What's That Ringing in My Ears?

Blood makes noise

It's a ringing in my ear

And I can't really hear you in the thickening of fear

Suzanne Vega, “Blood Makes Noise”

I was moved by a recent blog from the author Sara Davidson about her struggles with memory as she ages. I’ve had similar difficulty accepting the reality that I could use a lot more RAM myself, as I regularly forget not just names and dates but even the occasional common word. (Can’t recall exactly which ones at the moment.) Many of us who have passed into our sixties and seventies have trouble with memory, but in the last few years I’ve added to that the need to cope with progressive hearing loss. 

As with memory, our hearing range doesn’t fade out all at once but in slow, byte-size stages. Mine started declining more than a decade ago, and I used to blame it on too many Ramones concerts (I remember one show at Hurrah when I walked past a speaker stack and my knees buckled from the sheer volume). The Ramones' songs were so visceral, danceable, and blissfully short that I became addicted to playing them really loud on the just-invented Sony Walkman. Rock musicians themselves have a much worse problem, of course, and they have written about it, from Pete Townsend to Suzanne Vega. But other factors add to the problems created by loud music—genetics, poor circulation, inflammation, earwax buildup—so it’s hard to single out any one culprit.

The Ramones at CBGB Photo by Allan Tannenbaum

At age six I had an ear infection that caused intense earaches before it was finally diagnosed and cured, which may have done some damage early on. And through much of my childhood, we lived within fifty feet of the Long Island Railroad, where locomotives blasted their warning signals while approaching the station—loud enough to bury occasional comic punchlines on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Still, I feel conflicted about blaming my gradual hearing impairment on my love of music and my desire to get as close to it as I could. After all, I began my writing career by reviewing jazz concerts and recordings, and I spent countless hours listening with joy to the great music of the 20th century. I even felt fortunate that most of the music I adored—mainly jazz and punk rock—was then so relatively low in popularity that I could sit as close as I wanted to the source. To be ensconced a few yards away from the likes of Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Sarah Vaughan and Teddy Wilson was, to me, the equivalent of having been privileged centuries ago to sit in the room as Mozart or Bach performed their chamber music. 

I wouldn’t trade my experience and memory of all that splendid music—and I include rockers like Johnny Thunders, Chrissie Hynde, Blondie, and the redoubtable Ramones—for unimpaired hearing today. I believe that I came here in this lifetime, at least in part, to bear witness to the music and to do what I could to promote it to a wider audience. The slight discomfort of diminished hearing is a small price to pay, although if I had it to do over I would have turned the volume down on my Walkman.

I have to admit, though, that my recent experience with what I call my “hearing devices” has been less than optimal. Let’s begin with the fact that I resist calling them “hearing aids” because that makes me feel even older than my numeric age. I got my first pair about eight years ago, and wore them only in places where ambient sound made it harder than usual to hear—restaurants, meetings, meditation classes. But fate took a hand last year when I lost one of them. In the process of shopping for a new pair, I also had to come to terms with the amount of earwax that was accumulating in both ears. I discovered that some PCPs and nurses are better than others at cleaning out wax-encrusted ears, and I was elated when I discovered a skilled ENT who was efficient and relatively painless. My hearing improved, even without devices, immediately after he removed scary amounts of the stuff. 

Despite how it looks, earwax is a good thing, produced by glands in the ear canal to protect the ear and keep it clean. But too much build-up can diminish hearing acuity over time, so I’ve learned to do my own cleaning. I use an inexpensive kit from NeilMed called Clearcanal, and a device from Bebird that allows me to see into my ears with a wand topped by a tiny camera, and remove earwax via a WiFi connection to my phone. Instead of complaining about how irritating hearing aids can be—and they can—I feel  a sense of control by taking charge of my own self-cleaning.  

And yet, the main skill I’ve needed to develop is the ability to accept things as they are. We age, our memory declines, and hearing and other senses diminish. In this I received the greatest help not from any physician or tech gadget but from the wisdom of Yogananda. You likely know about Paramahansa Yogananda’s classic Autobiography of a Yogi, which enjoys the distinction of having been the favorite book to give away of both George Harrison and Steve Jobs (who had it distributed to all who attended his funeral service). Jobs claimed to have first read the book as a teenager and to have reread it every year until he passed on. Much as I love that book, replete with extraordinary tales of astral travel and miraculous healings, I have come to enjoy many of Yogananda’s lesser known books, all packed with supremely practical guidance that may be less mind-boggling but no less helpful.

