Dissolution_into the_Cosmic

Chiyono

Question 3:

Intellectual listening means that when you are listening you are simultaneously arguing with it. A constant argument is going on. I am saying something to you, you are listening, and constantly there is an argument inside: whether this is right or wrong. You are comparing with your own concepts, your own ideology, your own system. So constantly, when you are listening to me, you are comparing whether I confirm your ideas or not, whether I am according to you or not; whether you can concede to me or not, whether I am convincing or not. How is listening possible in this way?

You are too full of yourself, so it is miraculous that within this constant inner turmoil you are capable of listening to something. And even then, whatsoever you have heard will not be what I have said. It cannot be - because when the mind is full with its own ideas, it goes on giving colors to everything that comes to it. It hears not what is being said, but what it wants to hear. It chooses, it drops, it interprets, and only then does something penetrate in - but that has a completely different shape.

So this is what is meant by intellectual listening.

If you want to go deep in understanding what is being said. this inner turmoil must stop. It must cease! It must not continue! Otherwise, you are in your own way, and constantly destroying the very possibility of something which can happen to you. You can miss, and everyone is missing much.

We live enclosed in our own minds, and we carry that enclosure with us everywhere. So whatsoever we see, whatsoever we hear, whatsoever happens around us, it is never transmitted to the inner consciousness directly. The mind remains in between, always playing tricks.

One must be aware that this is happening. This is the first thing in order to go deep. This is the first thing for the second stage of listening - to be aware of what your mind is doing to you. It is coming in between. Wherever you move, it moves before you. It is not like a shadow which follows. you have become a shadow to it. It goes, and you have to move. It moves before you and colors everything.

So you are never in contact with the "facticity" of anything. The mind creates a fiction.

You must be aware of this phenomenon of what the mind is doing. But you are not - because we are identified with the mind, we never think that the mind is doing something. When I say something and it does not tally with your thought, it is not that you will think that your mind is not tallying with the thought. You will think, "No, I am not convinced." You do not have a gap between you and your mind. You are identified - and that is really the problem. That is how the mind can play tricks with you.

You are identified with a thought or with a thought process. And this is strange, because only two days before this, the thought was not yours. You heard it somewhere; now you have absorbed it and it has become your own. And now this thought will say, "No - this is not right because this is not according to me." You will not feel the difference that this is mind speaking, memory speaking, the mechanism speaking. You will not feel that "I must remain aloof".

Even if you have to compare, even if you have to judge, you must remain aloof - aloof from your memory, from your mind, from your past. But there is a subtle identification: "My mind is me." So I say, "I am a Communist" or "I am a Catholic" or "I am a Hindu." I never say, "My mind has been brought up in such a way that my mind is Hindu " This is the fact: you are not Hindu. How can you be a Hindu? It is only the mind. If you are the Hindu, then there is no possibility of any transformation.

The mind can be changed, and you must remain capable of changing it. If you become identified with it, then you lose your freedom. The greatest freedom is to be free of one's own mind. The greatest, I say - to be free from one's own mind - because it is a subtle bondage, so deep that you never feel it as a bondage The very prison becomes your home.

Be constantly aware that your mind is not your consciousness. And the more you are aware, the more you will feel that consciousness is something totally different. Consciousness is the energy, mind is just the thought content. Be the master of it! Don't allow it to be the master; don't allow it to just go ahead of you everywhere. Let it follow you, use it, but don't be used by it. It is an instrument, but we are identified with this instrument. Mm? So break the identification. Remember that you are not the mind.

But, really, so-called religious persons always remember: "We are not the body." They never remember: "We are not the mind." And body is not a bondage at all. Mind is the bondage! Your body is not a bondage at all! Your mind is. And, really, your body comes from nature, from the Divine, and your mind from the society. So body has a beauty, but never the mind. Mind is always ugly. It is a cultivated thing, a false construct. The body has a very beautiful realm. And if you can drop the mind, then you will not feel any conflict at all with the body. The body becomes just a door to the greater - to the infinite expanse. There is nothing ugly in the body - mmm? - it is a natural flowering. But the so-called religious people are always against the body and always for the mind.

They have created such a nuisance! They have created such confusion! And they have destroyed all sensitivity, because body is the source of all sensitivity. If once you begin to be against your body, you will become insensate, unfeeling.

The mind is just an accumulation of past knowledge, information, experiences. It is just a computer.

We are identified with it. One is a Christian, one is a Hindu, one is a Communist. one is a Catholic, one is this and that, but one is never oneself - always identified somewhere with something.

Remember this: be aware, and create a distance between you and your mind. Never create any distance between you and your body. Create a distance between you and your mind! You will be more alive and more childlike and more innocent and more aware.

So the first thing is to create a distance: that is, not to identify. Remember you are not the mind, then the first listening will change into the second.

