Right Listening🔗

September 9, 2010

Listening has been prescribed as the first step of spirituality in almost all spiritual traditions in the world. In the oldest spiritual tradition, the Vedic tradition, Rishis started spirituality with the word shravana. The Buddhist tradition starts the eight steps for nirvana with right listening. J Krishnamurti, the modern day master, goes a step ahead and says, right listening is God. He gives the place of God to right listening.

What exactly is right listening? Hearing is different, listening is different. Hearing means that sound enters into your ears, gets processed and creates fear, greed or different emotions in you. Right listening happens when sound enters into your system and gets absorbed into your system; it leads your system from sound to silence.

Right listening can happen when you are ready to listen to anything. The chirping of a bird can lead you to enlightenment. The sound of a bamboo can be the Upanishad mantras. The sound of the Ganga can be the Anahata Dhvani. With right listening, everything that echoes in your system, everything that reverberates in your inner space, leads you to silence.

Of course, the possibility for right listening and the happening of right listening is stronger in the presence of a living Master, an Incarnation who has Himself experienced the Anahata Dhvani: the uncreated sound which is in His inner space.

Again and again and again, the emphasis on right listening is put forth, because right listening is an independent, intelligent technique which can directly lead you to the higher space and higher reality.

With right listening, you will understand that the sound waves which reach your inner space are deeper than the visions which reach your inner space. When I say this, I mean that the sounds which you are hearing now and the words which are entering your inner space, are stronger, more truthful, and a higher reality than the scenes you see around you.

The wax out of which the scenes are created, those scenes that you are seeing around you, is of much lower quality than the words which are reaching your inner space. The sound which I am creating now, which is reaching your inner space, is a stronger base material to create what you want. As long as you feel that what you are seeing is a stronger reality than what you are hearing, you are in illusion: Maya. You are hallucinating. The right listening has not yet happened in you.

You know that right listening is happening to you when you feel that what you are listening to, the words that are entering your inner space, are more powerful than the scenes you are seeing.

Sit with deep awareness. See how the words are touching your ears and reverberating in your inner space. The consciousness that happens in you by the words, along with the reactions and space they create in you, is of a higher reality than the scene you see around you. This is what I call the science of right listening.

The sounds from the Master reach your system through your third eye, not through your ears. Ordinary words lead to more and more words reaching you through your ears. The words which lead you from sound to silence reach your system through the third eye. Anything which comes from my inner space and enters into your inner space will lead you to the same experience of my inner space.

Contemplation Sit with your awareness on the third eye. Listen through the third eye and see how the sounds penetrate your system, how they reverberate in your system, and all the emotions, experiences, expressions, and ripples it creates. Out of those ripples, emotions, and experiences, where do they lead you? You will experience the right listening - God.