Hearing beyond Death in the Bardo: The Highest Notes are hard to hear: chapter 41, of Tao Te Ching

Personally I prefer Gia-fu Feng's translation. I think the highest note - in music we now know that the highest pitch we hear externally actually resonates the brain as a whole as ultrasound which is then quantum coherent resonance of the microtubules with 3000 times greater electrical conductance as normal. This is called the "hypersonic effect" of the five tones. It's not from Western tuning but rather the nonwestern tuning using natural harmonics resonance.
 
How do you translate chapter 41? Chinese Philosophy and culture professor Emeritus Patrick E. Moran:
 

Lin Yutang :

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Great music is faintly heard

J H McDonald:

  Quote

the greatest sounds cannot be heard,

J Legge:

  Quote

Loud is its sound, but never word it said;

translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English):

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The highest notes are hard to hear;

Humphreys:

  Quote

the loudest sound can scarcely be heard;

Cleary:

 the great sound has a rarefied tone

The secret here is that young people can hear ultrasound because their jing level is strong, and their mind is pure - the heart energy is open still.

the sound current of enlightenment in buddhist mysticism - Medium

https://medium.com/.../the-sound-current-of-enlightenment-in-buddhist-mysticism-d3...

Oct 14, 2013 - Comparative Mysticism — Some References to Inner Seeing, Inner Hearing, and Sound in Buddhism. The Divine Eye ... The Divine Ear According to the Buddha. “I have proclaimed to my ... “In the sutra the Buddha praised this method, the meditation on listening, as the best method for enlightenment.

 “It is easiest to hear this Sound when it is quiet, particularly at night-time. Once you have identified this Sound, then you place your awareness on it without wavering. Resting your mind in the Sound, you continue to listen, going further and further into the Sound itself.” (“Mind Beyond Death”, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Snow Lion Publications)

 “As you calm down, you can experience the Sound of Silence in the mind. You hear it as a kind of high frequency Sound, a ringing Sound that’s always there. It is just normally never noticed. Now when you begin to hear that Sound of Silence, it’s a sign of emptiness — of silence of the mind. It’s something you can always turn to. As you concentrate on it and turn to it, it can make you quite peaceful and blissful. Meditating on that, you have a way of letting the conditions of the mind cease without suppressing them with another condition. Otherwise you just end up putting one condition over another.” (Ajahn Sumedho, a bhikkhu of the Theravadan school of Buddhism, from, The Sound of Silence)

Listening in the Bardo: Hearing Beyond Sound - Kris Oster, Ph.D

www.mythicrhythm.com/listening-in-the-bardo-hearing-beyond-sound/

Ethnomusicologist Guy Beck relates this kind of internal (or imaginal) hearing to non-linguistic sound, which is characterized as “sounds of objects employed in ... Life itself is a bardo state and while we are alive we also experience the bardos of dream and meditation; the one voice chord chanting technique seems to have ...

“Ananda and all you who listen here

Should inward turn your faculty

Of hearing to hear your own nature

Which alone achieves Supreme Bodhi.

That is how enlightenment is won.

Buddhas as many as the Ganges’ sand

Entered this one gateway to Nirvana.

All past Tathagathatas

Have achieved this method.”

(“The Surangama Sutra”, Selections from the Upasaka Lu K’uan Yu Translation, Published by Rider and Company, London)

“The Law of Attention: Nada Yoga and the Way of Inner Vigilance”, by Edward Salim Michael.

 The musical technique used by the Buddhist Tibetan monks of Gyume Tantric Monastery and Gyuto Tantric University in Lhasa to create the low, resonant, growling sound is called the “one voice chord.” How these monks created this chanting style has been attributed to internal hearing in a dream:

One night in 1433 AD, the Tibetan Lama Je Tzong Sherab Senge awoke from a startling dream. He had heard a voice in the dream unlike any voice he knew. It was a low voice, unbelievably deep, sounding more like the growl of a wild bull than anything human. (Hightower 2000)

According to the legend, the lama was instructed by the dream to create a new tantric chanting style that would “embody both the masculine and the feminine aspects of the divine energy” (Hightower 2000). Alexander Berzin connects the genesis of the one voice chord with another lama, Tsongkhapa, a guru of Je Tzong Sherab Senge.

Tsongkhapa had two styles of chanting at different times in his life, based on visions he had, in which protectors chanted to him in these ways. The two are called the mountain-cracking voice ( ri-bo rags-pa’i skad ) and the waterfall-crashing voice ( chu-der sgrogs-pa’i skad ). Both styles are with an extremely base voice, with the former being a flat monotone and the later undulating and producing overtones. (Berzin 2003)

 In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hearing is one of many vehicles in which the soul is moved through the bardo; during each state that the psyche encounters in the journey, the ego’s projections are dissolved one by one (in a strangely logical sequence) until the “end,” the Great Perfection, is reached. The person who has died is listening to the voice of their guru read the text for seven or more days, despite the fact they no longer possess the physical apparatus they once used for hearing. The sound of liberation in the bardo is the non-linguistic, imaginal version of the “one voice chord” transforming into the insight of linguistic sound:

when the sound of dharmata roars like a thousand thunders,
may it be transformed into the sound of mahayana teachings. (Freemantle 103)

The small universe meditation or microcosmic orbit found in Kriya Yoga as circulation of energy - also found in Egypt and West Asian alchemy - is because the Fire goes into the Earth to turn the Water into Air with air being Aion or the Wind element as formless awareness that is listened to - in the Inner Ear method of Buddhism. This meditation is based on 12 harmonic nodes along the body-mind just as the 12 notes are from the 1:2:3:4: as infinite resonance of Emptiness-Yang-Yin or the "three gunas of no guna."

