The Subtle Art Of Listening
Listening Beyond The Words
Understand And Cultivate Listening In This Cacophonous World
Words merely passing through our ears is not listening but a cacophony and in this cacophonous world, to be well performed, listening requires more than just letting the sound waves enter passively into the ear. Most of us just hear the words without grasping the very essence and meaning hidden beneath them.
Swimming in the sea of internal dialogues, we are always full of opinions, experiences, conclusions, problems and have lost touch with the subtle art of listening. Preoccupied with judgements that there is no space left within us in which to listen.
Whether personal or professional, most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. Even if we claim to be good listeners or remained quiet while others were speaking, we don’t really listen. We love to talk but we hate to listen. We only hear what we want to hear, only what gratifies us, comfort us, and alleviate our sufferings. More often than not we just hear what others have to say without attentively and affectionately listening to them which leads to either assumption or in most cases miscommunication. And that is why there is so much conflict in our professional and personal relationships.
A couple of years back, together with a monk friend, I was walking down a busy city street and amid the honking horns, screeching tires he exclaimed to me, “Listen to that bird!”
I looked at my monk friend in astonishment and said, “You hear a bird in the middle of all this cacophony? Without a word, the monk friend of mine reached into his cloth bag, took out a coin, and flipped it into the air. As it clinked on the sidewalk, a dozen heads turned in response.
The monk friend said quietly to me, “We hear what we listen for.”
“Listen to the wind, it talks. Listen to the silence, it speaks. Listen to your heart, it knows.” ~ Native American Proverb
Listening, a creative force, is not just about being quiet but being present, in the moment, and have a genuine desire to be with others while communicating, without leaving ourselves.
An Art Beyond Words
Often the word art is applied to artists, those who paint, those who play music, those who write poems or make sculptures and so on but the real meaning behind the word art is giving everything its proper, righteous place. Which means putting our whole, all our senses, emotions, feelings in the right place, putting everything in eternal harmony.
Listening is an art. And so, the art of listening is to listen with all our whole, our senses, emotions and feelings. With so much attention, affection and care that there is nothing in between the speaker and the listener. The words are mere vehicles. The sound waves passing through our ears are nothing but a medium for us to realise the depth of each word coming out of the other side.
When we listen with our whole, our full attention, affection and care, we realise that, in the process, the listener is disappeared and we witness immediate freedom. In that immediate freedom, every nuance of a word has significance, there are immediate comprehensions and immediate insights. This is called listening beyond the words. In this art of listening, one learns immediately and sees the fact instantly.
When the listener disappeared, freedom appears and in that freedom, we find our true being, we find ourselves. Listening beyond the words is an absolute miracle.
All great thinkers, artists, writers, poets, philosophers of the past were intuitive listeners and knew this phenomenon. To master the art of listening, they often pressed pause and embraced the sound of silence.
Most of us carry a library in our mind of all opinions, prejudices, philosophies, ideologies and listen through the screen of our beliefs, ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties. Means, while communicating with others, we are nothing but listening to our own voices, listening to our own beliefs, ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties and so on.
To master the art of listening, all we need is to put aside the library we carry in our mind and the screen through which we listen. The art of listening is that we should not bring our mind in and let the words go into our innermost being without being hindered.
In Buddhism, Avalokiteśvara or Padmapani, a Bodhisattva, is a model of the art of listening practice. Avalokiteśvara is known to have learned the art of listening and speaking deeply to help people let go of their fear, misery, anxiety, and despair. According to Avalokiteśvara, if we practice the art of listening, we too will be able to open the universal door (freedom) and bring joy, peace, and happiness to many people and alleviate their suffering.
The universal door manifests itself
in the voice of the rolling tide.
Hearing and practising it, we become a child,
born from the heart of a lotus,
fresh, pure, and happy,
capable of speaking and listening
in accord with the universal door.
With only one drop of the water
of compassion
from the branch of the willow,
spring returns to the great Earth.~ The Lotus Sutra
The Science Of Listening
Being a good listener isn’t always easy though. Studies have shown that the average person can only remember 50% of what they’ve heard and only 10% of the original message can be recollected after a time span as short as 3 days. Another study in which scientists who have researched human mind say that 96% of what what we hear we do not take it. We only hear 2% that fits into our understanding.
