Listening to Silence
Silence: absence of clutter in the mind.
Listening to Silence within you
OK. This is meditation, whether on a cushion or in the midst of a busy street…
or while coaching someone
or while just having an everyday conversation
or while enjoying art
Listening to Silence doesn’t mean that you don’t hear anything else. It’s about Listening to more than anything else.
It’s about intensively experiencing yourself.
This way, someone else can also experience you.
Very attractive!
The importance lies in this special kind of experience – even or especially if you ‘already know’ – and then also in what may come out of it. However, if during the experience, you conceptualize about what may – or what may not – come out of it, you don’t experience yourself.
To conceptualize without experience is horizontal. To experience yourself is vertical. Like the difference between sign and symbol. [see: “Symbols and Signs”]
Listening to Silence in others
Say: while coaching, or even while bringing empathy to a medical context. [see: “Empathy in 1, 2, 3 – Part 1: ‘Silence’”]
For this, it’s good to practice Listening to Silence within yourself. Through your Silence, you can hear another’s. Even more, it is your Silence itself that does this Listening.
Please try to feel that something may be happening; some ‘deeper truth’ might surface.
Who knows.
Let your Silence be Listening
such as to me now.
In a way, you may now be Listening to Silence in another person, namely me, through this writing.
Feel?
Right now, while writing, I try to be transparent, to let you hear me, to let you see me
for miles and miles… Nothing special?
Yet this kind of Listening – generally – changes your life, your environment, the world, everything.
This is not the end of being critical.
Of course. If Silence would be the same as silence, it would be the end. Personally, I call this the ‘Big Mistake’. It’s the worst that can happen. It’s the same mistake as between ego and total self.
Listening to Silence is the start of a new level of being critical: one with much more opportunity to transcend any possible bias. It’s like being able to look at things from a different perspective, not once but again and again. It’s a way towards not being stuck. It’s a chance to really change. One could say: as through a kind of ‘distillation process’
with as goal not to get rid of impurities, but to let them dissolve.
They are part of who you are, your personal flavor. How you manage them, is the real ‘being critical’ in the sense of making right distinctions: correcting existing ones, possibly adding some.
Listening to Silence – which as said, can be done in many ways – makes you a better person.
It may eventually be the only thing that does.
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