Levels of Listening

We live lives of enormous complexity.

Many things vie for our attention and time, leaving us with an underlying fear about our capability to cope with these many demands. Listening gets placed on the back burner, conversations become abbreviated, relationships become frayed and disconnected. Listening, something that is connective and sacred, is seen as just another demand that must be addressed, and, haven’t we heard it all, or don’t we know it all already?

Just as there are many levels of consciousness, there are many levels of listening, each depending on the level of involvement of the mind. The most basic level of listening is just mindlessly taking in the sounds, not even thinking about their meaning. At the next level of listening we listen, but this listening is filtered through a haze of inner commentary. This is where most of us reside.

Looking at how one listens isn’t a pretty process. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see that we frequently are impatient. We hold the inner thought, “Let’s get this over so that I can attend to more important things”. While “listening” to the other, we are often merely attending to our own inner chatter. This inner chatter revolves around judgmental commentary, criticisms, inflexible perceptions, quick and convenient but limiting labels, future planning, and a certain egoic pomposity of leaping ahead with inner answers, solutions, or replies, as one already “knows” what the other is going to say.

The highest level of listening is listening from Presence. When we sit in our heart, in Presence, we are open and receptive. We are available. This level of listening is free from inner commentary. It is outside of the mind’s interference. In this state, one’s small self is set aside to join, in Presence, with the other. Through this vulnerable openness, listening is transformed into the holy act of Love receiving Love in the Silence of Self, outside of anticipation and considerations of time, distance, or difference, taking in and feeling into the experience of the other.

Such listening carries a gift of great healing. The focused and attentive Presence of the listener offers the other a glimpse into their own worth and lovability. From this place of connection and intimacy insights and solutions can arise. When listening from the heart, boundaries dissolve, and the other person becomes oneself. In a sense, we are in actuality, listening to ourselves.