Far From the Madding University Crowd

 This was the first Thursday evening of "the first week of school" at University of Toronto. And, true enough, there is an energy in the school which is hard to find either during the slow summer months or the heavy exam periods. During this time,the students have a lot of energy to kill! They are hardly in the mood to even think about meditation or some other more introspective practice, which explains the very large party just outside the meditation quiet room tonight. It seems that the group before us had booked the reception space just outside the third floor quiet room, and the participants in group sitting were entreated to a lot of screaming and yelling from the excited students.
   There is actually nothing truly unusual about sitting meditation in the midst of noise. Master Sheng Yen has talked about how the first Chan Meditation Center in Queen's New York is located so close to the middle of everything that it can be referred to as 'crossroads' Chan. The challenge is to be able to present Chan in such an environment.
  I have to admit that I felt awkward at the beginning of tonight's guided exercise and sitting, as though worried of how the newcomer in the group today (as well as existing members as a whole) would react to the sudden shift in energy. But what happened is that once I had let go of all concerns over the noise itself and its impact, the room became quiet: no restless movements, and very little non-verbal 'protests' from the participants. Soon, as I was meditating,I lost the sense that the noise even has a location or an origin somewhere. It literally became 'pure noise', in the sense of not being tied to anything or anyone. But the point is, without any location, there isn't even an "I" registering this noise. Of course, this state tended to ebb and flow, but it showed me that the noise is created not just from forms but also from the way my mind moves to approach the forms. When I really behold the sound as it is through the ears, I am less attached to adding thoughts about 'who' originates the noise. In fact, the 'who' leads to a deeper question about experience, and that takes me away from my tendency to label sounds as belonging to certain people and as having a specific quality that can be located. And as the mind settles, the sounds affect me less.