The second is emotional - deeply felt, sympathetic. It is a love attitude. You are hearing some music or seeing a dance, so you don't just remember the intellect - you begin to participate. When you are seeing a dance, your feet begin to participate. When you are listening to music, your hands begin to be participants; you begin to be part of it. This is a sympathetic way of listening, deeper than intellect. That's why, whenever you can listen with your heart and feeling, you feel elated, you feel transported to somewhere else. Then you are not in this world. Really, you are in this world, but you feel that you are not in this world. Why? Because you are not in the world of the intellect.. A different realm opens - you begin to be actively in it.

Intellect is always an onlooker standing out - never in. So the more intellect grows in the world, the more we become just passive observers - in everything. You will not dance, but you will watch others dancing. If this goes on as it is going on, day by day. soon you will not be doing anything. You will just be looking at others doing. This will be possible some day: you will not love - it has become possible, it is there now - you will just watch others loving. What are you watching in a film? Others loving! You are just an onlooker - a dead, passive onlooker. You are watching others playing. You are watching others singing, others dancing.

Somewhere one character of Camus says, "Love is not for me. My servants will do it for me" - love!

A really rich man! - even love has to be done by his servants. Why should he do it? The logic is the same. If servants can play music for you, if servants can do prayer for you, why not love? A servant is doing worship for you in the temple, so why not love? If a servant can be used in between you and the Divine, why not between you and your lover or beloved? What is wrong in it? The logic is the same. And, really, soon those who are rich will not do their loving themselves. because servants can do it! Only poor ones will do their own loving and will feel very miserable because of it.

Everything can be deputed. You can be just an onlooker, because intellect is basically an onlooker - never a participant. If we create a world around intellect, then it is going to happen.

The second center is more involved. You begin to participate. I say you will understand more if you begin to participate, because the moment you are sympathetic your mind is open - more open than when you are in a constant fight. It is open, receptive, inviting.

This is how one can listen through feeling. But still there is a depth even deeper than feeling and that depth I call total listening, with your full being - because feeling is again a part. Intellect is a part, feeling is a part, the source of action is another. There are many parts in your existence, in your being. You can listen with feeling better than with intellect, but still it is only a part. And when you are listening with your feeling, the intellect will just go to sleep; otherwise it will disturb. It will just go to sleep!

The third is to listen totally - not even participating with it, but being one with it. One way is to watch dance through intellect; another is to feel dance and begin to participate in it. Sitting in your seat, the dancer is dancing. You begin to participate; you begin to keep the beat. And the third is becoming the dance oneself - not the dancer, but the dance. The total being is involved. You are not even out to feel it: you are it!

So remember that the deepest knowledge is possible only when you become one with something.

This is by faith.

How to come to it? Be aware of your intellect; be unidentified with the mind. Then come to the second - feeling. Then be aware that feeling is just a part and your whole being is just Lying dead.

The whole is not there, so bring the whole into it. When you bring the whole in. it is not that the intellect is denied or feeling is denied. They are in it, but now in a different harmony. Nothing is negated. Everything is there, but now in a different pattern. The whole being is participating - is in it - has become it.

So when you listen, just listen as if you have become the listening. When I am saying something, let it go into you not with a fight, not with a sympathy, but with a totality. Be it! Let it go. Vibrate - with no resistance, with no feeling, but with totality! Experiment with it, and you will begin to experience a new dimension of listening. And that goes not only for listening: it is for everything. You can eat that way, you can walk that way, you can sleep that way - you can live that way!

Kabir sends his son, Kamal, to the field one day. Kabir's cows have no food today, so he sends Kamal to cut some grass from the field. Kamal goes and has not returned. The afternoon has come and the evening has come, and Kabir is just waiting and the cows are hungry. Where has Kamal gone? So Kabir goes to find out.

Kamal is standing in a grass field. The sun is setting, the wind is blowing, the grass is moving wavelike, and Kamal is standing there moving wavelike just with the grass. The whole day has passed like that, and Kabir comes and says, "Have you gone mad, Kamal? What are you doing?" Suddenly Kamal is brought back to a different world and he says, "Oh, I had forgotten that I am Kamal; I became just grass. I was not! I became just grass! I moved with it, I danced with it, and I forgot for what I had come here. Now tell me, for what had I come?" Kabir says, "To cut the grass!" So Kamal laughs and says, "How can one cut oneself? Today it is not possible. I will come again and try, but I cannot promise because I have known a different realm. A different world has opened before me." Kabir, on this day, named him Kamal. Kamal means "a miracle".

This is the miracle! If you can be totally in anything, the miracle happens. And this is not only for listening: it is for everything. Be total! Move totally! Don't divide yourself. Never divide yourself. Any division is just wasting your energy, any division is just suicidal. Don't divide! If you love, love totally - don't withhold. If you listen, listen totally - don't withhold anything. Just move totally.

