Do we hear from inside or out?
In the age of wired earphones, Iphone 7 starts to use a wireless Airpod, but the technology is the same – an .mp3 file (a marvel in itself, as it is really just a compendium of 0s and 1s), and their considerations about wireless being better don’t seem to convince consumers much at present. Just like sight, we take hearing for granted; all except Moses, who heard the voice of God and walked up to Mt Sinai ([picture] like I did one night years ago). And except for the “spiritual” and the scientists. The spiritual, because they talk about “hearing” the word of God and then doing it. The scientists, because Brian Kross, Chief Detector Engineer at Jefferson Lab, says this about “hearing”: “In a process which is not clearly understood, the brain is capable of interpreting the qualities of the sound upon reception of these electric nerve impulses.” (sent from the hair-like nerve cells of the cochlea)... So Gray’s Anatomy tells us what these things look like to our eyes, but never exactly how they work in our consciousness.
In the age of wired earphones, Iphone 7 starts to use a wireless Airpod, but the technology is the same – an .mp3 file (a marvel in itself, as it is really just a compendium of 0s and 1s), and their considerations about wireless being better don’t seem to convince consumers much at present. Just like sight, we take hearing for granted; all except Moses, who heard the voice of God and walked up to Mt Sinai ([picture] like I did one night years ago). And except for the “spiritual” and the scientists. The spiritual, because they talk about “hearing” the word of God and then doing it. The scientists, because Brian Kross, Chief Detector Engineer at Jefferson Lab, says this about “hearing”: “In a process which is not clearly understood, the brain is capable of interpreting the qualities of the sound upon reception of these electric nerve impulses.” (sent from the hair-like nerve cells of the cochlea)... So Gray’s Anatomy tells us what these things look like to our eyes, but never exactly how they work in our consciousness.
So we also have various kinds of hearing.
1) Starting with “not-hearing”, when
we simply do not register sounds because our attention is elsewhere. The same
vibrations are travelling through the air, falling on the same eardrum, but
since attention is diverted, there is no “hearing” – no sound! It’s like being asleep
or in a dream.
2) Dream hearing is when
our brain tells us someone has called our name and we wake up, and we realise
that it was just in our heads. There was no one there. Or when we spy on our
own thoughts and “hear” them like in a dictation, but try as we might, we
cannot remember the exact words when we wake! Has that happened to you? When
you are learning a new language, this happens too. When you come to Spain, you wake up saying calamares
or patatas bravas or café con leche or something like that!
3) “Normal hearing”. We hear normal
conversations, words, sounds, music, birds, the wind in the leaves and the
traffic or the crows… What exactly happens, no one really knows. We just
pretend to know or take it for granted. A word is uttered, and our ear picks it
up, and even distinguishes tone, volume, pitch, degree of calmness or
nervousness in the sound, emotional and sentimental overtones, and a whole lot
of real or imaginary nuances… This capability combines with seeing as the two
most highly developed and overworked senses in us humans. Audio and visual
are the two constant bombardments from computer technology, the only two senses
so far that have been broken down and put into digital format for transmission.
4) Inner hearing. With your ears
wide open, or tightly closed with fingers or hands, if there is still hearing,
it’s not from the ear. It’s from “inside” the head. This happens to me, and I
don’t consider it a defect called by a funny Latin name referring to bells. It
seems to be a boon, although I haven’t yet been able to interpret any of the
messages being sent, if they are messages, that is. What is apparent is that
some time ago, I noticed a familiar sound that I had heard off and on over my
life, and this sound was inside my head. It used to be like a musical F, then a
G#, now it seems to be around G. It is drowned out by street noises, but purrs
on nicely when everything’s quiet. Its utility is that it reminds me I’m alive.
It’s always there, and when I pay attention to it, I know my heart is still
beating, energy is being transformed, and some modicum of Self-Awareness is there, like me and
my shadow. My inner sound is like a companion who is still just breathing
alongside me as we go on our journey together, and hasn’t actually said
anything yet, but maybe one day will.
So if seeing is interpreting the world of
visible things, hearing is the interpretation of visible and possibly invisible
things in movement. It is an attempt to interpret an “event” or “series of
events”, something that produces vibration from movement. How consciousness
does this is the mystery. It is not enough to describe the process as we
understand it. Because we don’t. We do not really know what produces
the original, so-called vibration, or how it is captured and transformed into a
message to the brain, and above all how this message is converted into something
intelligible for our minds.
Any other kind of hearing in the head may
simply come from personality and headbrain chatter. None of this, in our “normal,
civilised state”, can come from a “higher source”: it is just a part of the
normal mixed-up human mind, full of book-learning, beliefs and past experience.
Only when the mind is being quietly looked at and listened to in Self-Awareness,
and it quietens down of and by itself, can anything arise from much deeper
within, and that, if it involves sound, may be vital to our lives. But who can
sit still long enough and actually hear it, really?
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