When one lives in India, you make peace with noise.
Except in the wee hours of night, you never encounter silence.
The nights are lovely, dark and peaceful in India. You can hear yourself clearly only then. You cherish silence during those dark hours when most of India sleeps.
But there are a few idiots who, unaware of the odd hours, would honk at street corners.
Even today, I can hear honks at 1AM or 3 AM in the morning. Call center pickups, honking for the watchman or whatever.. Don't they realize that people are asleep at that hour and you have no right to spoil someone's sleep? Are we so insensitive?
While my irritation with noise is mostly because it affects my sleep, it seems to threaten philosophers in very serious ways. They cannot think or cannot hear what they think!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/opinion/sunday/im-thinking-please-be-quiet.html
A great mind can have great thoughts only if all its powers of concentration are brought to bear on one subject, in the same way that a concave mirror focuses light on one point. Just as a mighty army becomes useless if its soldiers are scattered helter-skelter, a great mind becomes ordinary the moment its energies are dispersed.
Even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days. The stress of audible assault affects us psychologically even when we don’t consciously register noise.
In American culture, we tend to regard sensitivity to noise as a sign of weakness or killjoy prudery. To those who complain about sound levels on the streets, inside their homes and across a swath of public spaces like stadiums, beaches and parks, we say: “Suck it up. Relax and have a good time.” But the scientific evidence shows that loud sound is physically debilitating.
Most people who are seeking more serenity from the acoustical environment aren’t asking for the silence of the tomb. We just believe we should be able to hear ourselves think.
www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/04/in-pursuit-of-silence/
Story of a buddhist monk:
A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, ‘Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice — I can’t meditate with all this noise!; ‘The noise isn’t bothering you, ‘ Ajahn responded. ‘You are bothering the noise.’ As Lushtak put it to me, ‘Silence is not a function of what we think of as silence. It’s when my reaction is quiet. What’s silent is my protest against the way things are.’
Except in the wee hours of night, you never encounter silence.
The nights are lovely, dark and peaceful in India. You can hear yourself clearly only then. You cherish silence during those dark hours when most of India sleeps.
But there are a few idiots who, unaware of the odd hours, would honk at street corners.
Even today, I can hear honks at 1AM or 3 AM in the morning. Call center pickups, honking for the watchman or whatever.. Don't they realize that people are asleep at that hour and you have no right to spoil someone's sleep? Are we so insensitive?
While my irritation with noise is mostly because it affects my sleep, it seems to threaten philosophers in very serious ways. They cannot think or cannot hear what they think!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/opinion/sunday/im-thinking-please-be-quiet.html
A great mind can have great thoughts only if all its powers of concentration are brought to bear on one subject, in the same way that a concave mirror focuses light on one point. Just as a mighty army becomes useless if its soldiers are scattered helter-skelter, a great mind becomes ordinary the moment its energies are dispersed.
And nothing disrupts thought the way noise does, Schopenhauer declared,
adding that even people who are not philosophers lose whatever ideas
their brains can carry in consequence of brutish jolts of sound.
Environmental noise calls attention to itself — splits our own attention, regardless of willpower.
Mammalian hearing developed primarily as an animal-detector system — and
it was crucial to hear every rustle from afar. The evolved ear is an
extraordinary amplifier. By the time the brain registers a sound, our
auditory mechanism has jacked the volume several hundredfold from the
level at which the sound wave first started washing around the loopy
whirls of our ears. This is why, in a reasonably quiet room, we actually
can hear a pin drop.Even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days. The stress of audible assault affects us psychologically even when we don’t consciously register noise.
In American culture, we tend to regard sensitivity to noise as a sign of weakness or killjoy prudery. To those who complain about sound levels on the streets, inside their homes and across a swath of public spaces like stadiums, beaches and parks, we say: “Suck it up. Relax and have a good time.” But the scientific evidence shows that loud sound is physically debilitating.
Most people who are seeking more serenity from the acoustical environment aren’t asking for the silence of the tomb. We just believe we should be able to hear ourselves think.
www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/04/in-pursuit-of-silence/
Story of a buddhist monk:
A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, ‘Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice — I can’t meditate with all this noise!; ‘The noise isn’t bothering you, ‘ Ajahn responded. ‘You are bothering the noise.’ As Lushtak put it to me, ‘Silence is not a function of what we think of as silence. It’s when my reaction is quiet. What’s silent is my protest against the way things are.’
No comments:
Post a Comment