How Does The Room Sound Right Now
Thousands of books have been written attempting to point people to the difference between mindfulness and “paying attention” as we normally do. I’ve read a lot of these books, and even written a few.
There are simpler ways to get at the concept though.
If you want to grasp what is usually meant by the word mindfulness*, all you need to do is to find the answer to a simple question: how does the room sound right now?
By “the room” I really just mean wherever you are. You could be in a room, or outside, or in a stadium, in a cave, scuba diving among coral reefs, whatever. The point is there’s always something to hear, wherever you are.
If you wanted to know how the room sounds, how would you get the answer to that question?
Well, you’d listen to it.
Try it now. Find out how the room sounds. Take a good twenty seconds to inquire, by listening.
So how does it sound?
You might say, “Well I hear the laptop fan whirring, I hear a large vehicle rumbling around out there, maybe a garbage truck. There are some distant voices, and also some pigeons warbling out on the eavestrough. I can even hear my breath escaping my nose at times.”
That’s not really the answer to the question though. It’s a description of the answer. The answer was how the room sounded — what you heard when you listened. A description like this doesn’t convey any real knowledge of how the room sounds, just as a description of a sunset will never transfix a crowd of people, and a description of your housekey doesn’t let you into the house.
The answer to the question of how the room sounds can be always be found, immediately — and only — by listening. The room begins telling you how it sounds the moment you inquire.
As soon as you stop listening and start doing something else — putting descriptive words to your experience of listening, picturing garbage trucks, pondering the amount of birdshit on your shingles — you’re no longer inquiring into the “how it sounds” question. Instead you’re doing tangential tasks (interpreting, describing, etc) which do not deliver the answer.
This is not some Mister Miyagi spiritual mumbo jumbo. I am pointing you to a simple distinction here, between (a) how a room sounds, and (b) how you might describe or interpret those sounds.
Mindfulness is our innate capacity to inquire into question (a), and similar questions about direct experience.
You can access this ability at any moment of your life by finding the answer to “How does the room sound right now?”
Of course, you can apply this same sort of inquiry with the other senses, using different questions.
How does it look when I close my eyes right now?
How does my body feel right now?
What do I taste right now?
Again, complete answers are available just by inquiring. You already have the capacity. You don’t even need to verbalize the questions after a while, you can just start inquiring about the answer.
Note that whatever experiences you witness this way do not contain any words. You don’t taste the words “oak” or “dark fruit” in the wine. Direct experience comes in the form of ineffable sense phenomena, not verbal data. You can come up with some words later and refer to your experience with them — “the strawberry was tart and a bit fibrous,” but the taste itself is devoid of words.
By the time you’re mucking about with words you’re no longer inquiring. In that case, all you need to do is go back to inquiring.
You can inquire this way with any experience, great or small. You can get quite specific with your inquiry:
“How does it feel to rest my hand on my knee?”
“How does that droning noise in the background sound?”
Or you can get more general:
“What am I experiencing right now?”
Detail reveals itself gradually as you sustain your inquiry. What you might have regarded initially as “total darkness” behind your closed eyes, might come to seem more like “a field of shimmering pixely things making dark, mottled patterns.” Of course, this description isn’t the answer, the answer is the ineffable field of pixels itself.
As far as I can tell, everything is infinitely detailed like this. Look long enough, and even something simple like “darkness” is more complex than you thought. Sounds contain subtle waverings and oscillations, layers and undertones. The taste of chocolate contains, surprisingly, both pleasant and unpleasant qualities. Pain is not as solid or objectionable as you thought.
If you play around with this sort of direct inquiry, you’ll quickly notice that the answer to question (a), whichever one you ask, is never quite what you expect. You sort of know how the office is going to sound when you listen, but it never quite matches your expectations when you do. There’s always some surprising element.
So if mindfulness is this simple thing we can all do already, why do people meditate for hours and weeks and years?
The short answer is that you can stabilize and refine this ability to inquire to profound degrees, and that takes a lot of inquiring time. You can get very good at staying with the direct experience of a thing (i.e. the answer to question (a)) and get less distracted by your natural reflex to dive into question (b) in its many forms. You can learn all sorts of tricks for inquiring into experiences you didn’t even notice you were having.
If you do a lot of inquiry, there are also a lot of downstream implications to sort through, from all the extra detail that’s revealed. For example, you notice sooner or later that there’s really nothing that cannot be inquired into in this way. In other words, there’s nothing you can detect about yourself aside from your experiences. So who’s doing the inquiring, anyway?
Also, what is this experience of wanting a thing? How does it actually feel? What do you notice about the moment when a given instance of “wanting” appears? When you get the thing you want, what happens to the wanting?
What about when something feels really bad — what happens when you inquire into the the “badness” itself? What would happen you got more interested in what that bad feeling is like than in making it go away?
You can untangle a lot of personal problems through inquiry, by looking right at the experiences that make them up. Oh — embarrassment is just this passing gross feeling in my chest that makes me want to indulge in rehashing other embarrassing moments? Maybe I don’t need to avoid it like death.
Fascinating stuff, for some people. If this stuff sounds esoteric or boring to you, don’t worry about it. Just try asking and answering the basic (a) question, starting with how the room sounds. Then try it for other things. How does it feel to hold this cup? How does this coffee taste?
Inquire into the real answers to those questions, for ten or twenty seconds here and there throughout the day. You will definitely discover something unexpected.
