A Life-Changing Insight Into Listening

[Yimpa]

Deconstruction baby!

[Davino]

This week I’ve been contemplating listening and really listening, as much as I could.

What is listening? At one level, it’s simple receptivity. Communication theory gives us a clean model: a transmitter, a channel, and a receiver. When we speak or act, we transmit. When we receive, we listen. But more deeply, these aren’t just mechanical roles: they point to properties of consciousness, and to the way reality is intrinsically interconnected.

For listening to truly happen, something in us must become quiet, still, and hollow—an inner and outter spaciousness that allows input to penetrate the whole body, mind, and energetic field. 

After more contemplation, I decided to stop understanding listening from mind and to focus instead on listening itself—the act, the state, the direct experience. So this week I set aside time to simply listen. After hours, listening became spacious and three-dimensional. I found I could tune to any part of reality (rain, voices, distant engines, birds) as if each were a transmitter, and I was the receiver, it was a contraction of the consciousness space between the two nodes (I and that) and a channel created through attention or the focusing of consciousness.

I also noticed how multilayered listening is. Even when I was resting in it, subtle thinking would arise—interpreting, labeling, making sense. And that thin layer of meaning-making would quietly fracture the purity of listening. So I began to develop a kind of meta-listening: listening to the impulse to comment, to conclude, to frame. Ironically, that made me even more silent. The more clearly I noticed the mind’s movement, the longer I could remain in an unbroken presence of listening.

I listened to the rain, to kids playing, to cars passing, to birds. I listened to other people like never before. The connection became richer, not only in quantity but in quality. I realized how much I had been missing: how many cues slipped past me because of divided attention, subtle inner chatter, or because I was “listening to respond” rather than listening from open awareness itself. Sometimes I listened out of obligation, not out of connection. This week made the difference unmistakable.

What transformed me most was listening to myself. I saw how many parts of my psyche I habitually repress: how often desires, ambitions, contradictions, and uncomfortable truths arise, and I instinctively force them to shut up. But as I sat for hours, I listened lovingly to every part of myself. I listened to my mind and felt a rush of unreleased material: old hurt, unprocessed memories, “wrongdoings” done to me that I didn’t want to acknowledge, much less integrate. I sat and listened to the whole of my repressed story as it asked, simply, to be heard.

Then the body began to speak. Every ache started revealing its “why.” The pain in my back, the knot in my stomach, discomfort in my head, the imbalance in my foot, the acid in my stomach—each sensation carried a message, a history, a need. I listened to each part patiently, one by one, until I finally rested again in something like absolute listening: empty receptive consciousness space. Listening felt all-embracing.

I put on music and experienced it differently too, much more vividly than I’m used to. I could feel the singer behind the voice. I could sense layers within the song: each beat, each texture, each word as sound, each feeling and bodily response, the explicit and the implicit. 

Overall, I’m deeply grateful I committed to this one-week listening practice. It turned out to be far more beneficial than I expected. It improved my relationships with other people and with myself. I reconnected with the beauty of listening and its qualia: the felt textures of attention, the spectrum from strenuous to gorgeous and everything in between. Listening isn’t only an instrument of communication. It’s a mode of presence and, in its purest form, a way of connection and unconditional love.

[Leo Gura]

@Davino What you're describing is what I would call awareness or mindfulness -- which is of course fundamental.

I don't call listening to the rain, listening.

But good for you for doing the work.

Edited March 1 by Leo Gura

[Davino]

@Leo Gura Yes, I see your point. What is your definition of listening?

In some of these experimentations indeed listening become the fundamental receptive quality of awareness more than conventional listening, although I did have plenty of conversational listening with other people, which was very fruitful as well, but maybe not as juicy as the metaphysical aspects I discovered by focusing on listening. 

[Leo Gura]

34 minutes ago, Davino said:

What is your definition of listening?

Listening, in my view, is understanding verbal communication.

Contrary to what hippies may believe, the rain is not communicating with you.

But it is profound to be mindful of the rain.

Edited March 1 by Leo Gura

[Davino]

@Leo Gura More of a classic definition: you listen to people and you hear the rain. 

I might have started contemplating more less from that frame but was seduced with the metaphysics of listening along the way.

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, Davino said:

I might have started contemplating more less from that frame but was seduced with the metaphysics of listening along the way.

It's okay. The important thing is that you did the work.

[vibv]

@Davino You can practice listening to rain. Because it's not about hearing what the rain has to say, but about dropping all concepts and opening your mind to the unpredictability of the raindrops.

[Breakingthewall]

Listening is interesting; it's about understanding from where the other person is expressing. They usually speak from a place of affirmation of identity, which is extremely boring, since conversation becomes a feedback loop. If you're not playing that game, it becomes flat.

There are other people who speak from their own truth, but to do so, they need to be in touch with it and not be like a constructing device identity. Usually humans use a huge part of their processing capacity to build identity, then the most usual is finding people that apparently are talking to you but really are talking with themselves 

[gettoefl]

I can't understand anything in the world. I don't know what anything means. It's not the world and its wars are messed up. It's the one who perceives, who thinks he listens. I have to change not to what I listen but from where I listen. I am listening from a place that thinks you and I are separated, vulnerable, lacking individuals. We are indivisibles not individuals. Thankfully as JK alludes, I can change my mind. Enter the pause and have what it said reinterpreted truly.

