When we think about hearing, we usually assume it is a simple, straightforward process: a sound is made “over there,” it travels through the air, reaches our ears, and we hear it as coming from that direction. This is what we are taught at school, and at a practical level it seems self-evidently true. Yet when we examine hearing more closely, it reveals three distinct levels of understanding. Each level is valid in its own domain, but each also collapses when it is mistaken for the whole truth.
 
These three levels can be described as:
● the taught physical explanation
● the physiological and perceptual explanation
● the deeper truth of awareness itself
 
The Taught Physical Explanation
In the standard explanation, sound is treated as a mechanical wave. A source vibrates. The vibration creates pressure waves in the air. Those waves travel outward in all directions. When they reach the ears, they cause tiny vibrations in the eardrum. These vibrations are converted into nerve signals and sent to the brain.
If a person standing five metres due south strikes a bell, physics says the sound waves originate at that location and propagate through space. Because the sound reaches the nearer ear first and with slightly greater intensity, the brain calculates the direction and concludes that the sound came from the south.
At this level, everything seems clean, objective, and measurable:
● sound travels
● space contains it
● the ears receive it
● the brain computes it
● the listener hears it “from over there”
This model is extremely useful for engineering, medicine, architecture, and communication. It explains how microphones work, how hearing aids function, and why acoustics matter in rooms and concert halls. But as an explanation of what is actually experienced, it is incomplete. It quietly assumes that sound is first “out there” in space and only later appears in awareness. That assumption is precisely what begins to unravel at the next level.
 
The Physiological and Perceptual Explanation
When we look more carefully at lived experience, something subtler appears. In direct experience, we do not first hear “south,” “five metres away,” or “over there.” What we first experience is simply a vibration appearing in awareness. Only afterward does the mind assign:
● direction
● distance
● source
● and meaning
The ears do not hear direction. The brain does not hear sound. What they process are pressure differences and electrical signals. Direction is not heard. Direction is inferred.
From a perceptual point of view, the sequence is not:
sound → space → awareness
It is:
vibration in awareness → interpretation → spatial attribution
In other words, the mind quietly builds the world after the raw sensory event appears. This happens so quickly that we usually never notice the construction process at all. We feel as though we directly hear “a bell over there,” when in fact we first experience an unlocated event and only then place it into a spatial map.
This is why simple experiments can be so revealing. When a person closes their eyes and hears a bell strike, they feel very sure they know where the sound came from. Yet their certainty is the certainty of the interpretive system, not of direct perception itself.
At this level, hearing is already seen not as a passive reception of an external world, but as an active construction taking place within the nervous system. And yet, even this level still assumes something more fundamental that it does not itself explain. It still assumes that awareness is a by-product of the brain. That assumption dissolves at the third level.
 
The Deeper Truth: Sound and the Field of Awareness
At the deepest level of inquiry, we are no longer asking how sound travels or how the brain interprets it. We are asking a more radical question: Where does sound actually appear? Not in theory. Not in diagrams. But in direct experience.
When this is examined honestly, a quiet but profound truth reveals itself:
● Sound does not appear “in space” first.
● Sound appears in awareness first.
● Space itself appears in awareness.
● Direction appears in awareness.
● Distance appears in awareness.
● The listener appears in awareness.
At this level, awareness is not something inside the body. The body, the ears, the brain, the sound, and the world all appear within awareness.
From this perspective, the question “From which direction does the sound come?” becomes a secondary, conceptual overlay. It is a useful story told after the event, but it is not the event itself.
From the deepest view:
● The sound does not travel into awareness.
● Awareness opens as the sound.
● The sound does not come from “over there.”
● “Over there” is a structure created within awareness after the sound is already present.
This does not invalidate physics or physiology. It simply places them in their proper domain: they describe the patterns that appear within awareness, not the source of awareness itself. At this level, awareness is not multidimensional in the way space is multidimensional. It is prior to dimension altogether. Dimensions arise within it. They do not contain it.
 
How the Three Levels Fit Together
These three levels do not contradict one another. They nest. The physical explanation describes the mechanical pattern. The physiological explanation describes how the pattern is constructed into experience. The deeper explanation reveals the field in which both the pattern and the construction appear.
Problems only arise when one level is taken to be the whole truth. If we stop at physics, awareness is reduced to machinery. If we stop at physiology, awareness is reduced to a by-product. If we look directly at awareness itself, both machinery and by-product are seen as appearances within a more fundamental field.
 
The Question of Direction Revisited
So if someone strikes a bell five metres to the south and we ask, “From where was the sound heard?” there are three valid answers, depending on the level we are speaking from:
At the physical level, it was heard from the south.
At the perceptual level, a vibration was heard, and its direction was inferred by the mind.
At the deepest level, the sound appeared in awareness, and direction was added afterward as a conceptual overlay.
And at this deepest level, the most accurate “pointing” is, in fact, not to point at all. Because pointing belongs to space. And the sound appears before space is consulted.
 
Why This Matters
This is not an abstract philosophical curiosity. It has real consequences.
When we see that sound, sight, thought, and sensation all arise within awareness, the sense of being a separate observer located somewhere behind the eyes begins to soften. The rigid boundary between “inside” and “outside” becomes less certain. Experience becomes less about a person having consciousness and more about consciousness expressing itself as a person.
This shift does not make the world disappear. It makes the world appear in a new light.
Sound is no longer something that merely travels through space to strike a listener. It is something that unfolds directly within the field of being itself.