(This is Part 15 of a continuing series. Go back to Pt 14.)
9. The Principle of Listening
Listening can be roughty divided into two parts:
The first part concerns listening to our inner guidance, that reality within us that knows so much more than our rational minds. Call it "intuition," "guidance," "our true nature" or whatever, it appears to be able to draw on vast resources unavailable to the rational mind.
As we discover, living our life following inner guidance leads to much greater happiness and sense of alignment. The question is, how to distinguish it from the various thoughts swimming about in our awareness? Let's look:
a) It is clear and definite. There is nothing muddy or wishy-washy about inner guidance. The mind can often do mental gymnastics like, "On the one hand there's these reasons but on the other hand there's these other reasons." The inner guide doesn't work that way.
Our inner guidance is clear, decisive and has a feeling of "Oh yes" about it, as if we had just remembered a word that we were trying to recall. This doesn't mean that the mind always agrees. Sometimes the mind disagrees; nevertheless there is always a feeling of something aligning inside.
b) It comes from possibility. The ego, constantly engaged in trying to be secure, is subject to great fear around any apparent threats to that supposed security.
Inner guidance is not against security (or anything else), but it doesn't come from there. It comes from aliveness, delight and alignment—a whole different realm than the attempt to be secure.
And instead of concerns around safety and security, there is rather a tremendous sense of possibility, a sense that the world is indeed mysterious and magical and that beautiful things are possible.
c) It comes from love. If you feel impulses towards acts that are hurtful, violent or divisive, you can be certain that these are not coming from inner guidance.
Inner guidance is always, regardless of the situation, inclining us towards greater love, harmony, compassion and gratitude, because that is where it resides, that is where it comes from, that is what it is. And that is where our happiness resides.
d) It is brief. Inner guidance is not wordy or polemical. It has no side to take, no point to make. It is not flowery or discursive, but rather, just simple and concise. "Go here." "Call so-and-so." "Do this."
e) It is non-coercive. Inner guidance is not impassioned or aggressive. It never insists on anything. It simply waits. It waits for us to notice it, to turn to our true nature, to turn to our true source.
Once we begin to become aware of our inner guidance, the next step is to have the courage to follow it. This courage comes primarily from experience—the increasing experience that It knows and "we" don't, and therefore increasing trust in following it.
The second part of listening is the process of becoming more familiar with the nature of our consciousness. We begin to take some time each day to turn our attention within and silently observe what is going on.
There are basically three stages to this second type of listening—actually a deepening of the first type—in a process of silent discovery:
The first stage is normally quite painful. In this stage comes the discovery of how invested we are in our thoughts, how tightly we're clinging to our stories, how devoutly we are worshipping at the altar of our beliefs.
We discover that our "self" is not the lofty moral or spiritual practitioner that we had thought ourselves to be. On the contrary: Our mental process, we discover, is mostly defined by grasping, pride, territoriality, irritation and resentment. We discover that our "self" is mostly self-absorbed and our "compassion" is mostly hollow.
The discovery of this internal negativity, chaos and self-absorption is painful to see at first, but it also represents something new: What we see may be difficult, but the very seeing of it is the first glimmering of awareness, the first breakthrough of the mysterious non-self into the sealed-off, rigid world of the ego.
In the second stage of this process, this personal "self" is discovered to be far more porous and insubstantial than we had thought. We begin to see that this "self" is a collection of concepts and self-concepts built up and solidified over a lifetime.
With this increasing discovery, the rigid and fixed structures of the ego-self begin to break down. The self-concept becomes more flimsy. We become softer, more open, more spontaneous. We become warmer, more genuinely caring, more trusting of life.
Something brilliant and pure is beginning to break through our rigidities now, like the sun breaking through the clouds.
In the third stage something unbounded and non-self begins to become more and more apparent. We begin to sense its omnipresence everywhere, inside and out. We begin to feel its vast mystery and utter stillness.
And, to our great surprise, the bird of happiness comes and sits on our shoulder. With even greater surprise we realise that this happiness is not conditional—it does not depend upon getting things "right," it does not depend upon getting things to go "our way."
And now that silent mystery breaks through our heart and we fall down in love with that-which-can't-be-named, that which is our ultimate nature, that which now sees only itself shining everywhere.
(This is the end of Part 15. Go to Part 16.)
—jim sloman, 1.3.04 for Aug 18
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