[Davino]

@vibv I love rain, when I'm tripping and rain happens it's such a moment for me

[vibv]

2 minutes ago, Davino said:

@vibv I love rain, when I'm tripping and rain happens it's such a moment for me

Definitely! Check this out: https://www.reddit.com/r/raining/

[UnbornTao]

On 2/25/2026 at 10:12 PM, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Why would it be? It is a co-creative process in my view.

Just how I think about it. 99% of my job is about listening, understanding and re-affirming what has been meant/created/communicated. I am very very emotionally  removed when at work to facilitate this (and I try to remove my bias and unnecessary thinking). Much to the chagrin of those who view women from a certain lens! (an example of being aware of my own context, and that people expect warmth from women as a default)

The last 1% is ordering and designing stuff to be built  

Exactly.

Just a hunch that many people here may have such a view. It might not even occur to you to inquire into listening in the first place, but rather into "advanced" stuff. Why? (Rhetorical.)

[UnbornTao]

@Davino Yeah, sounds good. Like Leo, I'd call that hearing, or mindfulness perhaps. Remember to keep it experiential.

[UnbornTao]

On 3/1/2026 at 5:47 PM, Breakingthewall said:

Listening is interesting; it's about understanding from where the other person is expressing.

That's the gist of it, though it's not very common for us, all things considered.

One important distinction that came up was how we tend to approach things through intellectual understanding. Even when we think that doesn't apply to us, it's still a world we can easily get stuck in.

[UnbornTao]

On 3/1/2026 at 6:16 PM, gettoefl said:

I can't understand anything in the world. I don't know what anything means. It's not the world and its wars are messed up. It's the one who perceives, who thinks he listens. I have to change not to what I listen but from where I listen. I am listening from a place that thinks you and I are separated, vulnerable, lacking individuals. We are indivisibles not individuals. Thankfully as JK alludes, I can change my mind. Enter the pause and have what it said reinterpreted truly.

Yes, listen to JK even more deeply (in this case, "read").

It takes some work, and like any skill, it can be developed. But at the same time, don't make it mysterious, inaccessible or esoteric. It's not metaphysical, it's an action. You've probably truly listened to someone once or twice in your life. How did that come about? Ask yourself that question.

[UnbornTao]

Discussing listening while some kind of noise keeps making him pause, like on the other video.

The guy knows what questions to ask.

Edited March 6 by UnbornTao

[Eskilon]

The funny thing is @UnbornTao I don't see you listening to Leo anymore since you disagree with his worldview. Especially Alien Awakening

Its easy to listen when you actually care what the other is trying to communicate and you dont have any prejudices. If you don't care, all is doomed. The only thing needed is care, if you actually care you will naturally listen.

More listening to the one preaching listening

Edited March 6 by Eskilon

[UnbornTao]

7 hours ago, Eskilon said:

The funny thing is @UnbornTao I don't see you listening to Leo anymore since you disagree with his worldview. Especially Alien Awakening

Its easy to listen when you actually care what the other is trying to communicate and you dont have any prejudices. If you don't care, all is doomed. The only thing needed is care, if you actually care you will naturally listen.

More listening to the one preaching listening

There is, once again, a conflation between listening and gullibility or agreement (or disagreement, for that matter).

As usual, we tend to see listening as "saying yes" to things. Anything that takes the form of a straightforward position against a stance comes across as not having heard. Understandable, but wrong. And don't forget that the same position could be taken by the other party: "I'm the one not being listened to - don't be so closed-minded."

Listening isn't incompatible with recognizing what something is - deluded, accurate, plainly false, biased, a manipulation, and so on - whatever purpose it may have had when it was invented. This is why questions are asked in the first place, especially basic, common-sense ones that people somehow tend to overlook. Educating people on this would easily take a good hundred hours of work.

Why do cult dynamics always implicitly emphasize a certain kind of "open-mindedness"? You can begin to intuit what that's about.

So yes, being critical and listening are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they complement each other. Without the former, what you may end up with is a kind of lightweight spiritualism, which is quite common.

"The Earth is a rectangle."

Edited March 6 by UnbornTao

[Eskilon]

9 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

As usual, we tend to see listening as "saying yes" to things.

I didnt say that, listening is listening, it is neutral. But also, you listen to the things you care about in the first place, and you DON'T listen to things you don't care about -- listening is biased in that way too. 

My argument is that once you have a specific worldview, it is hard to truly listen to another person who has one different from yours. Which is your case, you can say you do listen neutrally but that is simply bs from what I observe.

9 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

Why do cult dynamics always implicitly emphasize a certain kind of "open-mindedness"? You can begin to intuit what that's about.

So you think we are in a cult here? Even though the "cult leader" has said repeatedly to no trust him(or anyone for that matter), to always question things to death. I don't know but this doesn't sound like a cult lol.

 

9 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

"The Earth is a rectangle."

Nice one. But, I am afraid you don't actually know the true shape of the earth, since you never exited nor observed from a high perspective. So no, quit being a smart-ass here kek.

All you know about the earth is borrowed knowledge, not something existential.

Edited March 6 by Eskilon