Just Listening

Here, we will talk about the role of listening in meditation, both in terms of listening to his talks and in terms of “just listening.” When I am speaking to you, I am not trying to have a communication with your intellectual, rational mind.
My purpose is unique—I am using words just to create silent gaps. The words are not important. So I can say anything contradictory, anything absurd, anything unrelated, because my purpose is just to create gaps. The words are secondary; the silences between those words are primary. This is simply a device to give you a glimpse of meditation. And once you know that it is possible for you, you have traveled far in the direction of your own being. Most of the people in the world don’t think that it is possible for the mind to be silent. Because they don’t think it is possible, they don’t try. How to give people a taste of meditation was my basic reason to speak. So I can go on speaking eternally—it does not matter what I am saying. All that matters is that I give you a few chances to be silent, which you find difficult on your own in the beginning. I cannot force you to be silent, but I can create a device in which spontaneously you are bound to be silent. I am speaking, and in the middle of a sentence, when you were expecting another word to follow, nothing follows but a silent gap. And your mind was looking to listen, waiting for something to follow, and does not want to miss it—naturally it becomes silent. What can the poor mind do? If it were known at what points I would be silent, if it were declared to you that at such-and-such points I will become silent, then you could manage to think. You would not be silent; then you would know: “This is the point where he is going to be silent, so now I can have a little chit-chat with myself.” But because it comes absolutely suddenly…. I don’t know myself why at certain points I stop. Something like this happening to any orator in the world will be condemned, because an orator stopping again and again means he is not well prepared, he has not done his homework. It means that his memory is not reliable, that he cannot find, sometimes, what word to use. But because it is not oratory, I am not concerned about that—I am concerned with you. And it is not only here in this assembly, but far away… anywhere in the world where people will be listening to the video or to the audio, they will come to the same silence. My success is not to convince you, my success is to give you a real taste so that you can become confident that meditation is not a fiction, that the state of no-mind is not just a philosophical idea, that it is a reality; that you are capable of it, and that it does not need any special qualifications. § When you listen meditatively you understand, when you listen concentratedly you learn. If you listen with concentration, you will gain knowledge; if you listen meditatively, you will lose knowledge. And the
difference is very subtle. When you listen with concentration it means you are tense, too eager to learn, to absorb, to know. You are interested in knowledge; concentration is the way towards knowledge. When the mind is focussed on one thing, of course, it learns more. Meditation is unfocussed mind. You simply listen silently—not with a tension in the mind, not with an urge to know and learn, no. But with total relaxedness, in a let-go, in an opening of your being. You listen not to know, you simply listen to understand. These are different ways of listening. If you are trying to know, then you are trying to memorize what I am saying. Deep down you are repeating it, you are taking notes inside the mind. You are writing it in the world of your memories, you are interested in letting it become deeply rooted in you so you don’t forget. Then it will become knowledge. The same seed could have become unlearning, understanding. Then you simply listen, you are not interested in accumulating it, you are not interested in writing it in your memory, in your mind. You simply listen open, as you listen to music, as you listen to birds singing in the trees, as you listen to wind passing through ancient pines, as you listen to the sound of water in a waterfall—there is nothing to remember, nothing to memorize, you don’t listen with a parrot mind, you simply listen without any mind—the listening is beautiful, it is ecstatic, there is no goal in it, in itself it is ecstatic, it is blissful. Listen meditatively, not with concentration. All schools, colleges, universities, teach concentration, because the goal is to memorize. Here the goal is not to memorize, the goal is not to learn at all. The goal is to unlearn. Listen silently, and don’t think that you will forget. There is no need to remember; only that which is rubbish has to be remembered, because you go on