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THE LISTENING
How can the Great Spirit Ocean be described? It cannot be comprehensively described or explained, but It can be known, It can be experienced. Shabda or the Divine Sound Current is the background of all consciousness, the screen upon which this universe is projected. Before the so-called Big Bang, when the universe exploded into brilliant light, there was the Sound: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God." OM, the Word, the Logos, the Voice of Allah, Angelic Choirs, Voice of Many Waters, all these indicate the Sound Ocean. The sound current has always existed. There has never been a time when it was not in existence. It is the first cause, the original source of all that exists. It is the very nature of reality. Sufis call this audible intelligent divine sound current, "the Beloved." Many scientific revelations are yet to come that will shed more and more light on the nature of God and the Universe. String Theory, Dark Matter, Dark Energy all explore theoretically the hidden nature of atoms, sub-atomic particles, invisible energy, and what could be their foundation, their template or existential origin. Yogis have known for tens of thousands of years that if properly trained, one can listen to God's voice, see God's forms, perceive the Infinite Ocean of Sound and Light that emanates from within the human body. Sound and light are simply vibration. The only difference between them is the frequency of their vibration. If you think about it, you will see that this life is nothing more or less than vibration. All that we see, smell, feel and hear is basically made up of the same vibrating energy. And though it is constantly changing, it is eternal and imperishable in essence. Our bodies are made up of atomic elements that have their origins in the beginning of this universe, billions of years old. In the Bani all wisdom rests, all intelligence abides. Becoming familiar with the Universal Sound Current is to know the Voice of God. And although words are not needed, since knowledge is transmitted directly by vibration and inspiration to the yogi who has learned to listen properly, one can sometimes hear distinct words spoken telepathically in the mind, and this is taken as God speaking to us. How to recognize what one is hearing? It is not actually necessary to recognize the various sounds. The Listening is rather like standing in the town square of some international vacation spot and listening to a lot of people conversing in many different languages that you don't know. You just listen to the tones, to the feelings and energy of the sounds these people make. Once in a while you make out something clearly. Listening to God is like this. No one can take all of God in at any one time. It is totally impossible to do so since God is infinite. Similarly, if one is standing on the beach of the ocean, one cannot perceive it in its entirety, it is impossible. But, you can experience the ocean, you can taste its nature, it's energy and meaning, you can swim in it, you can watch it and listen to it, and it gives one a sense of peace and awe. Sound current meditation is rather like standing on the beach looking and listening to the great ocean. You know nominally what it is that you are experiencing, but you cannot fully explain it or describe it accurately. You can jump into it but it is difficult to live in it unless you are a fish. What you experience in the Listening is energy in constant flux, ever changing in its physical characteristics but never changing in its essence and meanings. How it feels is like one is listening to ones own sounds. The sense of personal integration with the current is universal. You are listening to the myriad sounds from within your own body, so they are "your" sounds. You listen to and participate with God's inner voice and it is your own inner voice. Sitting in meditation, I hear so many sounds that it is impossible to make out what 99% of them are. Like listening to the winds blowing through a forest of trees, one can seldom make out any one particular sound but must take them as an integral whole, all together. The various musical instrument sounds that we hear in meditation are arising in the sound current constantly, but they are filtered through the mind of the listener. This means that no two people will have exactly the same experience. Listening to the vibratory current of God is surrender, a letting go of personality and desire. I always let go of name and form when I am in meditation. I intentionally forget who I am, where I am and what I am, and just listen to the inner ocean. With training, one can be constantly aware of God's presence. This is why for an experienced practitioner, who has practiced the Listening for many years, remembrance of God is automatic and constant no matter what activity one is engaged in. It would be a mistake to expect any particular experience to occur. God is never what we expect, always more than we think and at the same time less than we think. People wonder if God cares, if God is concerned at all with our well being. I say he certainly is, but not from some high throne in Heaven. God's throne is in the hearts of the faithful, in the compassion of the caring, in the Listening of the yogi, in the acts of a Buddha. So you could say that God cares exactly as much as we care. When I listen in meditation, I feel my awareness expand until there are no boundaries. I become pure bliss, clear love. I am rock-solid sure that my Beloved is within me and within all beings. If I can know myself in this essential way, then I can know everyone in this essence. If I can perceive the Truth within myself, then I can see it in all beings. If I can clearly understand my own motives, desires and fears, then I can know those of all beings. So let's review. What is being alive? I think we need to step way back and try to see the biggest picture. Really, being alive is not what we normally think of it as being. Conventionally speaking we are animals. We live in an environment that dictates our