Meditation and listening

Good morning everyone,

Here is today's quote:

We hardly ever listen to the sound of a dog’s bark, or to the cry of a child or the laughter of a man as he passes by. We separate ourselves from everything, and then from this isolation look and listen to all things. It is this separation that is so destructive, for in that lies all conflict and confusion. If you listened to the sound of those bells with complete silence, you would be riding on it-or, rather, the sound would carry you across the valley and over the hill. The beauty of it is felt only when you and the sound are not separate, when you are part of it. Meditation is the ending of the separation not by any action of will or desire. Meditation is not a separate thing from life; it is the very essence of life, the very essence of daily living. To listen to those bells, to hear the laughter of that peasant as he walks by with his wife, to listen to the sound of the bell on the bicycle of the little girl as she passes by: it is the whole of life, and not just a fragment of it, that meditation opens.

Meditations, p 20

Here is my reflection.

What K is describing here is also what he is talking about with the notion of total attention. Both are akin to the idea of samadhi found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. In this state of samadhi, there "normal" distincton between the perceiver, the perceiving, and the perceiver is disolved. It is only created through memory, which is the efefect of thought and which is perpetuated by desire. It is also akin to the notion of true beauty that was discussed is the last study group conversation we listened to between K and Alan Anderson. The suffering that allows us to experience true beauty, not the beauty of museums, is the ending of desire and the opening of perceiver, perceiving, and the perceived as a totality. It is the ending of time, which is the movement of desire, and the ending of the destructive force of the "me". So desire or will don't end separation. Instead, it is ended in the observation of the separating force of desire itself; just as memory separates the perceived from the perceiver - "I like that and must have it again".

Best wishes

Robert