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How to Listen I HAVE begun to notice that many among you, perhaps a very large portion,
do not listen to what I say. For not unoften you have put questions on a
subject on which I had talked in detail just a moment before, as if nothing was
spoken. The fact is surely this: each one of you is shut up in his own thought,
exactly as, I suppose, you do in the class also at school. You repeat to
yourself your own lesson, thinking of what is expected of you – provided, of
course, you are at all diligent and attentive – and do not listen to what your
teacher asks and explains or what the other students answer. You miss in this
way three-fourths of the advantage of being not all alone but in a group. Here the matter is more serious. For I do not
give an individual or personal answer. I answer in such a way that all may
profit and if, instead of listening, you continue to think what you have in
your own head, you lose the opportunity to learn anything. That is the first point. If you are here, you
must first of all, listen and not think of other things. But that is not
sufficient, it is only the beginning. For there is a good way and there are
many bad ways of listening. I do not know if any of you likes to hear music.
But if you want to hear music, you must make an absolute silence in your head;
you should not follow or accept any thought, you should be wholly concentrated,
make yourself a kind of screen, noiseless and immobile. That is the only way
of hearing and understanding music. If you allow the least movement or
waywardness in your thought, the whole value of the music will escape you. Now,
to understand a teaching which is not altogether of a material kind, which
implies an opening to things that are Page – 166 within, the necessity of silence is all the
greater. But if instead of listening to what is said, you jumped about for an
idea in order to put another question or if you started arguing about the
things said under the specious pretext of understanding better, all that you
heard would pass like smoke without leaving an effect. In the same way, when you have an experience,
as long as it lasts, do not try to understand what it means; if you do that, it
vanishes, or you deform and disfigure it, taking away all its purity. In the
same way also if you want a spiritual experience to enter into you, you must
have a brain absolutely quiet and immobile, like a mirror which not only
reflects but absorbs, allows the ray to enter and penetrate deep within so that
out of the profundities of your consciousness it may rise up one day or other
in the form of knowledge. If you come here, come with the intention of
listening in silence. What will happen you will recognise later on; the effect
of this attitude of silence you will find out in course of time. But in the
meanwhile the only thing to do is to be silent, still, attentive.
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