June 17

Please forgive this long journal entry. With all the sleeping I was doing, due to the Mono, it appears that I pinched a nerve in my neck. The pain kept me awake all night, so I decided to write. Here is what I came up with.

I have been experimenting using sound as my meditation object. While sitting in meditation the predominate sounds that I hear are coming from the air entering and exiting my nostrils; and from what Ajahn Sumedho calls the nada sound. This is a high-pitched ringing that appears to be coming from inside the ear itself. Ajahn Sumedho says it is not important to know here the sound comes from, but my theory is that it is the vibration of all the cells that make up the inner ear.

I first discovered the nada sound on my own while I was on staff at the Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts. I had taken all my days off in a ten-day chunk so I could sit the Monastic Retreat with Ajahn Amaro and Ajahn Punnadhammo.

I remember one morning while about halfway through a sitting period, I began to hear what I thought was an alarm. Between the office and the staff dining room is a small passageway, in this passageway is the fire alarm control panel. If anything ever goes wrong in the system, the control panel emits a high pitch alarm. For the next twenty minutes I sat in the hall wondering why nobody had turned the alarm off.

As soon as the sitting ended I made out like I needed something in the office. I was surprised that as I neared the office the sound wasn’t getting any louder. When I checked the panel it was functioning normal. “Oh no, this sound is coming from my head!”

The rest of the day I could not get that sound to leave me alone. Then in the late afternoon Ajahn Amaro gave some meditation instructions. He said something like, “When you get settled down and become quiet you might notice a high-pitched ringing sound. This sound is called the sound of silence.”

“Did he say it is the sound of silence? Silence! You mean I’m averse to that which I’m seeking?” The story of my life as a meditator.

Hearing the nada sound has always been easy for me, and it is not because my mind is always settled and peaceful. Even around very loud noise, like while meditating along the Mississippi River below Baton Rouge. All I have to do is think about the nada sound and I can hear it, much like all you need to do is remember to watch the breath and there it is. The nada sound comes so easily for me that I also get bored with it rather easily too.

I once asked Ajahn Sumedho how to best use the nada sound and he gave me the following teaching. This is what I remember him saying, “When you develop any meditation object be it following the breath, observing feelings in the body or listening to the nada sound, whenever you develop the ability to be with that object every waking moment of the day, that object becomes solid. Your meditation object becomes like a movie screen and life becomes an ever-changing show of lights on that solid screen. In this way you will see life as impermanent (annica) and not self (anatta)."

Last week I was sitting in my cabin listening to an approaching thunderstorm. Most of the time they build up slowly and you can feel the barometric pressure drop, the humidity rise, and you can hear the thunder getting closer and louder as the storm approaches. Then just before the first drops of rain start to fall I can often taste the moisture in the air. As the first drops of rain start to fall you can also notice the temperature drop a few degrees.

For almost a week we had violent thunderstorm every afternoon—several with lightening bolts and thunder happening simultaneously. The hair on my arms would stand on end at those times. It amazes me that Austin and I slept out in the woods during a good number of these storms. They seem to be bigger and more violent here in West Virginia, but I don’t think that is the case. Being out in nature as we were at the beginning of this pilgrimage made us able to adapt to the storms. I remember on several occasions feeling quite frightened as a storm was approaching, but I would check my tarp, make sure my gear was covered, and adjust my umbrella to shield me from blowing winds and chant the Metta Sutta. After doing all of this I would often fall asleep before the storm actually hit.

Using sound as a meditation object has been interesting in that I find I do not have a lot of judgments about sound. The only sound that really gets on my nerves is somebody else’s breathing. I find most sounds to be neutral or pleasant. The sound of the factories along the Mississippi River were not pleasant, but they were not a distraction either.

Man-made noise used to disturb me, especially while meditating. Then one day while I was living at the Kripalu Yoga Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, somebody was vacuuming the hallway by the meditation room. They vacuum the halls in long lines, the way you might mow a lawn. Each time the person came down by the meditation room they would bang the vacuum cleaner against the wall, causing a rush of aversion to arise in my mind. After they banged the wall three of four times I had the realization that actually the noise of them hitting the wall was waking me up from a slothful state of meditation. From that moment on, rarely have I view sound as an obstacle.

Sitting in the meditation hall at the Bhavana Society has been a joy. Having Bhante G. sit in the front of the room like a solid rock is always an inspiration. They have many windows on all four sides of the meditation hall and being so hot those windows have all been open, so we have lots of sounds from nature drift through the room.

I did notice one particularly odd sound though. Occasionally I’d hear a loud “thunk” or a sharp “tink” sound coming from the back of the hall. There was no pattern to the sound but often it would last for ten or fifteen minutes once it started. Finally I asked Ajahn Dhamma if he knew the source of the sound. He said it is a pair of cardinals that fly into one of the large glass windows.

Yesterday morning I was reading in the library and heard the sound. Sure enough the two cardinals were sitting in the tree that grows from the island in the little pond. It appears that they see their reflections and attack! Attacking the illusion of self.