I have a friend who listens to what people tell him, be they friend or stranger, as a means of figuring out what deep-level information they have to offer him, even when the conversations are about obvious, surface-level stuff. Perhaps you’ve done this before yourself as an experiment, a form of narcissism, or as an adventurer who needs the thrill of the high of seeking to feel alive.
Do messages come through others for us unconsciously? If so, is this exclusively what conversations are for, meaning there is no other type of conversation to be had? Is there only decoding the message, not discerning a coded conversation from a normal, “Hi, how ya doing?”
When we listen, does the act of listening come from silence or does it come from us? That is, are you listening with your self-centered ears of desire or is total listening the state that you’ve dissolved into?
Have you ever noticed how vocalizing, explaining, sharing deep wisdom and the inner work you did to arrive at it nullifies the aliveness of the depths the moment your words hit the air? It’s as if the “knowing” does not come from you, it invigorates and defines you, and you stop it the moment you talk about it. Well, it’s not like that, that’s exactly the case.
When listening as silence, not self, one understands all that is being communicated because you’re not breaking the communication into parts—this component/that component; the part we unconsciously ignore/the part we consciously discard; the part we focus on, and so forth. When silence is the “center,” all of it comes through in appropriate weight and measure, unfiltered by you with your noisy barriers of comparison and wanting to edit and own. This cannot happen when you are at the center listening.
What happens instead is that you edit the communication with an interval of thought called “interpretation.” You create a story in your image, like a god, and off you go on another adventure, satisfied for a time being occupied with something you feel is important and meaningful, but often is no more or less so than the peaks and valleys of a rollercoaster ride. Everybody you encounter is there for you, underpaid carnies pulling the levers that strap you in and start all your rides.
Even so, you will likely get it right enough of the time to falsely confirm that how you’re receiving communications is appropriate, because sometimes real messages do come through. A broken clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes. The problem is, when we listen from self, we will always be trapped in desire, because what we desire is to exist and therefore to be in action—to be the center of the action—and we want to be acting on behalf of our own furtherance. We may call this growth or evolution, but it’s simply perpetual motion for the sake of existing.
If there is another type of action that one needs to perform, how will you know? How can you passively hear what’s authentically being said when you are actively listening to further yourself?