MINDFUL LISTENING

Very often the flow of our thoughts distracts us from giving someone our full attention. We take the present moment for granted. Our minds are awash with words and images and emotions that recreate the past and forecast the future. We listen to a friend, a family member, or a stranger from within this cloud of delusion. We nod our heads in agreement, missing words, gestures, and inflections of voice that might pull us deeper into the story, into the mystery and marvel of someone else’s life. On the other hand, if we are listening closely to this person, we usually have formed a judgement and are more concerned with the advice we want to give; so we cut him or her off and give our opinion, wanted or not. Or we simply relate the discussion to our own lives and refocus attention to our story—far more important and interesting than the world around us.

But is our story so important? Is what we have to say or think so important that the world stops for us and listens as if we were the ground of all being? We certainly would like to think so. But we must remember that there are six billion or so other minds like ourselves thinking in very much the same manner—regardless of intelligence or culture or socio-economic standing. Our inherent worth binds us more than our sense of separateness: intelligence, race, culture, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and gender pale in comparison to body, thought, feeling, perception, and consciousness. In these, we are all the same.

We want to be heard, we want to know that what we think, what we say, what we are matters to someone. It is a Catch-22. In seeking recognition of our value, we expose our most significant vulnerability: without acknowledgement from others, we won’t feel as important as we think we are. By vocalizing our opinions, extolling our virtues, regardless of whether or not others want to hear it, we justify our self-importance. Our words resonate like music through our brains and our bodies, lulling us into the belief that we matter more than others. We can fool ourselves into believing that we have the best interest of others in mind, but self-preservation is instinctual. It dictates our actions. It is our story, after all, and our story is the circle that encompasses everything we are. The story of our lives has a surprising effect on how we listen to the needs of others, as well as the needs of ourselves.

If you are too busy listening to your own inner chatter, how can you be open to the chatter of others? We all know people like this: endless talk about the mundane events of their lives, circling in upon themselves until nothing else exists but them. The sheer weight of the information exhausts us. But if we follow the breath and through the breath calm the body, thought, feeling, perception, and consciousness, we begin to discern the slight intonations of mood and know that something else is going on at a deeper level. We begin to discover their insecurities and doubts, their level of self-esteem and confidence, the level of personal actualization they operate from, whether it be from a reactive or proactive point of view, a tribal or pluralistic or transpersonal state of mind. In essence, we learn the value of the life before us, and regardless of the state of mind, or its level of development, we understand that we are similar.

The story of our lives is more fiction than fact, amplified by how we use our only true resources, which are the five aggregates, mentioned above. However, we are not born to perfection. Although wisdom exists within all of us it must be cultivated with great care, with the care one uses in cultivating a garden—without fertilizer, water, and pruning, the garden runs wild. In many ways, humanity is the garden run wild, with occasional forays into mindfulness. The garden run wild has created a majestic edifice of passion, knowledge, and artistic insight that has both enlivened and desecrated our planet on every level imaginable, century after century. Body, thought, feeling, perception, and consciousness have been wound up so tight that the individual, who is a part and parcel of these aggregates comes to believe in the unchanging self, the self that rises up and consumes the world, for the world exists only because of the self. In fact, the self is but a mere reflection of the ever changing presence of the five aggregates, product of this marvelous planet, and one among billions of forms in which creation expresses itself.

How do we look beyond our sense of self-importance, and self-absorption, to the needs of others and, ultimately, to our true needs and the needs of the life cycle that gave birth to us and empowered us to the point that we have such a profound influence upon it?

What is the one thing that can help us see where we have gone astray and where we have traveled to the heart of what matters?

It is in the witness.

The witness is a metaphor for the ability to detach ourselves from the five aggregates and the illusion of selfhood. The Tibetan Buddhists call it the spy consciousness. Something that can observe the nuances of our bodily functions, our mental constructions, our emotional aberrations, our point of view, and our sense of separateness, all the while experiencing and reveling in them and yet, at the same time, understanding their function.

The witness stands outside of us and within us. The witness is us and not us. It previews our truths and our lies. It doesn’t judge. It is a testament of what is, nothing more. The line between the subject and the object becomes blurred. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, it is called bare attention. Bare attention is the ability to observe something with such single-mindedness that our sense of self drops away and we become one with that which we observe. Imagine watching a movie or reading a book. Do you experience the self at those moments, or has the witness overshadowed the self? Ironically, this happens to each one of us in many different moments; it so totally engrosses us that we are not even aware it is happening.

Meditation is instrumental in cultivating bare attention. In fact, it probably accelerates this process more than anything else. But does one need to meditate to strengthen this process? Although meditation is probably the best vehicle, it is not for everyone, and mindfulness practice has far broader applications, through contemplation, visualization, prayer, and self-reflection, among other things. Our practice is our life, so long as we do it intentionally. It can be everything we do. As a great Zen master once said, do without doing. The more we practice this, from whatever approach we might choose, the more we deepen our experience of this life.

How do we embrace this particular approach to living? The world is very often an insane place. We can sit on a cushion in deep meditation or we can sit in a chair in high brow contemplation, but ultimately we must come back to the world, as magnificent and maddening as it can be, and embrace it, embrace all of it.

A step in that direction, or a direct step into the shit and sunshine of the world humans inhabit, can be through the art of listening. As already stated, if we listen without judging, through bare attention, we can come to a deeper understanding of others and ourselves. Through the art of listening, we learn to listen to ourselves and begin to discern our true face and what it is we need to be happy. Through listening, we learn that “the vibrations of air that come from our mouths” hold the magic of imagery and can affect our world with an unimagined power. Through listening on the deepest level, from the witness posture, we learn to become mindful with our words.

Once we have become a witness to others, as well as ourselves, we come to see that the five aggregates are continually changing, that life around us moves in a ceaseless, harmonic flux. We know that nothing lasts, and for this reason all of our stories are equally important because of the tenuous hold we have on existence. With this understanding, we come to an acceptance of how things are. We bow to those whom we share this life. We learn to suffer with them and understand their suffering, regardless of intelligence, race, culture, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and gender.

In this, we rest in ease and well-being.