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Guided Meditation: Just Sounds; Dharmette: Six Sense-Spheres (2 of 5): Seeing and Hearing - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 03, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Just Sounds

Good morning. Seven o'clock here on the West Coast. Greetings from Portland and also from Redwood City, California. Welcome back. If you were here yesterday, we're going to continue an exploration of a practice called the six sense bases, or as I'm calling it this week, the six sense spheres. Yesterday we began with some theory. Hope I didn't scare too many people away. Today we'll begin taking a more careful look at each of the six senses with which we create our world of experience.

Today we'll talk a little bit about seeing and hearing. Apropos of seeing and hearing, I'll introduce three techniques for bringing our practice to our sense spheres—bringing practice to the way we interact with the world, to the inevitable relationships we create with the world, and how we sometimes get caught and entangled in those relationships.

We'll begin with a sit. I'll guide just a little bit, probably a little less than yesterday, to get us started. We'll meditate making reference to the way seeing and hearing work in meditation, the way we can interact with these two sense spheres and use them to refine, sharpen, and deepen our practice.

Find a nice quiet spot. Find a posture that supports a balance of alertness and ease. Bring the eyes down or close the eyes if that's comfortable. In the posture, we also create balance, balancing effort and allowing, or energetic presence and ease.

We can begin an exploration of seeing and hearing—these two sense doors—in the meditation by noticing that when we bring the eyes down and close the eyes, it's not that there's no visual stimulus. Rather, we move to a mode of receiving the much more muted visual experience that happens when the eyes are closed.

As we settle in with the body sitting here and the breathing happening, open our attention to the sounds within us and without, the sounds around us. They may be faint or distant; they may be close at hand. We can use these sounds as an anchor in the world of the meditation. Just notice what it's like to be bathed, to immerse ourselves in this surround, the soundscape that surrounds us. Even if we found a quiet place, just notice sounds happening today. Notice a sound and then return to the breathing.

Perhaps a specific instruction for this morning is to notice when sounds become unpleasant or irritating, when sound becomes noise. Just noticing the mind's involvement there. Maybe placing a gentle label on sounds that says "just sounds," or "just sound happening," "just sound arising."

In the meditation, we can just receive sounds as sounds and notice when they become anything else but sounds. Noticing a little knot forming, a little entanglement happening, and then returning to the breathing. Just sounds. Just sounds arising and passing. And then back to the breathing. Just the breathing happening. Just this breath there.

Dharmette: Six Sense-Spheres (2 of 5): Seeing and Hearing

So again, good morning, greetings, and welcome from Redwood City, California, where IMC is located, and from Portland, Oregon, where I find myself this morning.

We'll continue with an exploration of the teaching called the six sense spheres. Yesterday I gave a theoretical introduction to this teaching as it is presented in the texts that come down to us. Today, tomorrow, and the rest of the week, I'll take a look at a couple of senses each day to give a sense of how we can think of this practice making its way into our lives in a way that supports our practice, helps wake us up, and helps us see clearly.

So today I'll talk about seeing and hearing. In the description, I call this "Sights and Sounds," trying to set this teaching in the context of the holidays coming toward us. Maybe the holiday is already underway. Certainly, the season of active encouragement of wanting and attachment—shopping season—is upon us. So today, I'll talk a little bit about seeing and hearing.

Seeing and hearing present an interesting contrast in a number of ways and are a good way to get into the six sense sphere teaching. We live in an era that some scientists who study the senses refer to as the "visual era," the era of sight. We live in a world, in case you haven't noticed, dominated by visual imagery, most obvious at present in our handheld devices and the constant presence of screens all around us. Before that, earlier generations—I am probably speaking here to some people like myself who remember television—saw television play an important role in that visual sphere.

Before that, in earlier generations, the world was more dominated perhaps by the sense of hearing. Before television, radio, for example, the spoken word, the train or factory whistle, the church or temple bells, the sound of tradespeople or merchants hawking their wares in the street, live music, the sounds of the natural world, including animals. So, we may live in a visual era, but hearing and seeing have certainly both been extremely important in what makes us human and in our shared history.

There's an interesting difference between seeing and hearing. In the case of seeing, we direct our gaze. We look around. We look at things. That involves us sometimes in certain complications with what is seen. Whereas hearing, a large part of hearing is passive. We receive sounds. We allow sounds to enter. Sometimes we turn our heads to better locate a sound, triangulating. And yet for the most part, we don't choose where we direct the ears.

Interestingly, one of the things we do in meditation when we close our eyes—I pointed to this at the beginning of the guided meditation—is that we rebalance sight and hearing. We bring our gaze inward in a way that doesn't exclude visual stimuli but mutes it in a very important way. As I pointed to in the guided meditation, sounds can become an important part of meditation, that important place to establish mindfulness that allows for a very easy way of receiving sensory input.

Similarly, when we see clearly in our practice, we're not directing our gaze as much as we are opening and receiving. Closing our eyes in meditation supports this. Not everybody feels comfortable closing their eyes in meditation, but when we close our eyes, we sort of can allow the mind to observe experience in a gentle, open, easeful way and sit comfortably in the flow of the arising and passing of experience. This is something that's much harder to do when the eyes are open and seeing is happening.

So, one of the first things we can do—I said I would mention three strategies or tactics, and these are useful in each of the senses that we'll talk about. We can start with seeing and hearing.

