5.6 What is the meditation on hearing?

Not all of the confirmatory experiences can be expressed in words; reality is too simple and unified for words. What you will experience is a function of your own nature and karma. If you accept these experiences as real, then they are real to you.

The purpose of these confirmatory experiences is to help you to understand the links between your own nature and reality. As you will gradually learn, the experiencing of reality solely through the five senses is limited and relatively illusory compared to the experiencing of the enlightened state. This meditation on hearing is an illustration of the general principle that reality is not structured, and does not function, in a way that is comprehensible within the limitations of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.

Reality only becomes comprehensible when one activates one’s sixth sense of direct intuitive perception. Committed daily practice of meditation develops your sixth sense. As your intuitive perception of reality unfolds, you will experience a subtle, but real and lasting, change in your sense of hearing.

As the meditation takes holds and produces fruit, one’s way of hearing alters, naturally and spontaneously. One becomes aware of hearing the ordinary sounds of the environment in a different way. One experiences sounds in this way: each is heard quite clearly, quite separately, and each is equally significant in your hearing.

Through meditation on this experience, one comes to realise how constrained is the hearing of normal consciousness. The lesson of this meditation is simple. Life is: become aware.