Shruti: Listening to Sacred Sound
by Katyayani Poole, Ph.D.
 ~ Portrait of the Tibetan Yogi, Milarepa, listening closely to the subtle melodies of nature ~
"Just listening to the bird's song with no preconceived idea to distort the experience is shruti." ~ Katyayani ~
I first heard the Vedas being chanted when I was 19 and living with a temple priest and his family in Kathmandu, Nepal.
At first, I wasn’t sure what it was. Half asleep and half awake, every morning I found myself aware of rhythmic voices coming from the room next to mine. The tone and quality of the sounds kept me from sleeping and yet only half awake in a dreamlike state.
After a week of becoming attuned to this daily musical event, I started to naturally anticipate it. My sleep would end just as the chanting began. I’d lie perfectly still and let the sounds sweep over me like warm water from a hose. I’d feel my body relax and my mind sink deep. And a smile would spread across my face, just as the dawn spread across the sky.
Eventually, I couldn’t remain in bed while this chanting was going on. Instead, I’d get up, take a cold-bucket bath, sit upright outside the door, and listen with my whole body.
It finally occurred to me that I was actually meditating effortlessly simply by listening to these sublime and rhythmic chants, sung back and forth between father and son. I understood through experience why the Vedas are called shruti, “that which is heard.”
Physically we hear with our ears. But really ears are only the instrument through which we hear, but they don't determine what we hear. Sounds travel through the space element until they are close enough to enter our ears. The sound stimulates a nervous system reaction -- an automatic sequence of pre-wired events that transport sound to the brain, which "hears" it.
Of course there are many sounds bombarding our ear instruments every moment, so the brain chooses what it wants to "hear."
The rsis (whose title interestingly translates as "seers," though they were first "hearers") wanted to hear the sounds that animate all life. But first they had to become very quiet themselves. If there is too much noise in your mind, you can't hear properly. It's so noisy in there that the brain, over-saturated with sound, literally pushes out any new input. But because the Sanskrit syllables are the sonic building blocks of life, they easily pull us in toward our core nature, which is silence.
The rsis knew that silence was the precondition that allowed for deep listening. To be really silent they had to shut down the part of the mind that analyzes. (The intellectual part of the mind that dismisses the innocence of pure listening with identifications such as, "Oh, that's a red-wing black bird's song....That's the song they sing in the Spring during mating season...I like red-wing black birds...They live near water," and so on.)
Just listening to the bird's song with no preconceived idea to distort the experience is shruti.
All knowledge arises out of truly hearing something at its essence -- not from all the categories we heap on the things we choose to hear.
This kind of hearing cannot be described with words, but it can be replicated in song. This is why the Shruti or the Vedas are arranged as "hymns." Whatever the rsi heard, she recorded it in song. If, for example, she heard the sounds of the sky getting ready to burst into the Dawn, she sang them to herself. And when you chant the Vedic hymn to the Dawn, you connect yourself sonically to that natural process.
In this way, the rsi identified the sounds of creation with his own body. When he sang Creation's hymns in its own perfect melody and rhythm, he became united with the whole.
The outside world and his inner heart became one, complete, song.
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