1.6 Defining Listening to the SONG of Life

To summarize, listening to the SONG of life represents a developmental progression beginning with conscious awareness as a starting point. The progression continues with attention processes like sensory perception, meaning-making, intuitive understanding, and dualistic and non-dualistic ways of knowing. This process can evolve into the deeper listening of contemplation as a long, loving, leisurely, look at the real^[1] which may progress into the deepest kind of contemplative-meditative spiritual listening described by world religious-spiritual traditions as nirvana, satori, enlightenment, awakening, mystical union, and cosmic consciousness.^[2]

Future chapters will cover each aspect of listening to the SONG of life (self, others, nature, and God-Goddess-the Divine) in greater depth. To conclude this section of Chapter One, I develop metaphors of listening to the SONG of life to assist the reader in further understanding and recalling the four SONG contexts.