Lights In

Episode Title: The Bucket Brigade of Hearing — A Meditation on Felt Experience of Sound

In this episode of Lights In: The Unofficial Direct Felt Experience Meditation Study Guide for Annaka Harris’s Lights On, we follow a single ripple of sound from its first whisper in the air to its final transformation into meaning and memory within the human mind.

Guided by a poetic metaphor of a ten-person fireman line, we reimagine the process of hearing as a series of intimate, living handoffs—each step performed by cells and systems that don’t think, but feel. These firemen aren’t men at all, but molecules, membranes, bones, and neurons—each one passing the signal forward, not unchanged, but transformed by the nature of their response.

Is consciousness something that only appears at the end of this line—when you recognize a sound? Or is it something that flows all the way through, woven into every felt exchange?

Drawing inspiration from Thomas Nagel’s “what it is like to be” and Annaka Harris’s questions regarding consciousness as a functional felt experience in Lights On, this episode is an invitation to wonder:
If you’re hearing these words now, and they feel real to you,
then maybe the answer is already yes.
Maybe feeling matters. 
Maybe it always has.