One of the first things to be aware of is when seeing becomes looking or watching, and when hearing becomes listening. There's a lot to be said for finding a place in the world, like in the meditation, where what is seen can just be seen, and what is heard can just be heard, without adding extra to those experiences.

You can notice just walking around that you look out the window, there's a bunch of different objects available, and they can just be allowed to register. You can notice when you pick out something that becomes the object of looking, watching, or observing. With hearing too, you can notice just sounds happening, as we did in the meditation. You can be aware when listening is happening, particularly where sound becomes noise, or alternately when sound becomes something that we sort of want to hear—music, for example, or conversation. You can notice the mind entering, adding extra, and a more complex experience arising.

You can also notice that this is where the simple relationship between what is seen, the eye seeing it, and the awareness of seeing it can become a knot, a tangle where wanting and aversion arise. There's nothing bad about this habit of looking carefully at our world and arranging things, organizing things. But the practice encourages us to become more discerning about how there are ways we see the world that get us caught up in it and that produce unwholesome or unskillful wanting and aversion. The practice helps us find ways of seeing and hearing in the world that are freer and that lead onward toward greater ease and being awake in the world.

So that's a first technique: just noticing when seeing becomes looking, hearing becomes listening.

Two other techniques. The first one is a technique referred to in the ancient texts as guarding the sense doors, protecting the sense doors. This is the habit of just being careful about what we direct our gaze toward. We come to know over time that certain objects of attention encourage us to get caught up, and we can, in a sense, look away. We can take care of ourselves, protect ourselves, by watching how we direct our gaze in the case of vision, what we listen to in the case of hearing, and so forth with the other senses.

The second one is the idea established in the Satipatthana Sutta¹, the discourse on the establishing of mindfulness, that directs our attention to feeling tone. Early in the experience, sometimes appearing as if it arises simultaneously, we become aware that a certain experience—something seen, something heard—is pleasant or unpleasant. With that, frequently we lean in toward the pleasant and away from the unpleasant. We can notice this as we notice that seeing has become looking. We can notice too that this particular object of attention triggers pleasant or unpleasant, and we look toward or look away.

One way I've made this a practice in my practice—I just do this at the holidays. To bring it back to our holiday moment, I notice at this time of year that, as I said a moment ago, wanting and attachment are actively encouraged. I start receiving catalogs at my house that arrive with greater frequency than at other times of year. The last week there was sort of a bombardment. I was guarding my senses pretty carefully, but I was aware that there was Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Hard to avoid, hard to not see, hard to just see.

What I do with the catalog—I enjoy this practice—is I take it in, I open it up, and I watch what happens. I flip to the men's section if it's a clothing or shoe catalog. I look at the products being shown me and I notice what happens in the mind. "Am I the kind of guy who... maybe I should have a pair of shoes like that? Maybe that's me." Whatever that means. A lot of "selfing" happening there. "Oh, and I don't like that color and I prefer this color." So, I watch this happen in the mind. Then I turn the page and I watch it happen again and again.

The idea here—it's kind of like returning to the breath—is watching the entanglement happen and then letting it go. The better we get at this—at touching something, feeling the attraction, feeling the wanting or the aversion, and then letting it go, letting the flow happen, moving into the next moment—the more likely it is we can do it with more complicated stimuli.

Around the holidays, for example, it's very easy to get attached to outcomes. We want the holidays to be a certain way, want certain things to happen, want certain people to act in certain ways. It's easier to start with a catalog and get used to that. "Oh, here's this wanting arising." And this is fairly easy to want and let go, or feel the aversion to one color—"No, they don't have that in my color"—and then let that go. You can do this with catalogs, you can obviously do it online. There's no paucity of opportunities at this time of year to be aware that there's an encouragement to wanting and to attachment, and to let it work on us through the sense of our sight, through the sense of hearing, and when that happens, let it go.

I'll talk about this technique in a couple of days a little more in depth, but it's a practice that is sometimes called "touch and let go." We can't avoid the touch. We make contact with the world. We see things, the mind enters, and until we're completely free, "extra" will be added and wanting will arise. The more used to that we get—to recognize "here's wanting happening, what am I going to do with it?"—the freer we can become.

So this example of the holiday catalogs or Amazon shopping or Black Friday, Cyber Monday... whatever it is today, I'm sure it's a good shopping day and has a special name and special deals are out there awaiting all of us. We can notice when seeing becomes looking, when we're directing the gaze. We can be aware that pleasant or unpleasant is happening. We can guard the sense doors by being careful about what we pick up. Maybe we don't pick up the catalog. And we can engage in this little practice. If we have picked up the catalog, if we have maybe seen something come up on our phone, we can do this "touch and let go" practice: "Oh, there's the wanting happening, there's the aversion happening," whatever is coming up, and letting it go.

So together, this set of techniques or strategies—I guess I said I would mention three, I think I ended up mentioning four—together or in any combination or alone, they can be really useful in charting a middle course between asceticism (sort of pushing it all away, "Oh, I just don't look at any of it") and the sort of indulgence that can lead to attachment and clinging. The Buddha recommends in many of his teachings that we accommodate our life in the world, that we recognize how suffering happens, and that we actively keep ourselves free. One way we do that is by finding ourselves in this middle territory between pushing things away because they might be dangerous and falling into the trap of attachment and suffering.

That's what these practices with the sense doors are designed to do. We'll continue exploring them in the coming days. Tomorrow we'll take up taste and smell—really powerful aspects of our experience that are particularly highlighted at this time of year during the holidays. So take care till tomorrow. Looking forward to it and see you then. Take care.