On sound, silence, and listening as an act of love.

When is the last time you heard absolute silence?..

Don't scroll down, like you've been conditioned to. You could consume the next line fast, sure, but, what if you did not?..

And you lingered instead... and stopped.

To try and recall, the last time you heard absolute silence?..

Sound is never truly absent. Frequencies and vibrations occasionally dip beneath our perception radar depending on our biological and cultural peculiarities, that is, we hear what we are conditioned to listen to.

I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation… Until I die, there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music (says John Cage in an anechoic chamber, in 1951, at Harvard).

Even tucked inside an anechoic chamber engineered to swallow your loudest scream (echo and all), you will still hear your heartbeat, the casual flow of your bodily fluids, and perhaps something like tinnitus (a high-pitched frequency, some electrical activity our brains and nervous system perceive as sound, especially when it is quiet around).

So, when is the last time you experienced absolute silence? Think about it... Does it exist?

Suppose you are inside that anechoic chamber, and even the voices in your head stopped talking, and you entered a peaceful yogic meditative state... Still, sound is not truly absent. You are just momentarily not tending to its flux in your particular state of cognition... In other words, life goes on, whether you tend and lend an ear or not.

Like death, silence is elusive, more concept to ordinary consciousness than tangible experience. We create art(ificial) and children as a response to death, and sound as a response to silence. But don't mistake silence and sound for mere opposites; they contain each other. Like death gives life meaning?..

Silence is the fleeting contraction of the pulse, between two heartbeats, or between an inhale and an exhale, where the self dissolves in rest. It is a relational, borderless state. It is the moment between the poet's gaze and the pen's first strike on the page. It is our commas. Or, if we are lucky, a fertile ellipsis... A space of tending, attention, an ear stretch...

Silence is pregnant with sound and the promise of resonance. It is the latency, the origin, the emergence, and the return of sound. The unstruck vibration that grounds all expression; it is not an absence of sound.

Silence is to sound as stillness is to motion, as space to objects, zero to numbers... In each case, silence holds creative potential. Latent vibrations emerge from silence only to eventually dissolve back into it. We are born; we eat, work, love and long, fight and fear, make things, change or resist; and, inevitably we die (at least for now, still, in the 21st century).

In some cosmologies, sound is imagined as the cosmic architect and animation artist. For example, in their creation story, Native American pueblo tribes of the Southwest tell of Sun God Tawa and Spider Woman singing "a song of life" onto Earth, to endless waters and space. With this song, they animate the first humans from clay form and saliva. A little further away, Australia's Aboriginal ancestor beings song-map the landscape with a repertoire called "dreamtime." Egyptian architect-god Ptah speaks the world into existence. Or, in the beginning was the Logos (or word), and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. The universe started with a big "bang," and as quantum superstring theory riffs, reality arises from miniscule vibrating strings. Seismic or subtle, some contemporary thought also understands resonance as being-with and the unfolding of presence, while others see sound as a material force that shapes matter and relations, acting even where no ear is present. In all these existential myths, whether a subject exists or not, sound is not just a byproduct of reality, it is the very blueprint of existence.

If every world begins in sound, what reality will you tune into tomorrow morning?... What is the first sound your hear when you wake up?

Out of all these musical myths, my ears lately perked up to a cosmology humming along to the primordial "OM"–the sound I have casually intoned during yoga sessions for quite some time. Some of these sessions started and ended with this "OM," or three... I tuned along to these starting and ending OMs. It was a good Western exercise and stretch in between, and a few seconds of not-thinking-much felt good during these sessions. Turns out, according to this Hindu cosmology, I had been tuning into the cosmos with this OM...

What's yoga of sound, and what does A-U-M got to do with existence?

Through some jazzy coincidences, I found myself diving into a year-long teacher's training in the Yoga of Sound. My sole secular intention was to incorporate sound-centered meditation techniques and instruments into my daily mindfulness practice that has kept me grounded in what feels like an increasingly faster-spinning world in the past couple of years.

After this mostly experiential study and my tangential personal inquiries into Eastern philosophies, my take: