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Listening for the Dharma

I want to tell a little story. There was once a family who went for a vacation to another country. It turned out to be a Buddhist country, and they were there for a couple of weeks. There was a teenager in the family, and she noticed that their vacation spot was right close to a Buddhist monastery.

So the first week she kind of just noticed, and she noticed it was a particularly calm and peaceful place that struck her as unique. The second week, she decided to venture in and see what was going on in there. Fortunate for her, she met the abbess pretty soon as she came in, and they struck up a friendship. She went back to see the abbess every day, and the abbess taught her a little bit about meditation. But those weeks were up quickly, and she was going to go back to her home country, which was not a Buddhist country, and she'd never heard of meditation before. So she asked the abbess, "You know, when I go back to my country, how can I continue this and learn more what this meditation is all about?"

And this was of course before YouTube and all that. So the abbess said, "When you go back to your country, ask around for different people you think are wise, and ask them if they can point you to someone they think is a wise person who really knows how to listen. And then learn how to listen from that person." That was the instruction; that was the alternative to meditation: learn how to listen.

This idea of listening is something that keeps repeating in many religious traditions as a representation of the kind of attention that we bring in this life of ours, of practice. It's represented, I think, in my mind by the idea that the direct disciples of the Buddha in the Pali word is sāvaka^[1], which means 'the hearers.' There's something about having the ability to hear the Dharma. Literally, back in the old days there were no books, there was no audio Dharma, and so the Dharma could only be heard in someone talking about it. But not just hearing the Dharma as spoken, but to hear the Dharma in everything—to hear it in the breeze, the rustling of the trees, or in the hum of the air purifier. What is it to hear the Dharma?

I wanted to read a little poem, a verse by one of the early Buddhist nuns named Uttamā. It's slightly abbreviated; I took out some of the technical terms that maybe would not mean anything for most people:

Not attaining mental peace, and with no control of my mind, I approached a nun who was trustworthy. She taught me the Dharma. I listened to the Dharma as she instructed me. For one week, I sat cross-legged in one spot, filled with joy and happiness. On the eighth day, I straightened out my legs, and shattered the mass of darkness.

She woke up. The turning point from her distress was listening to the Dharma as it was being taught.

So listening: how do we listen, and why is listening so important? When I think about listening, I think about listening both externally, but also listening internally. The importance of that is this idea that the world we can perceive around us is kind of infinite. It spreads out wide and big, this world of ours. If you stand on top of a mountain and look out across the world, you see the vastness of it, how big it is, and there's so much to perceive. But if you look inward to yourself, it is actually equally vast and big.

It turns out this little human body that we have, when you bring the inner eye to see, or the inner ear to really listen to what's here, it can feel just as vast. It's as varied and multifaceted as the external world. Listening sits right at the junction between this external world and this internal world. You can listen both externally and internally, but standing there at that junction where the listening happens, it's not a straight, pure separation into an internal and external world. The internal world that we have influences how we listen to the external world. How the external world is with us, and our experience with it, influences how we experience the internal world.

To be centered in the listening, and to really attend and be open to what's there, sooner or later your attention will sometimes go more to the external world, and sometimes go more to the internal world. To the point where we realize that the two are not so separate from each other, not distinct from each other. How we are in the internal life affects how we listen to the external world.

Our listening, our perception of the world, is seldom innocent, seldom just pure and simple where we're seeing things just as they are. Often we're listening or perceiving for certain things. We have our agendas, our concerns, our biases that we bring along in how we perceive the world, and in what we listen for.

To stay with the idea of listening, some people might be primed to listen to the tone of other people's voices because the tone tells them whether they're safe or not. So that's what they're listening for, that's what they pick up. And it never occurred to other people, for whom that's not an issue, to listen for that. They're maybe listening for, "What are they saying that reflects back on me? I hope they're saying good things to me, and they're speaking to me in a way that recognizes my wonderfulness and greatness, and if they don't let me tell them about it." Other people are listening because they have a lifetime history of being disrespected, ignored, not seen, misunderstood, overlooked, or diminished. So they're primed to listen to that, listen for that.

