[Advaita-l] On silence being not just the absence of sound - it's not abhAvarUpA?

[Raghav Kumar Dwivedula]

Namaste
A few excerpts from an article on Silence being not just the absence of
sound.
(The author uses the term "imperience" to refer to the Qualia or mental
recreation of a sensory experience after the external stimuli are
transduced in to nerve signals and fed to the brain . What happens to us
after that is being termed 'imperience' as different from 'experience'
which he uses for the external concomitants of sense perception.)
The article is a contemporary articulation and I was reminded of the
brihadAraNyaka phrase - 'na hi shrotuH shruter viparilopo vidyate
avinâshitvât.'

Start of excerpts from article -
Tranquillity’s Secret: Silence is Heard
(By StillJustJames)

Here is another quandary to ponder: silence is heard. If “silence” refers
only to the absence of sound, then we shouldn’t be able to hear it.
“Silence” should just be the name we give to the apperception that arises
when we suddenly realize that we’re not hearing anything at all.
But that is not how it works. We clearly hear silence — that is, we have
the indisputable imperience of silence — not just some experience of the
“absence” of sound, as some assert.

Does it make sense to imply that there can truly be a lived event that has
no content, that we can then call “silence” once we notice it, to indicate
the absence of aural content? How would silence be lived if it were empty
of any imperiential content?
Silence — a lived event — is an imperience of the presence of silence
because hearing continues. Like the simplistic showing of a magnet moving
iron filings on a sheet of paper, that a teacher showed us when we were
young, equating their movement to magnetism, we conflate our ears sensing
air pressure changes with hearing. Our ears don’t hear sounds, rather, they
respond to the presence of air pressure changes, ever ready to do their
work, though not active in the absence of anything to hear.

*And yet, how would we hear anything, if hearing ended in the absence of
changes in air pressure around them? Hearing must continue even in the
absence of sound.*
Silence, then, is something that is there, not something that is missing —
that’s why we give it a name to indicate the presence of silence, rather
than saying “the absence of sound.” And since hearing continues even in the
absence of air pressure changes, even when there is only “silence” —
*hearing is a continuum that continues even during the presence of silence
- the asserted absence of sound — it is fundamentally different than the
“hearing faculty,” encompassing the physical organs of the ears, and the
nerves that connect them to the brain¹,⁠ all of which react only to
something happening externally.
And this is evidence that translating pressure waves in the air into
something the brain can process, as well as that brain processing itself,
are not hearing. Instead, they are simply the conditions necessary for the
reflexive, but still spontaneous, manifestation of the imperience of sound
in the mind — and only that is properly called “hearing.”
The irrefutable positive nature of this imperience of silence derives from
the fact that silence manifests in the mind — so sound is never absent,
even when the hearing faculty is quiescent.
It may seem like a silly question, but if silence were the absence of
sound, then wouldn’t there be an infinite number of different silences, one
for every frequency of sound that we can hear and that can be absent, as
well as symphonies of silences, as many as the ways in which sounds can
compose themselves symphonically?
That question is silly because we obviously don’t imperience an absence of
different frequencies of sound because silence isn’t the absence of sound.
Instead it is the noted presence of the sound of silence.

...
We’re capable of hearing sounds and silence both;
They may be present to the ear or not.
Though people say that when no sound is present,
Our hearing must be absent too, in fact
Our hearing does not lapse.
Our hearing, then, is genuine and true.
It is the everlasting one.⁠²
“Silence” in spiritual traditions is often used as a metaphor for inner
stillness, because silence is the stillness of sound, not its absence.
Such “inner stillness” is not about the absence of anything — rather, it is
understood to be a phenomenon that can bring one in contact with the
divine, the ultimate unknowable reality, one’s own true self, one’s divine
nature.

....... the cosmic “Om” inner spontaneous sound, which is said to consist
of the sounds A-U-M as a kind of unfolding stream, I found instead that
those three sounds were co-extensive, completely overlapping, yet each
clearly discernible — and more importantly, there was a fourth sound just
as clearly discernible — that of silence. The Om sound consists of four
distinct sounds, and that, for me, was the moment when I clearly knew that
silence was a sound.

For complete article and other similar ones here is the link -
https://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/ai8vjj/using_inner_spontaneous_sound_as_support_for/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body


Om

Raghav