Friday 1 March 2013

Listening meditation


Listening without judging

Experiments with listening


The Meditation Second for now: 
Listening to sounds without judging them


Benefits:
Meditation is non judgemental. It is possible to practice non judgement with small exercises like listening in daily life without judging the sounds you are hearing. More and more the listening will become pure and leads to silence.

  
Osho on listening meditation

Buddha's advise: act dumb
"After initiating anybody into sannyas the first thing Gautam Buddha used to say was, “Now for two years be completely silent. Do not use language. If you want water then show the symbol; just be dumb. Act dumb, as if you cannot speak, so you are showing that you need water or you need food. You can point to your stomach when you are feeling hungry. Use symbols as if you cannot speak.” Two years were a long time, but after two years people were so calm and quiet, so radiant, so full of energy. Your constant chattering is destroying your energy. So Buddha used to remind them, “Now your two years are over, you can use language just if it is necessary. But now you are capable of listening to what I am saying.”

Listen and the heart opens
Only then do you become capable of listening; otherwise you only hear. And if you are capable of listening there is nothing left for you to do. In that silence you will be able to see without any argumentation within you what is right and what is not right. The right immediately makes you so joyful and the wrong immediately makes you sad and aloof. It is a totally different kind of differentiation than mental talk: “This is right; this is wrong.” On what grounds can your mind say, “This is right”? It is your prejudice; it is your preconceived idea.

The clarity of the heart
But the heart has no preconceived ideas. It simply sees clearly. It has eyes but no ideas. It has a clarity but no prejudices. With that clarity it can see where the door is and where the wall is. It does not have to think about it. Only a blind man thinks, Where is the door? Only a blind man starts finding the door with his walking stick. You don’t do that; you don’t even think about the door. If you want to go out, you know, you see. There is no need of thinking, you simply go out of the door.

Listening to silence transforms
It is not because you are not thinking that first you will try to go through the wall, and then you think about where the door is. And after a logical syllogism you decide, “This must be the door.” This kind of process does not take place when you have eyes. Silence becomes your eyes. Silence becomes your criterion of what is right and what is not right. And the decision that comes out of silence transforms you. You don’t have to do anything.
The art of listening is the simplest method of transformation."

Osho, excerpted from The Invitation, Chapter 17


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