We perceive different things for different purposes. If you're walking down the street and you need to buy a pillow, you'll notice pillow stores. But if you're hungry, you might be looking for a grocery store, and that's what you notice. We look according to what we want, what we're interested in, what our history is, what our associations are with certain sounds, certain voices, certain things we have histories of. If you lived in a foreign country and had wonderful experiences with people speaking that language, and you hear people walking down the street speaking that language, you think, "Ah, yeah, that's so good." Our history with that language influences how we hear and the impact it has. But if you had difficult experiences with that language—maybe you were in a war zone, and it's traumatic to hear that language around—then it can re-trigger some of those fears, concerns, and pain in the listening.

As we go into this more and more deeply in this practice, we start seeing that we stand at the junction of listening to the external world and the internal world. We start seeing the two aren't so absolutely separate. That's where we begin finding the Dharma. Not because someone's teaching the Dharma, but finding the Dharma in every place we go, every experience we have, because that's where we can see: Are we clinging? Are we resisting? What are we bringing with us? What are we adding to the situation?

Some of what we're adding might be appropriate and wonderful. Some of it might actually be harming ourselves and other people. Some of it might not be particularly harming in the way we think about harming, but it's a kind of a wind drag; it interferes with our freedom or our ease and peace. It's something pretty subtle.

I've noticed this mostly in my meditation these last few weeks. It's something I've become more acutely aware of than before: how much time comes into play in my conceptions of the moment, and how it interpenetrates or oozes into how I perceive what's going on in the moment. It can be so simple that as I exhale, I'm aware that the exhale is going to come to an end. That's time, right? It's a concept of time. And I can see that I can just let go of the simple thought of the exhale coming to an end. It's just an exhale. An end doesn't have to be part of it at all. It's as if it's timeless, just the exhale, and I could see the little addition of time, the concept of time, added on top of it.

Some people might feel, "What do you mean, Gil, added on top of it? Time is real, we live in time." Yes, but my conception of time is my addition. It's just like, for example, if I'm sitting meditating and someone says, "Well, the roof of the building is real." Does that mean I'm supposed to be thinking about the roof all the time? "Roof, roof, sitting here, roof, roof, roof, you know, it's real." Ideally, when you sit and meditate at IMC, none of you will think about the roof when you're sitting here. Except now that I brought it up, you'll always think about it when you come. [Laughter]

Same thing with time. Yes, the roof exists, but you don't have to think about it all the time. Time exists, you don't have to think about it. And it's so subtle, the addition to it. Even when I relax when I meditate, I see it there too, that I'm a little bit ahead of myself to the end of the relaxation, or to how good it's going to be when I am relaxed. It's just half a second ahead of myself or something, but I am living in this extra, as opposed to just feeling the relaxation, being with it. Just don't have time, as if everything that occurs is here forever, or just this is its moment and I can really be here for it.

It's the same thing with listening. It's all these things that come along with listening: all these associations, memories, meanings, agendas, preferences that come along. So as we learn to sit back and listen deeply, we're also learning to listen to ourselves.

There's a story of a man who came to a therapist and said, "You know, my spouse is always angry, and it's so difficult to live with my spouse. I've been trying to deal with this for years, but I think I need some help here from a therapist."

And the therapist said, "Well, have you ever tried listening to your spouse?"

"Well, no."

"Well, go home and listen."

So the person did, and came back the next week to the therapist and said, "I've been listening, but it doesn't change anything."

"Okay, I'm glad you've been listening. Now go back and listen to what's behind the words your spouse speaks. Where are those words coming from?"

So the person went back and spent another week listening to what was behind the words. He came back to the therapist and said, "Oh, this made all the difference in the world. There's peace at home now because I realized that when my spouse was angry with me, I felt attacked and I assumed I had to attack back, I had to have a fight, I had to protect myself. But when I listened to what was behind the words, I realized my spouse was afraid. And when I realized the fear was there, and I asked if we could talk about it, that just changed everything. There were no more fights in the home, and we had a whole different conversation."

To listen deeply to ourselves that way, what's behind our words? So many of us live in conversations, live in memories, live in projected futures and concepts and ideas. What happens if we listen to ourselves deeply, and in doing so, hear what's behind the words? Some people are phenomenally in the world of thinking and stories and imagery. It's a fine world sometimes to be in, but what happens if you listen to what makes you think, and listen to that? What do you find? What happens if you listen deeply to what makes your impulse be? And once you discover that, I bet you'll learn to listen to others in new ways, because what was making you spend a lot of time thinking is probably influencing how you were listening as well—certain subtle agendas or concerns.

