Sound and listening

Reading from Wednesday, March 13, 2013 yoga class

I love chanting... I love to hear the birds...I love to hear the wind!!  The sounds around us are really marvelous if we pay attention to them.  I love the following excerpt from the book "Healing mantras" by Thomas Ashley-Farrand.

"Listen... Listen closely...  What sounds can you hear right now?  Chances are, there are many of them.  Our lives are filled with sounds of all kinds, and our responses to those sounds help create who we are from moment to moment and from year to year.  At one extreme irritating or annoying, at the other pleasant or deeply satisfying, sound vibrations affect our thoughts, our feelings, and how we experience the world.

A quiet moments of concentration quickly evaporates when a diesel backhoe starts tearing up the street outside your house.  At the whine of a gasoline-powered leaf blower, a normally placid person turns into a red-eyed monster seeking revenge.  Loud music playing, dogs barking, babies crying--they can all be very disconcerting, especially if they belong to someone else!

Yet a few whispered phrases from a lover can instantly transform sadness inot euphoria.  The cooing of a baby gazing trustingly into our eyes produces joy that melts all care.  Tensions dissolve when we hear some bars from a Mozart concerto.  All this because of a few vibrations.

Sound can change our entire life's course in an instant.  Words spoken in anger can cause permanent problems between a husband and wife, or parent and child.  The throb of a well-tuned motor can engender such satisfaction in an amateur mechanic that a whole new career path suddenly opens before him.  A word of encouragement from a teacher at just the right time can inspire a student for many years to come. 

We respond to all these sounds, but usually we don't give them much conscious attention.  We don't really think about them.  They influence us, but we go on largely unaware that we have been touched by an ancient wisdom, a force of nature."


The author then talks about a book, entitled The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins.  He describes an experiment in which four plant groups were given identical lighting, soil, watering schedule, etc.  One group listened to rock and roll, a second group listened to jazz, and a third group, classical music and the fourth, no music at all.  The plants exposed to rock and roll inclined AWAY from the speakers at a thirty-degree angle.  The plants exposed to jazz has various results depending on what was played... they especially liked Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.  But the most dramatic results were seen in the plants that heard the classical music.  They inclined TOWARD the speakers at a sixty degree angle. 

Finally... back in the 60's the Second Vatican Council began considering changes in church practices... changing the chanting from Latin to the language spoken locally, but they couldn't agree, so they stopped chanting altogether.  So... monks of a certain Benedictine monastery became listless and fatigued.  It used to be they could go on just three or four hours of sleep...So... they altered their schedules, they changed their diet from vegetarian to eating meat, but none of this made a difference.  Then an ear specialist visited the monastery and learned that many of the monks were hearing impaired.  This ear specialist recommended the chanting resume and very quickly the monks were back to their old selves.   

COOL STUFF!!!   The power of SOUND!!!