Yogananda in Santa Rosa with Luther Burbank, 1924

The Divine Romance is one of a series of books collecting the many talks Yogananda gave when he was living in America from 1920 until his death in 1952. Its subtitle, “Collected Talks and Essays on Realizing God in Daily Life,” is indicative of Yogananda’s scientific knack for offering advice to help maintain our physical and psychological energy while on the spiritual path, based on his close observation of human nature and motivation. He was knowledgeable about many of the scientific advances of the day, foreshadowing the current movement to merge spirituality with the revolution of quantum physics. He was friends with the pioneering botanist and horticulturalist Luther Burbank, visiting him frequently at his home in California, and initiated Burbank into the practice of Kriya Yoga that he brought with him from India. He often emphasized the need to cultivate good habits and unlearn bad ones, as in a talk he gave at his Self-Realization Fellowship headquarters in Los Angeles in 1939:

The helplessness you feel is caused by no one but yourself. Your weak mind is being pulled backward by the very cords that you have tied to bad habits. Most people are self-hypnotized by their environment and wrong habits, and by strong tendencies and moods brought with them from past lives. It is an insult to your mind and to the image of God within to allow yourself to be hypnotized by these limitations. You must break your bad habits and develop the power of mind by which you can command your own life.

It has taken me several years to develop the habit of using my hearing devices all day, or most of the day. They tend to make my ears itch, and they often need readjustment at inconvenient times. Yet, like many recent models, they are WiFi-enabled,  so I can also use them to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Better still, unlike Apple’s AirPods, they don’t need to be recharged every few hours; one overnight charge lasts all day. Walking around my block the other day, I was treated to an astonishing array of birdsong that I wouldn’t have heard so clearly without my “annoying” devices. It was almost unreal, as if the natural sounds of jays and mourning doves, finches and robins were being downloaded stereophonically. Unreal, maybe, not at all unpleasant. On the down side, now I can also hear annoying sounds I was able to ignore in the past, like the hum of certain electronic appliances. When I mentioned this to my wife, Louanne, who has unusually acute hearing, she informed me that she has been hearing those same annoying sounds forever. 

Yogananda has said that to some extent our habits are the result of karmic traces from past lives. This can seem distressing, even a bit arbitrary, but what if it’s true? Way back in 1977, when I was covering the New York music scene at the Soho News, I was occasionally assigned to interview people outside of my field, including some I would never have chosen myself. The most memorable of these interviews was with a German-born psychic with the assumed name of Maha Yogi A.S. Narayana.

Photo by Allan Tannenbaum

The A.S. stood for his birth name, Alfred Schmielewski, while Narayana, his yogic name, is one of the epithets of Vishnu. (I called him Swami.) He claimed that when he was a very young child in Germany during the war, he could perceive where the bombs were going to fall, which tipped him off to his unusual abilities. Besides offering personal predictions, Swami had a business bent. His record included forecasting oil and mineral deposits for exploration companies in Canada, where he now lived, boasting a success rate of 80 percent. I was expecting to write a wry takedown of this presumptive fraud, but soon after I arrived at his hotel room at the Sheraton in midtown, he caught me completely off guard by recommending that I quit my job as a journalist and become a rock and roll musician, or else start a literary career. I had already tried rock and roll as a teenager, without much success, and it would be another eight years before I published my first book—about the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap!—so he wasn’t entirely off the mark. Besides, I enjoyed hanging out at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, both at their peak then. 

“I could see you onstage, jumping up and down and having a great time as a rock and roll singer,” Swami said. “And you would have been very successful—if it weren’t for the shitty inferiority complex that your father hung on you.”

The truth of this remarkable insight didn’t hit me fully at first, but it began to sink in while I was listening back to the cassette that evening. My dad, a quintessentially domineering Italian father, ruled the roost as his father had before him (beginning in Southern Italy, where he was born). He was a good man and rather disciplined, but he had seen combat in Germany during the war and had come home with what would today be diagnosed as PTSD. As a child, I feared and despised his unpredictable outbursts of temper and corporal punishment, but until I heard it from Swami I had been in denial about the effects of his random fury on my temperament.

Despite being a science fiction fan, having read through Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books as a teenager, I had a strong skeptical streak and didn’t especially believe in psychics. Yet here I was, in the presence of the least likely-looking psychic I might imagine, who seemed to know things about me that I could barely acknowledge myself. Expanding his range in rapid-fire progression, the Maha Yogi asserted that Martian pyramids had appeared in photos of the Red Planet that NASA had suppressed, not exactly common knowledge in October 1977. And he predicted—accurately, as it turned out—that Ed Koch would be elected mayor of New York the following month. I decided to test Swami about his advertised ability to read previous lives, and asked if he could provide me with one. I had long believed that reincarnation was far more credible than the Catholic doctrine I’d been raised with that we only get one go-round, but I had never thought about it in personal terms. 