This idea of settling back and listening deeply... you know, I grew up speaking Norwegian, and there's a word in it just like in English. There's a word for hearing and a word for listening. And listening, there's an academic Norwegian dictionary that has a definition for this 'listen' that I really love. It says, "make an effort." And part of the definition is in parentheses, so I don't know why, but it says "make an effort" and then in parentheses, "(and keep quiet)." [Laughter] Maybe it's in parentheses because you're supposed to say it quietly. So: "make an effort (and keep quiet) to pick up or perceive sound."

What a great definition of listening! To be quiet as you listen. The reference point I have for that is listening to a very quiet sound far in the distance. I think some of us, if we try to do that, we even close our eyes and get really quiet, and kind of quiet our thinking mind so we can really hear the subtle sound. But is it possible to quiet the inner chatter, even if it's just for two moments? That suggests a way of beginning to hear the Dharma in everything. It's in that quiet we can pick up and experience better where the stress is, where the compulsions are, where the preoccupations are.

One of the marvelous things about being quiet for one moment or two moments—it doesn't have to be long—is that it could be just long enough to see how difficult it is to be quiet. And as soon as you start seeing how difficult it is to be quiet, that's where the Dharma can be found. That's where we see where there's compulsion, clinging, desire, and fears operating. Rather than being upset at seeing that, in the Dharma we kind of celebrate: "Oh, I saw it. I see it more clearly than ever before." Some people specialize in being critical about what they see, like all news is bad news. But in the Dharma, we're training ourselves to learn to appreciate seeing the compulsions, the agendas, the fears, the angers, the greed, the desires that we get caught in. We appreciate it not so we can do it better, but so that we can listen to it. Where does it come from? What's even deeper than that?

And to listen in such a way that the listening has a lot of space in the room. One of the things I love about listening is that you're not touching what you're listening to, you're not interfering in a certain way. I think of listening as making space to allow oneself to hear. There's a kind of peacefulness, a non-aggressiveness, hopefully, in the listening. There might be times when listening is aggressive and maybe even problematic, but what inspires me about listening is this ability to have perception that doesn't require any kind of interfering with what's happening. It just allows things to be as they are, but they're heard.

To really know how to do that well, we have to hear ourselves, listen to ourselves, to see the extra baggage we bring, the extra judgments, values, and preoccupations we have, because listening is seldom innocent. But to have this sense as a clear reference point of the possibility of listening without interfering... The reference point for that, for me, is hearing. The difference between listening and hearing is that listening requires some effort, as the Norwegian dictionary says, some directedness. But with hearing, it doesn't have that directedness, it doesn't have the effort. We can hear without having to think about or want to hear. A loud car goes by, we hear it, but initially we're not planning to hear it, choosing to hear it, directing ourselves to hear it. We just hear it. A bird sings, and we hear it. There's something about just hearing and leaving things alone, and being able to relax and open, just hear, that is a wonderful reference point for seeing when we can't hear—when we do get involved and caught up in our thoughts and ideas of what's going on.

That's one of the functions of mindfulness meditation. This path of Buddhism is not to fall into some wonderful bliss state, a wonderful place of peace, and have a kind of enlightened retirement where, "I have it made, if only I could rest in peace then everything will be okay." The purpose of the Dharma is to have just enough peace so that we can see what takes us away from it. And that's where we see the Dharma, that's where we hear the Dharma.

So when we listen to the trees rustling or the birds or the river flowing or the rain falling, we're not just hearing the rain and the leaves rustling. If we listen well, we're hearing that there's a mutuality, a cooperation in the hearing. It's us and our memories and associations and all kinds of things that come along with the hearing. If we don't have any attachments, clinging, fears, and all these extra suffering-producing things as part of it, it gets to be a very rich world to hear and listen and perceive. The natural world around us and the social world around us adds a deeper dimension to it. What are we listening to? It's co-created. It's not just completely out there, it's not completely in here, but something is happening in the interface and the connectivity, in the ways in which we overlap our lives or co-create our lives together with the wind blowing in the trees out there. What is that world? What is that life? A life that's maybe not so self-centered, but it's not exactly self-forgetting either.

So to listen deeply, to hear, to allow, to be able to hear the Dharma not only when the Dharma is being taught by someone, but to be able to hear the Dharma all the time wherever we go. The Dharma is available if we've learned how to listen, and then we become a disciple of the Buddha, a listener.

So let's all listen. And remember also to listen to each other. And maybe to listen to what's below the words of what people say, so that we can love in some deeper way what's behind the words. May listening be a vehicle for care, compassion, and love in this world that we live in. Thank you very much.

