By Roger Guest
Embodied within the ordinary soundtrack of our lives are profound opportunities for awakening. As we revel in the rush of daily life, it is very easy to miss these calls to alertness. In order to harvest their benefits, we have to listen mindfully. What we tap into is known in Sanskrit as "smrti". Often translated as "recollection", smrti is the mindfulness muscle that has to be exercised regularly if we are genuine about our pursuit of wisdom. Again and again, the world is invited to disrupt our reverie and trigger our magical capacity to engage life with presence. No one claiming to aspire to wisdom can afford to squander these simple but precious perks of human existence.
True recollection is about more than just listening to music or coming back to a vague sense of breathing; it’s owning what is manifesting in awareness, right now. Usually, our minds meander through a chaotic jumble of thoughts, losing focus with every distraction. How often do we forget our intentions or get caught up in patterns of ignorance? Smrti distracts us from such distractions and interrupts this mental chatter, bringing us back to reality.
Recollection is unlike ordinary remembering. I can remember skydiving in Vermont several years ago and stepping out of a shaky little Cessna to find myself free-falling through space with a gorgeous view of the Adirondack mountains and Lake Champlain stretched out below. I recall thinking how ironic it was that nature could provide such a beautiful background to my imminent death. Remembering poignant moments from the past can be powerful, however, right now I am sitting here in front of my laptop, feeling my feet on the floor and the tips of my fingers hitting the keyboard. This is smrti, recollection. Unlike remembering the past, this is presence practice. It allows me to appreciate each breath and each sound as it happens, and be more attuned to being in the free-fall of time, right here and now.
All of us, at one point or another, have the wherewithal to recollect our own awareness, regardless of the object of our focus, and embrace whatever is happening in life. Smrti occurs when we tune in to our bodies, our attitudes, our behaviors, and even the rhythm and nature of our thoughts, rather than grasping at mental and physical events with a fragmented speediness. It offers us the option of synchronization and wholesomeness in that we can take a seat within the primordial curiosity of a more wakeful state.
Half-hearing the world is never spiritually satisfying. Nor is reflexively labeling the things we perceive and simply going on with our day. Our goal in meditation is not just to hang out with the general sense of air passing in and out of our nostrils, or to wallow in the relaxation we feel every time we sit. But something happens when we dive a little deeper into the immediacy of each actual breath or sound. We can’t attain enlightenment on auto-pilot. For genuine wakefulness to emerge, we have to engage in true recollection as often and as genuinely as we can. So, the idea here is to train ourselves to step through the open door of nowness, whenever it strikes us to do so. Eventually, the essence of immediacy becomes the consistent bull’s-eye of focused appreciation.
There are probably many stages and forms of smrti, but essentially, listening mind practice trains us to recollect not only that we are breathing or hearing, but fully being. The impact of smrti can be as subtle or profound as the effort we assert and can result in tremendous potency. It is always encouraging to rediscover the path when distracted, to come back to square one and touch back in roughly where one left off. However, since sounds are like footprints in air, the listening path is ephemeral and marked by impermanence and uncertainty. Thus, we are forced to develop our motivation to ‘live in the challenge’, where the gravity of smrti presents itself. Every time some new notion pops into our head and the thread is lost we can be left hanging. But if we train ourselves to rely on mindfulness, whenever a sound pokes a hole in our balloon and our dream momentarily falls apart, we can recollect our wakefulness within the gap.
To listen is to become aware of vibrations hitting our ears. In the shadow of listening, we become aware of ideas forming and being gone before they have a chance to solidify. Such immediacy thwarts the conceptualization process altogether. Thus, we abide within a sandwich of hello and goodbye where occasionally, we taste manifestation and unmanifested phenomena co-arising and dissolving, where every sound, indeed every event in consciousness, is both question and answer simultaneously.
When phenomena lack solidity or any lasting qualities, we say they are empty or groundless. Sounds are this way. Furthermore, what can be said of sounds in this context can also be said of thoughts. Focusing on the cusp of manifestation amplifies existential insubstantiality. Whatever occurs in consciousness appears and is gone, endlessly, eternally, and immediately. In this sense, thinking mind allows us to contemplate mind’s spontaneity and can lead us to the very brink of nowness. But, it might be the intuitive quality of listening that nudges us to let go into the vastness, where the auditory realm and the realm of sincere cognition merge.
Eventually, smrti unveils existential loneliness. Most of us are plagued with a convincing sense of a ‘me’ that we have yet to truly ‘unknow.’ However, if we actually stop and listen, again and again, one day we are likely to encounter the feeling that ‘nobody really knows me’ and realize how alone we are. And like it or not, the more we listen, the truer this turns out to be! Nobody, not even oneself, truly knows this ‘me’ because, ultimately, there is no me to recollect. As an old friend used to say, “We are so alone that we don’t even have a self to keep us company!” So, what we recollect at that point, it turns out, is liberation.
Roger Guest is a student of the great Tibetan Buddhist master, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He has been practicing and teaching meditation for over 50 years. We are sharing the following excerpt from his next book, Listening Mind, with his permission.
You can email Roger at [email protected]
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