On Attention and Cleaning Ones Ears

For the past few weeks I noticed some pressure and discomfort on the inside of my right ear upon waking. I didn’t give it much thought and dismissed it as a minor annoyance, but then I realized that the volume on my computer had been gradually raised over the last few weeks, likely to compensate for an increased lack of hearing. This lead me to flush my ears out, and a funny thing happened.

Almost immediately I felt a sudden sense of clarity when the deed was done. The sound of liquid rushing through the pipes to my sink was distinctly sharper, almost too sharp for my newly clean ears to tolerate. I flushed the toilet once, and then again, afterwards feeling a shameless sense of joy in listening to the newfound range of frequencies that have always vacated my bathroom. Had all of this only been a flush away?

It occurred to me that much of our lived experience is like this. Life is limited by what we are able to perceive, which itself is constrained by the capabilities of our brains and bodies. Yet within these biological parameters are worlds and landscapes that many of us have yet to explore, much less are even aware of. In my case, only when I had cleared–quite literally–the debris residing in my ear did the auditory nuance of my bathroom become perceptible. Out went the junk and in with what had always been there.

Similarly with certain mental states and frames of mind, it’s difficult to know what other worlds and possibilities exist unless you have an experience that takes you out of your habituated contexts. Reading and meditation are the sorts of activities that can remove you from your usual ways of being, though the resulting shift in perspective varies from person to person, and it occurs in small, snailish movements.

On the other end of the experiential spectrum is something like a psychedelic journey. To echo a well-cited study (aptly titled: Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psylocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later) conducted by the scientific psychonauts at John Hopkins, well more than half of the participants reported that their psychedelic experience was among one of the five most “spiritually significant” and “personally meaningful” experiences of their lives at a 14-month follow-up. Other similar studies have observed lasting personality changes of up to a year, particularly on the dimension of “openness”. This is the sort of experience that fundamentally changes you, or at the very least it can provide the grounds for lasting change, especially when done safely and responsibly with a guide or therapist.

In the beginning of what you might call my own spiritual journey, I had a vague understanding of the connection between life, attention, and experience. Meditation certainly helped–it was on a floor cushion after all where my initial interest in these ideas emerged–but it wasn’t until my second psychedelic experience that the connection become tangible for me. About four hours in, I remember asking my roommate to walk with me to get tacos. I had been listening to classical music alone in my room while blindfolded, so I wanted to see and feel what was happening outside of my mind-–or more accurately, in what I felt was the space beyond the entity I called my ‘self’.

Words don’t do experiences like this justice, but the short walk to the restaurant was incredible. Everything felt more visceral and full of life. The sound of my roommate’s voice. The lights of the cars whirring by. The varying shades of darkness that were slowly being donned over Burlington. People who walked past me didn’t feel like strangers, and the usual sense of separation I felt between myself and the world was gone. “Is this really where I live?” I asked myself. What was once familiar had become novel and special again.

In the midst of this pandemic, it’s easy to lose ourselves and our sense of place in the noise and chaos. But beyond knowing enough to take proper action-–social distancing, proper hygiene, etc–it’s all just build-up and needless debris that narrows and steers our attention away from what is essential, from what is possible, from what has yet to be seen but is always in plain sight. Perhaps what we as individuals need is a deliberate and steady reconfiguration of the self, a recentering of the spirit, a wider acceptance of what is, and a reorientation toward what can be. Our usual lives have been uprooted and disrupted, many more than others. But the same bare question remains open to all us: what now?

On my early morning walks through the woods, I am graced by the song of many birds. Often I try to locate them as I trek forward going nowhere in particular. Only when I have slowed down to a halt do the lovely whistlers emerge. Then, so too does everything else.