Q&A

Questioner 1: Well thank you, that was a wonderful talk and you know, a lot of my work has been with listening to the world, so it was very appropriate. The problem is that when I listen to my body, my body won't stop complaining. It says, "Oh, you're finally listening to me, your shoulder hurts." And also, I have really bad tinnitus, so whenever I listen, I hear the tinnitus. So there are a lot of things that are difficult for me when I actually listen to my body.

Gil: Yes, so what you're calling the difficulty, that's where you find the Dharma. I wouldn't shy away from experiencing that difficulty, but you need to discover what you mean by difficulty. What exactly is happening? Because it's helpful to think provisionally that a painful shoulder is just a painful shoulder. There's no difficulty. The difficulty is what you're adding. So what is that?

I would encourage you—you seem to sit well and still—I would encourage you in meditation at least to spend time being very patient with the physical pain. Listen to it, feel it, and discover what you're adding that's extra. The advantage of that is that once you can find what's extra—the resistance, the judgments, the fears, the expectations—that's very respectful for our body. Then you might be able to listen to your body more deeply, and you might be able to discern that there are subtle, or not so subtle, shifts you can make in your posture, or how to take care of this part of yourself better.

Also, you might discover that the body has self-healing powers, and sometimes some of the places of tension will begin to unravel themselves, or soften, or open up. Or you start discovering, "I guess this pain will be forever, but the problem was not the pain. The problem was all the tension I added around it, and I can soften the tension that's around it." Then it becomes simpler and simpler, and it turns out I can be at peace with the pain once I've settled some of the extra layers. I don't know if how I worded it is meaningful for you...

Questioner 1: No, that's wonderful, yeah.

Gil: Take your time, with a lot of compassion and care. The only thing I would suggest for you—since I'm basically suggesting you sit in pain—is to only sit with the pain when you feel you want to. When you feel, "Okay, this is a good exercise, it's useful, I understand why I'm doing it. I really understand how this is beneficial for me, and it's not easy to do, but I feel motivated." When you no longer feel motivated, or understand how it's beneficial, probably take a break. You don't have to force yourself to bear through it at all costs. So just be caring for yourself too that way.

Questioner 2: Thank you, dear Sangha. In my ten years of practice, I've gone from someone who's unable to listen to being very, very... [Questioner readjusts microphone] Okay, so in my ten years of practice, I've gone from not being able to listen to people to listening so deeply that I've become very reactive. So I was wondering if there's a difference, or if there's passive listening, active listening. What I do, I'd call it reactive listening.

Gil: Great. Well, I congratulate you for listening deeply. That's a really great thing to learn how to do. I don't know you well enough, but what I suspect is happening is that you've come to a deeper place inside of you that what you hear is striking.

What I mean by this is that if I hold my hand like this and someone comes along and pushes it, there's resistance; it hits something. But if my hand relaxes, then this goes right through, it doesn't stop. Or if there's lots of space, things just find their way through. So you're probably touching something very deep inside of you that those things are striking. So discover what they're hitting. If you can find out what's going on, because it doesn't have to hit anything—so what is it that it's hitting?

And then I think your wonderful sensitivity and capacity to perceive and feel others might even get more acute, but it's just not going to land anywhere. It's not going to hit anything, and you'll feel more porous. You won't be unfeeling if you do that, but you'll actually be more capable of holding what's going on.

Questioner 2: Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. Yes, because I have PTSD, so yeah.

Gil: One of the things we're trying to do in this practice, I would suggest, and I think listening is again a nice metaphor for this, is we're expanding our capacity to hold life experience. So rather than necessarily solving the problems or fixing things that happen, we're making more room in the mind, the heart, the body to be able to hold things, and to be present for things as they are.

Sometimes we're so preoccupied with ourselves, with our concerns, our life, that there's very little room. And then if there's very little room in there, sometimes I feel like I have to change the world so that everything can be okay, and other people have to behave better so that I can be okay. But as we learn to open up the ears to listen, it turns out there's lots of room in hearing to hear all kinds of things without being reactive to it. There's lots of room in the heart, amazingly lots of room in our love, that can just be really spacious. It doesn't mean we forgive people for what they say sometimes—like "you know, everything is good"—but we don't have to react to it because we have so much space. So thinking of meditation as increasing our capacity is, I think, a useful orientation.