KEEP QUIET AND LISTEN LEARNING TO LISTEN BETTER
Take a good look at your life. How many hours a day do you spend talking? And how many hours do you spend listening?
Most of the day, we are either talking or trying to talk! Have you noticed, whenever people are in a group, every person feels an intense need to monopolize the conversation.
Talking is a way of controlling the environment. Most people use talking as a way of showing their power. Not just by what they say, but how they say it, how long they talk - and how much they can control others' talking! No wonder, 'Shut up' is seen as the most humiliating term of abuse! If you are not allowed to talk, you feel as if you have been deprived of something very important, because everybody is competing to vomit his ideas and opinions on everyone else! We have all built up a whole storehouse of borrowed opinions from books and media but rarely do we get someone who is willing to listen to them!
When you eat, but cannot digest the food what happens?
You have to vomit it out!
In the same way, if you have read someone else's philosophies and ideas, but they have not become your personal experience, you haven't digested them, you end up vomiting them out.
Talking is not just to other people. When you are not talking to someone else, you are talking to yourself and that's even more dangerous. Talking to ourselves is what we all do, practically every minute of our waking time. All our plans and worries are nothing but - talking to ourselves! Talking to yourself is nothing but the inner chatter, the flow of thoughts that keeps playing in your mind, continuously disturbing you. At least with outer conversations, there is a break sometimes. But this inner chatter is continuous. It can drive you mad! Actually, many times, speaking to others is just a way of escaping from your own being, from your own inner chatter. That is why so much talking is going on in the world!
Today, there is an acute shortage of listening in the world!
More than a century ago, Bertrand Russel predicted that listening will become the highest paid profession of our time. And it has happened! Today, practically every person especially in the West has a personal listener. People pay huge sums to the 'shrink' or counselor, not for solving their problems but simply for listening to them. Because who else is there to listen? Today, no one has the time to listen, to give attention to the other.
Your attention is your energy!
When you are so low on energy that you don't even have enough for yourself, how are you going to give energy to others?
Most of the time, you don't even hear when others are talking to you! All the time, there is so much being spoken around you if only you can listen!
Talking is not always through words.
In fact, the most important part of our communication with one another is nonverbal.
When your wife brings you coffee in the morning, listen to her.
Not just to her words, even to her actions.
Does she put the cup down with a bang? What is she trying to tell you? Is your child throwing a loud tantrum every time you have guests? Don't listen to his tantrum; listen to him. He's trying to tell you that he needs more of your time, your attention. Tantrums are the only way he can get attention right now. Is there something you can do about it?
There is a famous Zen koan (riddle) which says:
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a noise?
Recently a harassed young mother who attended one of my programs came and asked me jokingly: Swamiji, if a child falls in a forest and there is no one to hear him, does he make a noise?!
We are also no different from children! All our noise, all our talking is nothing but a way of asking for attention. If everybody learns to listen, there will be no need to talk!
Never mind listening to others - are you listening to yourself? For instance, do you listen to your own body anymore? When you go to a party and overeat or drink too much, you can hear your body screaming at you to stop. When you sit up late watching television, your body is crying, Enough, I need rest! In fact, all diseases are nothing but your body's way of asking for your attention, for your concern.
But do you listen?
When you get home from work, you hear yourself slamming the door hard. Do you do the same when you get home after a movie? That slamming noise speaks volumes about how you feel about your job. How can you change that?
And unless you listen, how will you even know that something is wrong?
We have forgotten the gentle art of listening.
Listening is not just about listening to someone else or yourself talk.
Listening is also about listening to the silence that is in us, around us. All our talking is just waves upon an ocean of beautiful silence. Have you ever heard that silence?
Create space and time in your life for listening to silence.
Make a practice of spending some time everyday doing this.
Welcome natural sounds into your silence.
Don't listen for the sake of hearing anything, for the sake of getting some information.
Just be aware; be open to the silence.
It is in silence that you learn the most. Only in silence can you truly understand life, poetry, nature.
The Zen master Basho says in a haiku:
Sitting silent, doing nothing, and the grass grows by itself.
This silence is not a passive silence. It is a positive, listening silence. It is the silence of deep communion.
There is a big difference between communication and communion. Communication is what we are getting better and better at these days! Communication is the science of conveying information in words and actions. Communion is the pure transfer of energy it is beyond words. Nowadays we have mastered complex communication through telephones, mobile networks, internet but we don't know the simple ways of being in communion with each other!
Communion is the gift of the master.
It does not need words.
In fact, the master can give you more with his spells of silence than with his words if you know how to listen.
When you listen to the master, listen as you would listen to the birds or the wind. When you listen to the birds, do you believe or disbelieve? Do you agree or disagree? Neither! You simply allow. It is not an intellectual process. Simply listen with openness, with receptivity and you will automatically enter into deep communion with the master.
There is a verse in the Dakshinamurti Stotram about the communion between a young master and his disciples:
Chitram vatataror mooley
Vriddhah shishyaa gurur yuvah
Gurostu maunam vyaakhyaanam
Shishyaastu chinnah samshayah
(Beneath the banyan tree they sit the disciples old men, the guru a mere youth!
The guru speaks through Silence alone
But lo! The disciples' questions dissolve on their own!)
This is true communion.
When your listening is total, there is no longer any need for words. Where there is communion, words drop away naturally.
When the great Buddhist master Bodhidharma was on his deathbed, he called four of his disciples to find out who had listened best, who had learnt the most from the master. He put a common question to them: What is truth? The first disciple said, Truth is that which is beyond affirmation and negation. You have my skin, said the master to the disciple. The second disciple said, Truth is that which once seen, is forever seen. You have my flesh, said the master. Truth is no-thing, said the third disciple. You have my bones, said the master to him. The fourth disciple said nothing. In deep gratitude for the learning he had received, he simply bowed before the master and stood in communion with him. After a while, the master spoke. You have my marrow, he told the disciple.
Silence is a beautiful way of entering into meditation. In fact, silence itself is a great meditation technique. It is a great healing and rejuvenating power.
In silence, you achieve what Jesus calls the peace that passeth understanding.
As they say, sweet words are silver, but silence is golden.
So the next time you open your mouth to talk, first ask yourself whether it improves upon the silence!
LAUGH YOUR WAY