Flavors of silence

Between the heart and the ears there run subtle currents that we must open up, clear, and make tangible. When we can drop the mind completely into the heart so that the heart can expand, all the subtle senses open up, but particularly the subtle sense of hearing. This type of hearing has to do with an understanding of these very fine currents that in ayurveda would be called vayu, a type of air. It’s not like the air in the atmosphere. It’s a different type of subtle prana or breath that the heart and the ears connect to. When those types of prana come in through the heart, they fan back out through the ears. You get this opening from the heart to the ears that is like a fan that opens out and starts to change the energy currents that move in the jaw and open up into the physical ears and the subtle hearing.

Sometimes when we think about subtle hearing we think about hearing a word or guidance or another language or being able to communicate with another person differently. Those are all true things, but perhaps the subtlest level of hearing is being able to hear different types of silence that are not connected to words necessarily. In a sense, silence is like Eskimo snow, it has many different facets or stages or awakenings to it. The subtle level of hearing is ultimately about being able to experience these different flavors of silence and being able to feel those inside the heart. It can manifest as language or audible sound, but what we’re really looking at is the inaudible part.

These different levels of silence correspond to different ways of functioning in the brain. It’s hard to understand sometimes how the heart and the brain can be so commingled, but they really are. As you dive down into some aspect of the transcendent in the heart, you pull up into some aspect of transcendence in the brain. It’s diving down into the heart and pulling up into the brain, and the travel between the heart and the brain has to go through the chakra where the ears are. When you pull down into the heart and travel up into the brain, then these windows that are like conch shells around the ears open out on the subtle level and then you have all these layers of hearing that open up.

This has to do with being able to experience the underlying value of sound inside the environment, inside objects. It’s about attuning oneself to the frequencies inside objects and inside the environment, which have been called the melodies of nature.