Only this total movement can bring you to a realization where ego cannot be found. It can be found with intellect. it can be found with feeling - but never with your total being. It can be found with intellect because intellect has no center of its own. It will not allow the center of the total to come into operation, so the intellect has to create its own center. It becomes the ego. Feeling will not allow the total, so feeling has its own center - it becomes the ego.

That's why men and women have different types of egos, because man's ego is intellect-centered and woman's ego is feeling-centered. They have different qualities of ego. And that's why a man can never understand a woman, a woman never understands a man. They have different types of centers and different languages.

When intellect says 'yes', it means 'yes'. When emotion says 'yes', it does not necessarily mean 'yes'.

When emotion says 'no', it may mean 'yes'; it may just be an invitation to be persuaded more. And if you take a woman at her word, you will be in difficulty because her word is not an intellectual assertion. It has a different way of movement, a different quality. Intellect has a direct, mathematical ego. You can understand it easily. So to understand a man is not very difficult because the logic is straight: two and two make four. To understand a woman is different because the logic is not straight. It moves in circles, so two and two never make four. They can make anything, but never four! The logic moves in a circle. Emotion moves in a circle; logic and intellect move in a straight line.

When something moves in a circle, you can never be certain because it may mean just the contrary.

Soon it will move in a circle, and it will be the opposite of its own assertion. So with a woman one has to be aware not of what she has said but of what she means. The actual assertion is not to be given much importance - what she means. And the meaning may be something very different.

So it has always happened that very intellectual persons have never been at ease with their wives - never! Socrates, a very intelligent person, an intellectual genius, knew every nook and corner of logic, but was never at ease with his wife, Xanthippe - never. He could not understand what she was saying! That is, he understood what she was saying, but he never understood what she meant.

He was so logical that he always missed the point. He went direct, straight, and she went in circles.

Intellect has its own ego - direct, straight; emotion has its own ego - circular. They both have egos. But the totality has no ego. The totality has individuality. So when you reach totality, you are neither man nor woman. You are both and you are neither. You transcend and comprehend both.

That is what is meant by ARDHANARISHWAR - half-man, half-woman: a deep communion inside happens. You have become total, one, with no division.

One thing you must note: this is not a fixed arrangement. When I say that a man has an intellectual ego, it is not a fixed arrangement. In some moments he may just regress to an emotional ego; in some moments a woman may come up to an intellectual ego. Then things are more confused.

When a man is in difficulty, he will just regress to an emotional ego. He will begin to weep and begin to talk in ways which are not even comprehensible to him. And he will say later on, "What happens I cannot say! In spite of myself I begin to weep; I begin to act in ways in which I would not like to act." A very strong man, in a particular situation, may begin to behave in a very emotional way. And a very emotional woman, in a particular situation, may begin to behave very manlike. In a different setting the ego may change from one center to another. That creates even more difficulties - but one has to be aware.

With feeling or with intellect, the ego is bound to be there. Only with totality is there no ego. So this I give you as a criterion: If you are and you don't feel any "I", you are total. You are sitting here: listen as if there is no "I" in you. Ears are there, a listening process is there, your consciousness is there, but no "I", then you are total. How can you be divided without an "I"? Without an ego, how can you be divided? The ego is the division.

And just as I said that there are many personalities, there are also many egos. Each center has its own ego. Intellect has its own, emotion has its own, the sex center has its own ego - its own "I". If you go deep down into the bio-structure of the body, each cell has its own ego. That is the division.

If you are without an ego, if just you are, with no "I-feeling" anywhere, then you are total. And in that totalness - even for a single moment if you are total - you will be Awakened suddenly. And then anything can awaken you - anything!

A zen nun is carrying an earthen water-pot from the well. For thirty years she has been in this monastery - working continuously, meditating, making every effort to achieve a tranquillity, a state of stillness where the Truth can reflect. But it has not come.

Suddenly the water-pot falls down and is broken, shattered. She stands there, sees it shatter, and the water flows out - and she is Awakened. Suddenly she achieves the Enlightenment. She runs, she dances, she goes into the temple.

Her Master comes and touches her feet and says, "Now you are a Buddha: you have achieved." But the nun asks, "Tell me, how did this happen? - because I tried and tried and tried continuously for thirty years, and it was not happening. And this morning I decided that this seems just absurd and it will not come, so I left every effort. So why, this day, has this happened?"

The Master says, "Because for the first time you were total and without an ego. Effort creates an ego. The very effort was the barrier. Now, without any effort, without any motive, without any ambition, you were just carrying a water-pot and suddenly the pot falls - bang! - the pot has fallen and broken, and suddenly you become aware, with no ego. And the very listening the very breaking of the pot, the shattering, the noise, the flowing of the water, and you there without any ego, listening totally - the thing has happened!"

So when I say listen totally, I mean this.

 

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