25/08/2022
GENUINE LISTENING
The virtue of genuine listening plays a major role in an authentic journey to uncover truth and cultivating wisdom. If one wishes to go beyond the veil of stories, genuine listening should be taken seriously.
Usually, when we meet something, if it is a life event, new knowledge, or another opinion, we immediately respond. We don't allow space between us and the things that we encounter, therefore we simply emit what comes up in our system as a response, and the process bares unripe fruits.
Genuine listening is a refined quality that contains many other qualities inside it. It is infused with silence, presence, humility, compassion, and love, and it is one of the most powerful tools we have in order to merge with the divine, to become one with another person and love him, or to understand the meaning of true service.
It is a powerful tool for diminishing the ego because it makes us empty from ourselves, and it forces us to be present.
Listening is connected to our deeper layers, while the shallow layers act automatically out of defense and self-preservation. Listening is anti-self-preservation, it claims that you don't have to defend yourself in order to be someone.
The ability to listen, unresponsive, unwilling to defend, with the desire to be open and penetrated by the thing that is in front of us, goes hand by hand with the realization that whatever is, it doesn’t say a thing about us. So we can be open.
---------------------------------------
Translated from Satsang given in Hebrew.