Tag: echo

  • A listening resonance

    We often think that when we are listening, we are perceiving the resonances out there in the world. It does make sense. Sound travels to us, after all.

    But Jean-Luc Nancy offers another perspective: when we listen, we open ourselves to the world and let it resonate in us. We don’t really hear the world, so much as what echoes within us.

    All that appears in our awareness is an echo of the world, shaped by the resonances in the subtle structures of our being.

    To what extent are our thoughts simply automatic resonances captured from the world? Is there a boundary between internal and external resonances — or do we just call the more subtle resonances internal?

    What if we are just very resonant matter and the awareness is out there, everywhere, in the world? This is a panpsychist perspective: perhaps consciousness is a property of space itself, and we are its instruments.

    We experience our being as stable because our structure has a stable tuning. We catch the world’s winds like an aeolian harp, and resound with the chord that arises naturally from our form.

    That resonance is our presence in the world. We sound it out until it becomes part of the space that created us.

  • Echo guides you home

    People are looking for a home in experience – or rather an experience that feels like a home. When they are at home, they are not out there, separated from their origin. They have returned to something that allows them to be at ease. (By “home” I mean an existential home, not the actual home, or a nostalgic childhood home, of individuals.)

    A religious experience can be described as a homecoming, a return, a definitive answer to the fundamental ubitas, a recurring and insisting “where am I?”. When one returns home, one does not need to leave anymore. The existential location has been defined not in contrast to the surroundings, or by geographic coordinates, but by experience itself. It is an affirming answer to the question: “Do you know where you are?”

    The irony of “looking for one’s true self” is that people look inward when they should be looking out in the universe. Only by witnessing their own existence through their own being can they actually recognize that they exist in the world, as a mind and a body.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self.

    “It’s all in your mind”, is an explanation often given by New-Age folks, Neo-Platonists, or Cyber-Gnostic Matrix fans. These ideas can be either dismissed as individualist solipsism (“all of this exist in MY mind”), or more rarely understood as a limitation set by a mind that is dampening its resonating potential with complicated and overlapping feedback loops that cancel out their own resonance; in much simpler words: we can potentially find everything by tracing back our mind, but too many conceptual explanations obscure the direct experience.

    Finding a home in one’s own experience is allowing the self to merge together with the resonance of the world. In this experience the individual disappears and becomes one with the phenomenal world. This experience may be considered ‘religious’ because it transcends all ready-made concepts, and without an ego in the way, the experience might evoke a sensation of ‘being in God’ or ‘being the ultimate truth’ — although verbalising or defining the experience conceptually will inevitably push it further back from the unhinged openness it requires.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self. Follow the echo, and keep your mind quiet.

  • My definition of echo

    Wikipedia defines echo like this:

    In audio signal processing and acoustics, an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound.

    Wikipedia

    In common use of the word, this definition works well. But today, while writing my thesis on echosophy, I reached for a more phenomenological definition. This is what I came up with:

    An echo is the observation of a sensation returning in time and space.

    The definition consists of a couple of elements that I felt were necessary. First, echo needs an observing subject. Second, an echo is not necessarily tied to sound, but can relate to any sensation. One can, for example, listen to one’s emotions, or physical vibrations that are outside the scope of normal aural hearing. Third, the experience consists of a returning, which implies that the subsequent appearance of the sensation is perceived as the same as the first one (even if altered). And finally, this experience is tied to both space and time.

    I’m still exploring other forms of this definition. For example, following Jean-Lucy Nancy’s terms, the definition could take this form:

    An echo is the observation of a resonance returning in time and space.

    Even though my thesis is based on Nancy’s philosophy of listening, I feel a tiny hesitation to embrace his term of resonance in my definition of echo. Maybe I don’t fully understand the full depth of resonance as Nancy means it, or maybe I’m drawn more towards sensing. But I do like this formulation, too.

    Nancy also talks about sense, but I’m writing in Finnish, and don’t like to make the poetic dimension any more complicated than it already is, so I’m leaving that topic for others to ponder on.

    (And while we are on the topic of language, I’m writing this blog in English because I believe that figuring these topics out in a foreign language will force myself towards a more clear understanding of these topics.)