 Life relies also on quantum entanglement of phonons - it's what holds DNA together in the double helix. Like strong psychedelic shrooms or ayahuasca DMT-based plant bark and leaves - our left brain ego is very fragile but Mother Nature has all things happening at the same time at the speed of light that is from nonlocal noncommutative phase - the 5th dimension as eternal listening. So our sense of time is very fluid - mystics can see the ancient past of a place - the spirit happenings - and also see the future as precognition. But what does not change is the process of listening or hearing as energy that is ONE - it's called yin-yang balanced or noncommutative phase - or NADA in India - N/om - the Mother goddess is called the buzzing of the bees. The highest sound we hear externally resonates the whole brain as ultrasound which has 3000 times greater electrical conductance of the microtubules of the neurons as macroquantum coherence. Nonlocal quantum consciousness is real and proven by science and exists before and after the Big Bang - as the 5th dimension of reality. The indigenous people call it the Womb at the Center of the Universe or the Egyptians call it the Cosmic Mother that will not be Unveiled.



 
So that's professor Patrick Edwin Moran's translation of chapter 41.
 
The secret of the "5 sounds" is that the Chinese tuning used a pentatonic scale but as Professor Moran explains, it was constructed from an alternation of yang and yin or 3/2 frequency and 3/4 frequency. http://users.wfu.edu/moran/Cathay_Cafe/G_tar.html
 
So when I say "frequency" I don't mean the Western definition of frequency based on symmetric math. Rather instead the origin of the original fundamental pitch is not named - it is inaudible as the qi energy-consciousness.
 
However, in the 1980s, China did discover bone flute of 8,000 to 9,000 years old.  This is the oldest playable instrument and was tuned to the same scale based on the yang and yin intervals of 3/2 and 3/4.
 

  Quote

But something that is remarkable, is many of the bone flutes found throughout the world are tuned to the pentatonic scale. Many claim that these flutes are between 40,000 and 60,000 years old.

 
So every human culture around the world uses the Octave or 1:2 and Perfect Fifth or 3/2 and Perfect Fourth or 3/4. The secret of alchemy is that actually the 3 as the origin of the 10,000 things is also the "one" as being "not-two" or nondualism. Music theory is based on pitch as a spatial location that does not exist - so a "phase space." So with 3/2 is it C to G while 2/3 is C to F as the subharmonic. So they are both Perfect Fifth but in relation to the same "fundamental pitch" the 2/3 is doubled as 4/3 since you have C to F as Perfect Fourth and then F to C (octave) as Perfect Fifth. Again it is noncommutative phase. The Perfect Fourth is resonated from Yin as 3/4 back into Yang as 3/2 and that is the secret of alchemy.
 
And so there is no fundamental pitch since that process is eternal listening that is nonlocal - or yin-yang at the same time as Yuan Qi (the air in the water).
 
So it is not as frequency is defined in Western tuning (unless you consider the actual orthodox, early Pythagorean alchemy music tuning that was also based on pitch pipes like the Chinese tuning and had the same meditation secret). So Michael Winn gets into this - but he doesn't quite understand the specific secrets of the music theory - as it relates to geometry as noncommutative phase. In other words there can not be a "fundamental pitch" or as the Pythagoreans stated, "One is not a number." There can be eternal listening but the fundamental pitch is always changing as a spacetime shift of formless awareness.

Magic Numbers, Planetary Tones and the Body - CiteSeerX

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.6256&rep=rep1...

 

by M Winn - ‎Related articles

 
So for example in the http://springforestqigong.com small universe meditation there are 12 nodes - because the 12 note scale in Chinese music tuning is actually the infinite harmonics of yin and yang. And so again each note is also yin and yang as complementary opposites with 3/2 and then 3/4. So in the meditation the explanation from qigong master chunyi Lin is that the yang governing channel is the sound OM for energy going up while the sound MUA is energy going down the front. But then in the meditation he says Om and Mua for each alternating note. The reason is that the Chinese scale is created from a change of direction of zero time and infinite frequency and infinite frequency and zero time - with each note. So Fields Medal math professor Alain Connes explains that for each zero point in space there is a "triple spectral" of frequency as 2, 3, infinity. What that means is you have 2/3 and 3/2 at the same time at zero time and zero space but infinite frequency energy.