond knowing into something beyond that.  There is indeed peace in this place. Peace that passes any rational understanding.  A peace birthed from listening. Indeed this listening appears to create the space, and the space the listening. It’s hard to distinguish them as the sun beats down, the leaves rustle in gentle wind, and birdsong passes through.

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Harkening: Vulnerability and Listening

I would like to explore the relationship between listening and vulnerability.  “[O]ur hearing belongs to the sonorous field of Being; that it belongs to the matrix is sonorous energies, in and as which, Being manifests… since it belongs to the sonorous field, our hearing is appropriated by Being; as primordial opening out and laying down of the sonorous field … the Being of beings lays claim to our hearing, calling it to realize it’s given potential as an organ of the sheer vibrancy of the Logos.” Thus spake David Michael Levin.

There is something to this belonging.  Something primal.  Levin points to this as a kind of existential claim, but I am not so sure that it is so one-sided.  There is a kind of agency to listening – a moving outward – that requires a hazarding of ourselves in the midst of the cacophony. I’m not one who enjoys overwhelming sound. My wife and I joke that we are “noise intolerant” – we like peace and quiet.  To the extent that is violated, hearing becomes a painful and triggers a kind of anxiety and defensive moves of self protection.  Listening, it seems requires a different approach – a kind of naked vulnerability – a movement into potential discomfort.

Brene Brown suggests that vulnerability is a form of courage and that courage (born of the French word “couer”) is a form of wholeheartedness. Thus to enter the world with vulnerability is to enter with a kind of wholeheartedness, and that wholeheartedness seems woven into particular forms of listening to require a radical openness.  This putting down of defensive barriers opens one to a kind of receptivity (listening) that allows the interior processes to rearrange themselves in harmony with what is being heard. This re requires a kind of radical openness – as Otto Sharmer would suggest – an open mind, an open heart and an open will – which become a preconditions for a capacity to listen well.

This openness seems not to sit idle or passive, but moves with the kind of anticipation into the middle of things. It welcomes the cacophony and the contraction of noise intolerance becomes a field of awareness that allows for profound shifts of development. It requires a kind of undoing of one’s assumptions and perspectives in a sonic dismantling of the preconceived and already structured. To listen closely is to be undone. To be undone is to be reborn. To be reborn is to be saved. To be saved is to be sanctified. Thus in listening when moves into the holy and can begin to appreciate grace in ways that can seem more immediate those graces offered by the complexity of sight. Listening becomes a mode of practice to see the world in new ways.

This vulnerability or wholeheartedness recognizes that a breaking open and falling apart of self (before its reconstruction) goes with the territory. In his gentler forms involves the recognition that the boundaries between what is hearing, what is heard in the hearing itself are at best blurred.  He can go much further in recognizing the ways we tease apart foreground and background noise and how our attention moves from one thing to the next in the sonorous field.  And if we are listening closely, we can find the very foundations of our sense of self challenged by the way sound moves in and through us.  This is dangerous work.  This movement outwards – the willingness to risk something of one’s self in the world and to be undone by the world – is one of the core dynamics of vulnerability. This kind of listening goes first and doesn’t wait for permission to be vulnerable – it forgoes the requirement of safety to be vulnerable (first on faith, but then in the recognition that the only safety there is comes from this kind of egoic risk).

This is not sitting behind the gates in fortified and invincible stillness (though that may be a good place to practice – on the cushion as it were), but a looking for the existence of silence/stillness in the middle of swirling form – in the marketplace as it were – and again that willingness be undone/remade in new forms as the “world tests the calm fluidity of your body from moment to moment, as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and calmness and final stillness, As if you were meant to be exactly where you are, as if like the dark branch of a desert river you could flow on without a speck  of guilt and everything everywhere would still be just as it should be.As if your place in the world mattered  and the world could neither speak nor hear the fullness of its own bitter and beautiful cry  without the deep well of your body resonating in the echo. Knowing that it takes only that one, terrible word to make the circle complete, revelation must be terrible  knowing you can never hide your voice again”.

Listening, in that sacred place of vulnerability, becomes a kind of repentance – a metanoia – and thereby an an invitation to make manifest the epiphany of divine grace in its guise as the ordinary.

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Listening InTo

1. I wish listening happened so naturally and my response automatically, compassionately articulating what is called for.  This to me means that whatever you need, is responded to. Whatever you want, is spoken clearly about, seen, important to regard. What may still be hidden glimmers for the next opportunity. Listening is a holy compass. A whole beautiful way to live in relation.

2. I often drift while being spoken to and return by feeling into the words I have heard (or are presently being spoken) in order to respond.  I am listening to where the words have taken me.  Sometimes I have to concentrate on lips, eyes, the rise and fall of a breathing chest, in order to just hear the words in the air.  It’s easiest to let the words fall onto me, into my being, and then relate this somehow. I’ve received some training to listen for things that alert me about where another person is speaking from, what it is they are hoping for, and guiding them in the in between place(s).

3. I practice listening to the wind, people, trees, sounds, music … feeling my connection with as many senses as I can. I like to practice adl (any distance listening)

4. A pivotal moment in my life, at 8 years old, is the memory how a classmate answered a teacher and kept changing his answer till he had the right answer, all while the teacher ridiculed him. I listened to the classmate’s pain. This affected me tremendously.

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkipsBpOkYI