All this talk of noise cancellation reminds me one of the Buddhist meditation classes I was at. The classes were held at the local community hall. On this particular occassion, it was being held in a room just upstairs from the hall, and this particular evening there was a band playing (usually the bands are at the weekends, but for some reason this was on our meditation evening). At the start of our 20 minutes of meditation the band hadn't started but, shortly after they got going, and they were loud!!!! Some people obviously found it too distracting and I could hear them fidgeting in their seats. I took my own hearing of the sound to simply recognise that I was not maintaining the focus of the meditation and so just chose to return to the focus. Yes, the noise did keep bringing me back to it, but again and again, I just used that as a trigger of recognition and returned to my focus. Within a short time, I was able to maintain my focus until the end of the meditation, and the noise simply wasn't an issue.
As the Buddhist teacher said afterwards, that was a good practice of our patience and focus.
From silence comes sound. To silence sound goes. Listen beyond the sound into the silence.
Hugs
Giles
