Awareness During Listening To A Guide

[alyra]

An important thing that I've learned is - that we are our own teacher. the wise man, the master, the teacher - they can only be a guide to us, as irrelevant to our understanding as words themselves. 

 

however as I am listening I am becoming aware of a conundrum. I wonder if I am listening to their words as if they are truth - I am noting that I want to hear the words as the illusion, and experience my response to the words in a way where I can trust that I am doing the work necessary to reach understanding. in a way I am trying to be selfish lol - to prioritize what I am thinking above the rest. but I am also wondering about how I am holding these thoughts as if they are belief. It is so easy to consider how beliefs are low-consciousness and how I could be letting go of them instead. But even so - on a certain level I believe that my thoughts are correct. but this is not the question of the post I assume. 

 

What I am concerned with is the question of - what I am believing, verses what the monk is saying, versus my awareness of this situation. In a way they are all the same thing lol - but I guess really the point is, that I don't want to be hearing the first thing that comes along and believing it as if it is true. and maybe the real place where I dismantle the beliefs is not in hearing another person's words - but instead in my actions. that, when I share my words, attempting to say it in a way where I do not hold it as true or false is what is desired. or when in deciding which to do, I am simply aware that my decision is not right or wrong, and the assumptions it is responding to are not necessarily correct or incorrect. but then I am unsure with that too. because making a decision based off of an idea is the behavior that occurs when that idea is held as true lol. 

 

but the point is. when I am listening to a person- well it was said by someone, an important thing to do is listen to someone as if they know something we do not. but, I guess really the question I am asking is, how do we reconcile the idea that a person says something we choose to ignore, and another thing they say we choose to retain in our memory and processing. regardless of whether we hold these things as right or wrong, we are somehow giving life to certain ideas and death with other ideas. and I am unsure how to reconcile the life and death of ideas with letting go of "true" and "false". and I am unsure my future steps towards mindfulness while listening, to both the other and the self, but especially the other, which actually is that also the self? grr how to progress with these thoughts I am conflicted.