Why Inner Spontaneous Sounds are not Tinnitus
Tags: Meditation, Science, Sound, Mind, Tinnitus

First, let’s get this out of the way.

Tinnitus is the name of a symptom, not a specific disease. The word means that sounds are experienced, but have no identifiable source. It may be a symptom of a disease if they are not voluntary — i.e., you cannot choose to hear them sometimes and not hear them at other times. It’s only in the case where they are involuntary that they are truly a disease symptom. After all, if you can turn them off whenever you want, then you’re clearly not suffering.

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Because tinnitus can be caused by ear damage, or other organic issues — even drinking too much coffee for some individuals — and in such cases the tinnitus is involuntary, most doctors and specialists take the presence of any sound without an identifiable source to be evidence of damage or disease.

But aside from an actual organic issue being present, which can include structural damage to the brain or body, what the underlying disease actually is, in the case of most tinnitus symptoms, is not known to medical science. Therefore, there is a problem with labeling all cases of tinnitus as evidence of disease. It is truly an unscientific and insupportable diagnosis, given that so little is known about the origin of these spontaneous sounds — in most cases.

But let’s take a closer look at the occurrence of what is sometimes labeled: “meditation-induced tinnitus” and see if it is justified to ever take it as evidence of disease and/or physical damage.

Meditation results in a calming of the mind through a reduction in the mental chatter which is responsible for most of the distractedness in our lives, as well as being the primary source of our stress. By reducing mental chatter, momentary voids are left during which we can become aware of various inner spontaneous sounds that have no identifiable source, starting with the silence of those voids.

But, unlike organically-caused tinnitus with which you don’t have the choice to pay attention to it and bring it into your focus of awareness, or not pay attention and have it recede into the background gracefully, until disappearing entirely, with “meditation-induced tinnitus” you do have that control — as long as you can control your attention, which is, of course, the ability to concentrate that is one of the first goals of mind-training.

It is this lack of control over the former, organically-caused, type of tinnitus that makes it a dis-ease for those people who suffer from it, while the latter, controllable sort, isn’t a bother — again, as long as you can control the focus of your attention. If you can turn your attention away from these sounds and no longer hear them, then how can they be considered evidence of a disease?

And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that meditation-induced tinnitus arises as a result of meditating. It is a known result of certain types of meditation.

Another point that must be considered is that the “ringing” of organically-induced tinnitus blocks out other sounds, making it hard for the sufferer to hear less intense sounds. This is one of the characteristics of organically-induced tinnitus that makes it a malady for those who suffer from it.

On the other hand, inner spontaneous sounds that arise when we quiet our minds can be exceptionally loud and yet you can still hear even the faintest of external sounds that your physical hearing is normally capable of. In fact, one of the hallmarks of using inner spontaneous sound as a support for meditation is that as you concentrate on these resonant sounds and you pick out more and more subtle ones, you still hear the more powerful tones, as well as any unblocked⁠¹ external sounds around you. The inner spontaneous sounds don’t go away until you release them from your attentional focus, and they don’t block subtler sounds.

It should also be noted that one of the few effective treatments for tinnitus symptoms is learning “mental coping techniques” that teach you how to turn your attention away from the sounds. These “mental coping techniques’’ are nothing more than meditation techniques repurposed to helping individuals who are experiencing tinnitus.

But in the case of organically-caused tinnitus, these techniques just make the presence of the ringing more bearable, muffling it slightly by directing the attention away from the ringing — but it is still always there and not subject to your desire to “turn it off,” thus it is truly evidence of a malady.

Interestingly, the first inner spontaneous sound that most people can access is a metallic-like squeal that grows more shrill the more your attention is unwaveringly concentrated, but which fades into the background as your attention becomes distracted. Perhaps this is evidence that what most doctors view as a physical disease symptom is in fact simply an indication of the strength of one’s attentional focus in life.

This would also mean that the effectiveness of the “mental coping techniques” is derived, for the most part, from their application to inner spontaneous sound, and not, as normally assumed, to an organically-caused disease symptom.

Another one of the hallmarks of the use of inner spontaneous sound as a meditation support is that it seems to significantly increase auditory sensitivity over time even to external sounds, so that you hear more of the external sound around you, even being able to pick out individual sounds that are normally too faint to hear among the surrounding cacophony of sound.

To sum this up, there is, at all times, a clear distinguishability between inner spontaneous sound and external sound. External sounds arise and pass away, like the notes in a song, while inner spontaneous sounds are always there if you turn your attention towards them, and while their intensity may vary, they remain present until you turn away from them. And it is this characteristic of inner spontaneous sound that makes a world of difference in their effect upon us.

ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།

Footnotes:

¹ Normally, when using inner spontaneous sound as a meditation support, external sounds are blocked out so that they do not become a distraction to meditation.