A Meditation for Coping with Noise
I’ve lived in noisy places near heavily trafficked boulevards. Places where doors slam late in the night, where laughter or a cry echoes down the street, and helicopters agitate air into waves that shake the walls. Noise invades all our lives. The dog that won’t stop barking sharply next door. The music we don’t like. The mournful din of emergency vehicles. For people who are already stressed to the limits of their endurance even a simple sound, if persistent, can become torturous.
I was once very reactive to sounds. The pitch of a voice could change my mood. The echo of a dove call on a sunny street with shallow shadows could fill me with dread, as if born from some forgotten terror, or vague premonition. My ability to focus was precarious, and unexpected noises irritated me. My parents shared this oversensitivity to sound. A crow cackling could send my father into a black mood, as he recalled long dead crows, of another continent, feasting on human eyes during the war. My mother’s ear for insincerity passed to me, and it applies equally to voices and musical performances.
My teacher moved in an atmosphere of serenity so deep it pervaded the rooms he inhabited. Standing in his office I was reminded of the peace I felt in Jeruslaem gazing at the ancient olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane. The same tranquility I found at the Vedanta Temple under a great oak in the foothills of Los Angeles, or in Ojai, on a hot day heavy with the perfume of roses, outside the Theosophical Library. Something like the Hindu idea of darshan, the feeling you get when you witness what is holy. When Sufis talk about the baraka of spiritual masters they describe this immeasurable experience.
My teacher encouraged me to ask questions when we met for lunch. At first, I only asked questions about the work we were doing together. But when he saw I was troubled, he opened the door to more personal conversation. With his encouragement I had gone back to college where I discovered disturbing truths about myself. I was angry. I was morbid. As I struggled, studying required courses I had no interest in, I found the barking of the dog across the street annoying. Too much noise from the kitchen could provoke a tirade. His friendly laughter reassured me of my humanity. Then he told me about an obscure form of meditation.
He said monks of a certain Tibetan school would sit in meditation beside large bells. When the bells rang, novice monks fled, covering their ears. But they learned to sit in such stillness the bell neither startled nor irritated them. By doing this they were training themselves to remain poised and conscious during the overwhelming vibration that is dissolution at death.
Unimpressed by this advice, I nevertheless pondered it out of respect for my teacher. The breakthrough came when I realized that the bell itself is a sacred sound, meant to call us to awareness of the highest. But aren’t all sounds sacred? No temporal occurrence is without its eternal signature. Every sound is the sound of immortal beings lost in the amnesia of embodiment, some more than others.
To my surprise, with this realization, sound caused me no more difficulty. Instead of an irritant, every noise became a sacred sound, a reminder to remember. Being in the moment, awareness can become like shining blue sky, attached to nothing, yet containing everything. Then love awakens, and even the commonplace appears glorious.
The Tibetan bell meditation can be used for coping with other kinds of noise: political, emotional, mental, and psychic. However drastic, or epic, the fantasy of life becomes, it is empty. Good is followed by bad, and bad by good. Even empires are forgotten in time. By awakening to the beauty of the moment, we find an awareness deeper than the shallows of our daily predicaments.
In the Chinese classic The Secret of the Golden Flower this is called “turning around the light.” The Golden Flower is the ever present light of original consciousness. As incarnate beings our light leaks into the world of illusions, giving reality to our desires, but also our fears. When we can detach for a few moments from our attachments, letting thoughts pass without reacting to them, simply placing awareness on breath, breathing as slowly and softly as we can, we regain integrity. The reality that seemed so threatening can become a garden.
From Spiritual Mysteries, a book in progress.
Photo by Tamra Lucid.