The reason for these shocking stats is that most of us think of listening as a passive process that requires no effort.
Various explanations of listening have led to diverse models of the listening process. A well-recognized and widely used model is developed by Judi Brownell (1996) which comprises six elements in the HURIER Listening model. The six parts are Hearing, Understanding, Remembering, Interpreting, Evaluating and Responding. According to Brownell’s model, we have six listening tasks and a lot of skills that either indicate or facilitate each stage of listening reception.
During the ‘team-building’ activities for the new interns, Jason, the head of HR decided to go with an age-old exercise, the Chinese whispers. Amy, the first player came up with a message and whispered to Adam, the second player. Adam repeated to Linda and it kept going on before ending with the last player, Jason himself.
Jason received a message which was different than what Amy had said and that was the whole point of choosing this game, to show the interns how effective communication cannot be established without practising effective listening within the team. If we don’t practice effective and affectionate listening to others, we tend to judge people without really considering their emotions and feelings, which results in regular conflicts in the workplace.
Unlike ‘hearing’ what the speaker is saying, listening requires our full concentration which involves using all of our senses on what exactly is being said. It entails paying full attention to others to convey the message that we truly are engrossed in the conversation.
In an article for McKinsey Quarterly, Amgen’s CEO Kevin Sharer talks about how he was a terrible listener until Palmisano convinced him to change. The best advice I ever heard about listening — advice that significantly changed my own approach — came from Sam Palmisano, when he was talking to our leadership team. Someone asked him why his experience working in Japan was so important to his leadership development, and he said, “Because I learned to listen.” And I thought, “That’s pretty amazing.” He also said, “I learned to listen by having only one objective: comprehension. I was only trying to understand what the person was trying to convey to me. I wasn’t listening to critique or object or convince.”
True listening, at its essence, is about being an empathetic person and connecting with our inner self in the process.
Cultivate The Art Of Listening
Listening to others begins with listening to us first. We should listen deeply to ourselves before we start the process of listening to others. We need to clear space in our being before we make room to listen to others.
When we listen to someone with all our full attention, affection, and care we give our innermost space to the speaker and it is the most precious gift we can give. Because at the deepest level of Being, we are one with all that is.
Listening is a phenomenal skill to possess and is useful in every intellectual and emotional encounter that we have with others. If we are to thrive, we must become a better listener, honestly and compassionately across diversity and difference. Doesn’t matter whether a CEO or an employee, a teacher or a student, a friend or a spouse, all of us need to learn the art of listening to satisfy our human cravings for empathy, acceptance, affirmation and so on.
“If speaking is silver, then listening is gold.” ~ Turkish Proverb
The art of listening is to be sensitive, to be alert, to be watchful, to be present and involves, from a deep, receptive and caring place in oneself. It is generous, empathic, supportive, accurate and trusting. Trust here does not imply agreement, but the trust that whatever others say, regardless of how well or poorly it is said, comes from something true in their experience.
Alan Watts, the main interpreter of Zen Buddhism in the West, once stated: “Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlooking them”. This perfectly sums up the issue with our listening skills, too. There is a certain Zen-like quality in practising listening. Not only does it help us socially, but it also helps us spiritually.
Listening doesn’t work as effortlessly as hearing does. Endless possibilities surface toward developing the communal philosophical pursuit on our route to establishing a connection with a (semantic) sound through our attempt at listening.
It is an ongoing practice of suspending self-oriented, reactive thinking and opening one’s awareness of the unknown and unexpected. It calls on a special quality of attention that poet John Keats called negative capability. the ability to reside within paradox, to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
Being in touch with unknown and unexpected creates a clear space of no-mind within which any word will have its significance, any relationship can flower and anything is possible.
Thanks for reading this story. You may wish to read my other curated poetry and stories.
a) Listen To This Moment. Read here:
b) How to help others without burning out and hurting yourself. Read here:
c) Know what intuitive creativity is and how to cultivate it. Read here:
