​Pauline Oliveros and Process Theology


“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently
that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

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Pauline Oliveros describes Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.  Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening is my life practice," she explains, simply. 
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-- http://paulineoliveros.us/about.html

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Pauline Oliveros on Deep Listening

Deep Listening is expanding our attention. In Deep Listening we talk about two forms: focal attention and global attention. Focus [focal] is more like digital, in that focused attention needs to be renewed moment by moment, in order to exclusively follow a stream of some sort. A stream of speech for example; you have to keep renewing your attention to what is being said. All of us have the experience of being distracted for a minute and missing part of what someone has said. So, to keep your attention focused takes quite a bit of energy. Global attention is expanding to take in and listen to everything that is around you; inside of you. When we do this, and we can expand almost infinitely to include, and this is what I call inclusive listening, everything that is possible to listen to. Most of the time we are discarding what’s going on as not important, but in order to do what I call Deep Listening we have to include everything. (Pauline Oliveros, interviewed in Sound American, retrieved 10/19/2018)

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God's Practice as Deep Listening

Imagine along with process theologians that the universe itself is endowed with a conscious soul and that all the entities in the universe, connected to one another like cells in a body, are indeed the body of this soul.  The universe is God's body.  The entities have creativity or power of their own, which means that they are not mere puppets of the divine soul, but everything that happens in the universe is felt by the soul on its own terms and for its own sake but also in its connection with one another.  How might the soul "feel" these entities.  We might imagine this activity on the analogy of visual perception, but in human life vision often involves a sense of spatial distance.   We "see" the world a "outside" our bodies.  A better analogy would be listening, because in the act of listening the sounds we hear are both inside us and more than us, in the sense that they come from what is other than us.  Thus listening, as understood by Pauline Oliveros, might be a better way to imagine the way in which the soul of the universe feels the feelings of he world.  It feels the world in a listening way. (J. McDaniel)

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