Tuning Out of This World: Silence and Mantra at an Urban Ashram in Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity

• Published in: Educational studies (Ames) 2018-07, Vol.54 (4), p.448-464
• Main Author: Bliss, S.A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustics; Educational Philosophy; Ethnography; Foreign Countries; Metacognition; Religious Cultural Groups; Spiritual Development; Teaching Methods; Transformative Learning; Urban Areas
• ISSN: 0013-1946; 1532-6993
• DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2018.1473867

Feeling 'solid' is no longer an option as we are fraught with uncertainty in Zygmunt Bauman's (1925-2017) liquid modernity. The discussion of strategies to deal with uncertainties is open to educators. How might educators engage inner silence, sound, and re-sounding in order to navigate uncertain waters? If sounds are educational and the listener can render external sounds into embodied meaning, then it follows-the one who resounds is also able to render meaning from within. Furthering the notion of primal embodied sounds, including breath and mantra, I explore accessing an inner-technology. This article presents how a turn toward an inner experience of sound articulates new ways of being and knowing, and functioning in the world. In order to document how silence and sound are perceived and embodied, I begin with explorations of silence, breathing, and mantra (sacred repeated words or script). An introduction to my research site and participants provides a brief outline of my ethnographic research with residents of an urban ashram in a major city in Canada. I provide excerpts from interviews with 9 meditators who regularly attend early-morning sadhana (daily spiritual practice from 4:00 AM to 6:30 AM). To conclude, I query pedagogical possibilities of silence and sound. In sum, this article queries possibilities in interrupting discomforts by reorienting to breathing, silence, and mantra in order to live in Bauman's liquid modernity.