“When I look at life in the past. . .” Swami said, as he took a deep breath and rubbed the moonstone ring on his right hand, a cabochon that looked as big as the Moon to me. He seemed about to trail off, but then described in glowing terms my supposed life as a man of leisure in 18th-century Florence. “I see a man in a large house with many rooms, the walls lined with Renaissance paintings—Pisanello, Raffaello. . . .” Here his voice took on an air of luxuriance that mirrored the life he was describing. “He played the harpsichord. I can hear him play Vivaldi. A little Scarlatti, but especially Vivaldi. Giving literary teas, spending summer in the Campania.” 

Could he have been reading my subconscious fantasy world, or remote-viewing my apartment in the Village with all my beloved Scarlatti and Vivaldi records? Then he dropped the hammer. “And this was your problem when you reentered your present life. Your father did not know how to react to you. He responded the way a peasant responds to a nobleman, with disdain and a bit of fear.” Here he paused for a beat. “ I'm sorry if this is disturbing you.”

Swami may have read the look of incredulity spreading over my face as emotional disturbance. Earlier, though, he had given me an accurate reading of my physical ailments. For one thing, he “saw” several misaligned vertebrae in the lumbar and cervical sections of my spine. I had been having back pain since my college days, but not until two decades after this interview would MRIs confirm his readings. Of more immediate interest to me, he identified the ear infection at age six that I mentioned earlier. The earaches were serious enough for my parents to have taken me to a hearing doctor in Manhattan, who was, I am certain now, incompetent. (Years later, I learned from my mother that he had thoroughly alarmed them by insisting that I was going deaf, and that they should teach me to read lips. Instead, they took me to a clinic, where I was diagnosed with a viral infection and was given a shot of penicillin, after which the infection completely disappeared.) Swami not only knew about the infection, but which ear it was in. I remembered it as the right ear but he insisted it was the left.  A phone call to Mom that evening confirmed that Swami had been right. 

I wondered, after the interview was over, that if Swami was right about my ear infection, he could also have been right about my past life as a musician. If, as Yogananda insists, both positive and negative karmic traces persist over lifetimes, why didn’t I have more success as a musician in my current life? I had saved up to buy a beautiful Gretsch hollow-body electric guitar, had studied jazz with a local teacher, and rocked out with a garage band on my block. I just didn’t seem to have the natural ear that most musicians are born with. I had enough auditory discernment to appreciate and write about music, just not enough to overcome my lack of an exuberant personality to play it in public. 

Even Yogananda didn’t guarantee that skills and abilities always reincarnate along with the soul’s habits and karmic traces. He did point out, though, that we can overcome these traces only in this material world, and shouldn’t expect to wait for the afterlife to resolve everything: 

You may say that life is ebbing away and you are going to die anyway, so why try for success? I would answer as the Gita says [Bhagavad Gita, II:72 and VIII:6], that at the moment of death, even one second before, if you can leave the body with the conviction that you are victorious in life, so shall it be. If you go with the conviction that you will be with the Lord, so shall it be. But if you go with the consciousness that you are done for, so shall it be. Whatever thoughts predominate as a result of the way you have lived your life, those thoughts determine your after-death state and the pattern of your next life. Can you remember that? There is no excuse to say that you are too old or otherwise unable to succeed materially and spiritually. 

Yogananda does offer a solution of sorts, if we’re up to the challenge. In another talk from The Divine Romance, he warns us that, “The delusion of identification with the body came with the creation of man, and that identification increases by pampering the body.” He adds,

In India our training is different than here in the West. We are taught to conquer the flesh, to mentally rise above body consciousness. If you love the body too much, you become unduly sensitive; you suffer whenever the body is uncomfortable. You have been taught to suffer, because you have been taught to depend too much on physical comfort for happiness. The desire for all sorts of comforts is a major source of pain. This is why the saints say we should not be attached to anything. . . . Never be so attached to anything that you become dissatisfied or unhappy or pained over the absence of it.

As it turned out, my petty complaints about the discomfort of wearing hearing devices had been leading me to disregard the comfort of someone close to me. Perhaps because my wife has such acute hearing, she speaks softly. By not wearing my devices all day, I was compelling her to speak louder than usual, and to strain her voice, and her throat, in the process.

Yogananda’s seemingly simple caveat about not being attached to comfort becomes increasingly relevant as we age. As the tinnitus that accompanies my gradual hearing loss becomes especially intense, I find myself missing the silence that I enjoyed before all that hissing and ringing set in. When I’m tempted to curse my fate, though, I remind myself that I’m lucky I can still hear at all—with help from my auditory devices. What’s a little inconvenience when I can still enjoy listening to the music that has been my soul companion for a long, long time?

For more on Yogananda, see my Instagram feed. https://www.instagram.com/peter_occhiogrosso

For Sara Davidson’s blog about memory loss: https://saradavidson.com/blog/

Life before earaches