physical characteristics and behavior. If we were intelligent, gas breathing, tentacled slime blobs on Gamma Whatsis IV, 689,751 light years from Earth, we would certainly have different thoughts and concerns. And for all we know there are infinite universes, both going down into the microscopic and going up to the gigantic, and add to that the possibility of infinite parallel universes such as physics theorizes that there are. So what are we? His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama once was asked n my presence, "What is Karma?" He immediately replied, "Karma is evolution." This is an elegant answer in my opinion. We are evolution or the products or result of billions of years of evolution, all that change and adaptation just to arrive here to where we currently perceive ourselves to be. Why? Because life travels, moves, changes and adapts. Life is all about traveling, we are all cosmic travelers. Our DNA may have come from other galaxies far away, traveling on interstellar bodies such as comets and asteroids or even starships. It is no accident that even a single cell micro-orgasm has 99% of the exact same DNA that we have. It is that last 1% that makes up the differences between the various physical bodies of living beings. Life is universal and it travels. Where is it going? It is going toward enlightenment, toward completeness, toward perfection. Will it ever reach this? It already has, long ago, and it will continue to do so forever. Buddha said that he had lived millions of lives on other planets in other star systems very far away. He made it clear that he meant this literally, it is not an allegory for something else. Consciousness has a life of its own. Consciousness is….conscious. Being is a single unit and at the same time a universal principle. I am a being, I am Being! As Being, we can know all that Being knows. Kind of gives a new twist to "Be all that you can be" doesn't it? So, in the Listening, we are participating in BEING. The particular items that one may perceive in meditation during listening are not as significant as the Listening taken as a whole as it relates to BEING. It is not that you will practice and then gradually become something that you were not. Something cannot come from nothing. It is that you will practice and gradually become aware of what you always have been and always will be. In the Listening we participate in the Eternal Whole. Look not for individual sounds or the significance of any particular occurrence and the ways that it might relate to the past or future. Rather always expand your view so that you are perceiving the Whole in the present. This mode or method of perception, once practiced and successfully undertaken, connects us to God in ways that someone that does not practice in this way cannot even imagine in their wildest dreams. So, the practice of the Listening is best done with a deliberate decentralization of one's personal identity. Try to just be what you are hearing. Try to let go of such conceptualizations as "I am listening", or "I hear this", or "I wonder what that is" and so forth. Conditional ideas with their chains of relativity and cause and effect are always a hindrance to pure awareness. It is not true that one must have an idea before one can apprehend an experience. In meditation the idea is to loosen the grip of our conditioning. In the Listening it is possible to just be, or participate in BEING without adding anything to that basic core experience. This is the best way to approach God. We come empty-handed, with no preconceived notions, open, pure, and then we will experience the Whole purely as it is. Also as regards position or displacement, it is best to try not to position oneself in the conceptual sense. Where am I? I am nowhere and everywhere. Do not let your mind fill in the blanks (as it always loves to do). This is not easy but it is doable. One must listen from nowhere in particular and from everywhere in general. Listen from ten thousand light years away. Listen from a hair on your head, listen from your gut, from your brain but do not limit the position of where YOU are by adding conventional conditioning, i. e. I am in my head, or I am in my third eye and so forth. We are in point of fact everywhere in spirit, so it is possible to sense this everywhereness in real time with sound current meditation. Time and space? Only relevant in conventional terms, not relevant in omniscient terms. Time and space are functions of the physical universe, but even then they are relative to who is doing the thinking and what that being has already experienced. This planet is spinning very fast, it is also orbiting the sun. The sun is orbiting the center of our galaxy and the galaxy is moving away from the original point of the big bang. If one were on a moving airplane then this would mean that that person's physical body is moving in 5 directions all at the same time. If one is walking toward the rear of the plane toward the restroom on this plane then they are moving in 6 different vectors all at the same time, but they are only aware of the movement that is relative to what they can see. Similarly, in the Listening, one is not immediately aware of how much is there, how much is experienced. They are only aware of what they can see and touch, or what can be related to what is familiar to them. The Listening is virgin ground, the very gates of the Heavenly Realms. A way to be familiar with God the Beautiful, and perfect bliss naturally arises when one knows Him. Who and what are you? This can be truthfully answered with the Listening. Drop conditioning and experience joy and knowledge. Drop conceptual knowledge and experience perfect wisdom. Drop the focus or objects of desire and experience perfect peace of mind. Do only good unselfish acts and enjoy the rewards of good karma. Be always more conscious, always stay aware of how our environment and other people will automatically add conditioning to us at any given moment. The Listening teaches us to truly be aware of what is, and not just seeing what we want to see. It is bad to fool