Stillness 11-26:
Yesterday I walked along a mountain trail that crossed a stream and paused in the center of an old wooden bridge for a while.
If you close your eyes and face straight head, you can hear the sound of the stream roiling between mossy banks, entering in through one ear, circling freshly and clearly in your mind, and then burbling out your other ear.
All your mental clutter is cleared away. Not only can you hear but you become hearing itself.
In that moment you’re within the center of stillness. As the water flows through your head, you are only where you are, nowhere else. You become conscious only of sound and after a while you become the sound itself. You are both the drum and the drummer.
Your clairaudience—that super-sense we all have—can be developed through growing more aware of sound. Just as your eyes can develop a sense for color and form and clairvoyance through the practice of observation, so can your ears hear in ways you might not imagine! The hearing of blind people is acute, simply because they develop it. We can all develop any one of our senses as much as we want.
We can listen to the silences between the words that someone speaks. We can hear what someone means, rather than what they’re saying. We can hear the energy of the wind and what its message is—whether a harbinger of stormy weather or a message from beyond.
Instead of hearing noise, listen to the degrees of silence all around you and within you. Let the stream pour through your head while you remain still. The more you listen, the more you hear.
Water works best for this exercise, because flow is water’s natural essence. But you can practice listening wherever you are. if you live in a town, pause and let the sounds of traffic flow through one ear and out the other. Even if you’re standing inside an empty house or solitary apartment, you can practice focusing on the quiet that comes in one ear and flows out the other.
After a while, I turned and let the water stream through my head from the other direction. When I was ready to continue on, I felt refreshed, cleansed, lighter, and happy.