(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 rational mind always agrees. Sometimes the rational mind disagrees; nevertheless there is a feeling of something aligning inside.
b) It comes from possibility. The ego, continually engaged in trying to be secure, is subject to great fear concerning 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 impulses are not coming from inner guidance.
Regardless of the situation, inner guidance is always 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."
I well remember an early experiment in inner guidance when I asked for its advice on whether to stay or go at a two-week seminar I'd been attending.
I'd been wrestling with this problem for days—six reasons this way and seven reasons that way, etc.—and sat down with a large pad of lined paper to write down the words of inner guidance. And suddenly one word, six inches high, formed on the paper: "GO." That's inner guidance; it does not waste words.
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.
The more we become aware of our inner guidance the more we'll have the courage to follow it. This courage comes primarily from experience—the increasing sense that It knows and "we" don't, and therefore an increasing trust in simply following it.
If the first part of listening is following inner guidance, the second part is the process of becoming more familiar with the nature of our consciousness. We begin to just take some time each day to turn our attention inward 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 quiet 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're 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 nothing more than a collection of self-concepts built up and solidified over a lifetime.
With this increasing discovery, the rigid, 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 pure, innocent and brilliant is beginning to break through our rigidities now, like the sun breaking through the clouds.
In the third stage something unbounded and utterly 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 butterfly of happiness now comes and sits on our shoulder. And with even greater surprise we realise that this happiness is not conditional—it does not depend upon getting things "right" or getting things to go "our way."
And now the 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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