On listening to another, oneself

Zoketsu Norman Fischer on listening:

• Listen with as few preconceptions or desires as possible.
• Listening takes radical openness to another and radical openness requires surrender.
• Listening turns a person from an object outside, opaque or dimly threatening, into an intimate experience, and therefore into a friend. In this way, listening softens and transforms the listener.
• Listening requires fearless self confidence that is not egotism. It is faith in yourself to learn something completely new.
• To listen is to shed, as much as possible, all of our protective mechanisms.
• Simply be present with what you hear without trying to figure it out or control it.
• To listen is to be radically receptive to others.
• You are aware of all your preconceptions, desires, and delusions, all that prevent you from listening.
• Listening is dangerous. It might cause you to hear something you don’t like, to consider its validity, and therefore to think something you never thought before, or to feel something you never felt before, and perhaps never wanted to feel.  Such change in ourselves is the risk of listening, and this is why it is automatic for us not to want to listen.
• To really listen is to accord respect. Without respect no human relationships can function normally.
• So much of what we actually feel and think is unacceptable to us.  We have been conditioned over a lifetime to simply not hear all of our own self-pity, anger, desire, jealousy. Our “adult response” is no more than our unconscious decision not to listen to what goes on inside us.

From Taking our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up

So much of being grown up, yeah, is an unconscious choice not to listen to most of what goes on inside.

How to listen and let it, another, oneself, in. Not give it sway but look after it.

Asked before what just sitting following the breath could possibly offer as a response to Trump and what’s happening.

This thought, just now. Trump’s first failure is a failure of inner listening.

I know that sounds 180 degrees wrong. But I mean Norman’s sort of listening – the friendship given another, given to oneself. Trump has no such friend.

The image atop: three Daruma dolls. I saw one last summer in a store window in Toronto and wished for it and … oh, it’s a long story, but my dear friend Barb went to great lengths, and then some more. And over pancake breakfast at the Old Town Cafe a few days ago passed it across the table to me. Daruma = Bodhidharma, Zen founder, spent nine years in a cave listening.

With thanks to Nomon Tim Burnett for passing the text on.