Sssh! The Sound of Silence

I was a goofy kid whenever it was real quiet, I would hear a high-pitched, silvery-like sound while day-dreaming in my room. Mom would say I have good hearing, when I mentioned I could hear high frequency of automatic door closers in the market. In Jr. High, I would ride my dirt bike out to the fields to watch the clouds, sometimes hearing the sound of silence there, too. Lately, I have been hearing it more and more, during quiet times at home and it seems like meditation helps to access it. I did not mention it back as a kid for fear of being called again a freak. I had enough problems. And now, because I felt like it might be another side effect of my brain injury, not really tying it in to the sound I heard as a kid, I never googled it. Silly me, I even thought it could be the wi-fi going to our computers.

I went to all day sit today with Buddhist Nuns, having been familiar with them from a past meeting at a monastery. The first hour was working on your body, then walking meditation. When we came in for the second sit, Ajahn Anandabodhi began to talk about the sound of silence, as taught by Ajahn Sumedho, and she wasn’t talking about that old song. I lit up, and I wanted to burst out and say, there really is one and I am not crazy? She talked about using it to meditate on, either letting concentrate your focus, or broaden it as it encompasses everything in life. This vibration of life I can hear even now, over the drone of my refrigerator. I now know what it is, and with a day of silence I know how to how to find it. It is not something you can look for, because it exists all the time, so you know it intuitively not like a violin sound you listen for. It will come to you when your mind is quiet. It made the remainder of day a breeze to get into if I tapped into this sound. On the way home I told my friend about hearing I but afraid to mention it as a kid and later as a adult, we both laughed because he had the same experience. When I got home I looked at the course title of today’s sit: nada yoga-attending to the mysterious sound of silence and the development of it as a support for both concentration and insight, duh. So, quiet mind means your own tune, not Looney Tunes!