others but it is much worse to fool oneself. We all owe ourselves better than that. Dear Salaam~ Not doing then doing would be one way to describe it. I like to call it Greater Being. Saying "not doing" is accurate enough but then the "doing" that follows is more passive, less like initiating anything and more like you being quiet and letting ambient inherent energies be experienced. Our minds are normally filled with worldly thoughts, name, form, past, future, concepts, fears, regrets, guilt, desires, ideas of self and self-worth or un-worth, etc, and these forms go very deep. They are our beliefs, hopes, fears, regrets; powerful feelings and associations, occupying almost all of our mental attention and obscuring our own Greater Being from our awareness and experience. Think of meditation like looking in a clear perfect mirror. The back of this mirror is jewel encrusted and filled with gold and pearls and all the gorgeous, precious things of this world. The mirror surface is perfect, flawless and reflects everything without conditioning it in any way. The mirror does not teach. It does not interpret. It does not improve or change what is reflected in it in any way whatsoever. If a living being looks into this mirror without fear, with a strong desire to see himself as he truly is, in other words, if a being be in search of truth, then he can gaze into this flawless mirror and all will be revealed about himself, if he has his wisdom eye open, and can see and hear clearly in the vast realms beyond this physical universe. Did the mirror do it? Not really, it is passive, empty of self. It just reflects what is there already. If the mirror shows a person that they are Pure Spirit and free, then this is truth....NOW... The mirror cannot show you what will be, nor will it show you what once was, it only shows what is now. What will be and what once was can be known, but the mirror does not give this. The understanding of past and future comes from the wisdom deep in your own soul. Funny thing....most people are busy looking at the jewel encrusted back of the mirror, where there are pearls and gold and precious stones glittering, shining, alluring, capturing their attention and exciting their avarice, and making them forget about looking at the mirror itself and gazing constantly only at the valuable precious jewels and gold on the back of the mirror. This mirror is your mind. Your sentient immortal Soul Being is the looker The back of the mirror is your thoughts, concepts, beliefs, loves, hates, possessions, what you hope to get, what you lost, your regrets, who you are, your childhood, memories of your entire life, the good times, the bad times, your name and its history, your birth, your parents and relatives, siblings, education, the whole teeming ocean of conditioned thoughts play across the back of the mirror that is your mind. The mirror itself is the Sound Current. This part of your mind is the substance of pure perfect reality, the Buddha Nature. It is the true Being, the realm of Sat Nam and all contained within Sat Nam. Perhaps you were not quite prepared for just how close to “you” this sound current experience is? :) One never is. It's why they can the initial sound current experiences as awakenings. It takes some practice and some trial and error but once you get your meditation style aligned enough mentally to see it, hear it, feel it, sense it, discern it, talk with it, know it, then you will never forget how. It is impossible to forget God once God has been truly experienced. Look for the Holy Spirit to descend upon you like an ethereal dove from the garden of Sat Nam. Feel the Power, the Mercy, the Infinite Love that abides eternally, the Everlasting Beauty of The Divine Oneness. Feel your belonging to this, your participation in this. Indeed it is totally impossible not to participate in this. The only questions is will we participate consciously or unconsciously. God is everything you ever thought He was and more, much much more. We all belong to Almighty God? Yes sure I am the Ocean, and so is everyone else! But no one of us or even all of us together can equal a single teardrop from the Beloved. We are but small units of this infinite Greater Being. As we practice and progress in our inner understanding, we learn and experience more. We can learn to participate in the Divine Current, we can learn to channel Allahu’s energies to heal and bless. We can do this because this Divine Current is not separate from ourselves. It is ours! An embodied awakened human being experiences the Sound Current as light and sound vibrations emanating from within his own mind and body. He feels that it comes from within him. But really it is just that the mirror is his mind and if he can look into the mirror correctly, he can see the greater ocean of life to which he belongs. And since God is infinite, then there can be no end to learning, no final stage of existence or final enlightenment. There is always more. This is a very subtle world you seek to enter my friend. Please ponder these words and make them your own. The key to gain entry forever to Sat Nam is in them, look closely. Once this key is regained (yes we had it in the past) then the entry of your awareness into the Divine Current is constant and effortless, requiring you to really learn how to concentrate and control yourself so that you can keep your balance when the sound current is powerful but you have to pay attention to the mundane world around you. There have been times for me when the Current was so powerful and I needed to come down more so I could do something like driving or talking and so forth and God says in my mind, "What do you care? You have me. I will take care of you." And I just have to smile, and so far He has always taken good care of me :) Brightest Blessings to you my friend, I am happy for you, I am thrilled to know what is coming to you. God is truly so much more than we can imagine, God is truly the Master of the Universe, the True Guru, the Beloved. Rahmatullahi Wa-BarakatHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU Musfaad