https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/10/30/23426406/ai-animals-google-translate-karen-bakker-sounds-of-life

Neel Dhanesha
There’s a point that you bring up about how digital listening is new but deep listening is not. What do you mean by that?

Karen Bakker
The way Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear puts it is, “The human brain is like a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations ... the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.”

The Indigenous writers John Borrows have Robin Wall Kimmerer described deep listening as a sort of venerable and ancient art. Before the advent of digital technologies, humans had lots of practices whereby they listened to nature. Animals’ complex communication abilities were well known to Indigenous peoples, who had various strategies and tactics for interpreting those sounds and engaging in cross-species communication. So deep listening provides us with another window into the soundscapes of the nonhuman and it does so with a sense of rootedness in place and a sort of sacred responsibility to place and a set of ethical safeguards that digital listening lacks.

That is so exquisite a point of focus, thank you Barbara for posting this.

I've been doing this recently and recognized it as that, but had no way of describing it in words to myself. But this is it. Deep listening. It's the best way of describing it. And it's similar to what the remote viewers do, except it's on a conscious daily level rather than going into a meditation and then going somewhere. For example, one instance for myself was when I had been working on organizing this new place I'm at ...a box, a shoebox, pandora's shoe box, it just is neverending things coming out to have done because it's so small and there are no shelves up yet, so much work to do and it's just so stifling... and so I looked out the balcony window to the sun setting with it's golden pink rays of light, which took all of me into it now, and suddenly I saw deeper than the surface of the view, I saw into the other, higher dimension where there is such a feeling of soft joy and fully spread throughout everything, evenly, and I was now in that influence, that wonderfully gentle joy-feeling of beauty... there was a presence, a nature, a being, whether bird or whatever I saw out there, but it was communicating to me in that type of geometrical super-fine and refined structure, emanating from it, the whole scene, with the nature being, and suddenly... all the difficulties disappeared. I felt so pleasantly relaxed in a very lovely balanced way. It picked me up in a way of describing, so that now I could continue to go on and work at what here needs to be done. And it put a memory into me so that when I needed it, at any moment things got too overwhelming, I could remember that incident and focus on it so I could will myself through any difficulty, to keep going toward that awesome excellence I had experienced, when I never expected it or even thought it could be, like that...it was so wonderfully beautiful.

Yes. Deep listening to the Nature, the Naturalness of Life. It's where it's at.