Hearkening: The Listening Self is an invitation to gather together in the intimate presence of fellowship with-in the celebratory clearing that is Listening’s dojo. Three themes will host our journey through this dojo of listening. The first of these themes is Detective Novel/Treasure Hunt. The second is the Hearkening of/to Avalokiteshvara. The third is Lila and Praxis.
Theme 1: Detective Novel/Treasure Hunt Our participation in the listening track can be approached as a co-creative composition and artistic production – as an exultant symphonic arising with-in the spirit of a detective novel/treasure hunt. Listening is an intricate mystery to explore as well as a vital treasure to unearth. I wish for our community’s gathering together in this course to saunter in sedulous serenade as a detective novel/treasure hunt through the mandalic labyrinth of listening.
Theme 2: The Hearkening of/to Avalokiteshvara Avalokiteshvara is the bodhisattva of compassion. One translation of the name is, “Whom hears the cries of the world.” Another translation is, “Whom hears the sound of the world.” Our living Question may become: Who or what is this Hearing? Who or what is this sounding? We wish to reveal Avalokiteshvara as the personification of listening. That is, we wish to reveal Avalokiteshvara as the beating heart of mystery which animates our detective story, and as the pearl of great price of our treasure hunt.
Avalokiteshvara gathers and personifies the multi-toned questions about the relationship(s) between listening, the cries of the world, the sound(ing) of the world, and compassion. Avalokiteshvara gathers these multi-toned questions with-in the clearing of the dojo’s soundscape, and personifies their relationship to the freely and fully alive human Being.
Our communally lived Question: What does listening’s reclamation have to do with compassion’s rehabilitation?
Theme 3: Lila and Praxis Listening’s dojo is toned with the (at)tune(ment) of lila and praxis, and we are invited in this track to resonate with these kosmic chords.
Lila is a Hindu expression revealing the entire vivid display of life as a divine drama, as a creative artistic jubilation… as the prajnaparamita that is “playfullness.” Praxis is the serenading process of learning, of embodied realization, and of ripening intimacy.
Listening is lila and listening is praxis. Our gathering together in and as the celebratory clearing of listening’s lila and praxis ripens into the resonant (at)tune(ment), where, as physicist Henri Bortoft says, “The part is the place for the presencing of the whole.” This is the resonant (at)tune(ment) where “each everything is echoing sounds” (beings/part) with, for, and as the Sounding Field (Being/Whole).
Lexicon-Wordsmith-Playstation Here are some links to terms that may be more foreign to you within the post above. I invite you to play with them and let them muse with you, seeing what novel interpretations, expressions and possibilities emerge.
Dojo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dojo Avalokiteshvara: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalokiteśvara Lila: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila_(Hinduism) Praxis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_(process) Mandala: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala Labyrinth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth Prajnaparamita: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita
Main PDF Hearkening Reading Files Hearkening – pdf file of reading
Wunderbar Vid: L.I.L.A. : Live Interactive Listening Adventure!
Vid Deva says:
For the Magellan Courses Listening Track
(the fully community is also welcomed to let their voice be heard here)
I am considering some ways of working with different layers, aspects and levels of our writing on the Biffnet site. I will get back to you on that shortly.
For now, to begin our listening journey, detective novel/treasure hunt together, in the service of weaving our group into deeper community and to let your own unique life experience flavor our practice together i would love it if you would be willing to offer a few comments about listening and your life.
The comments i would like to invite you to consider and post about here in the comments section are:
1. What would a key question, interest, area of inquiry be for you in regard to listening?
2. What musing, reflection, insight, or comment from your own experience with listening would you like to share with us here.
3. What practice, engagement, or participation in listening would you like to share with the group?
4. Do you have a situation or story about listening from your life that you would be willing to share with the group?
5. If you have a favorite quote, poem or section of writing about listening please feel free to leave that here as well.
These are four areas that you can also take with you into your writing on the Biffnet site. Feel free to offer more than one for each of those headings here in the comments. If you find any of the numbers challenging to reply to please feel invited to still speak out here saying something about why that is so. This could be as simple as saying that listening is an interesting new area to play in and so you don’t have any life events or practices to share. Could be as simple as saying that although you do have life situations and practices of listening you haven’t considered what questions might be animating them yet.
1. What specific practices can I learn to deepen my ability to listen, both within myself & to others, and most especially how can I practice listening with, through, to, as, into, out of the divine?
2. It’s possible to listen with my entire being, but it hurts.
3. Listening as a marker for the alterations happening from one state of awareness to another.
4. I remember reading about how a film editor used a technique to draw the audience’s attention to the emotional content of a scene by carefully removing sounds and music until there was complete silence at the emotional peak. I immediately watched the film and confirmed the power of this technique. The film is “The Conversation” editing and sound design by Walter Murch.
5. Just came up with this: Four areas, but five comment requests, hmmm is that the Afikoman?
With apologies if this is too broad or vague, my primary question going into this course is how can I better listen to and understand the communication of everything both outside and within myself, and better support this in those with whom I interact?
As a Magellan rookie, I also very much look forward to soaking in whatever I can of the experience, insights, and thought processes of everyone else participating here.
The practices I have found to be most helpful to my personal listening involve better feeling when to hold back my instinctive urge to try to “fix” challenges people tell me about, and also the impulse when someone is talking to think ahead to what I am going to say next, and rather be fully present to what is being said in each moment, trusting the response that will arise in me when the moment is ripe for one.
Big thanks in advance to everyone/thing responsible for making this course happen. I’m very much looking forward to it.
What do I hear, do and feel when I listen here?
An excercise of blind and speechless grace,
a memory of taste and smell of place,
a being present and aware
feeling together around the pond,
letting our deepest selves respond
to the ancient call of the heart
each in a unique way but not apart?
(blindness to train the ear and the other senses, but also to surrender and trust)
How does one listen to/for the unspoken? How is it filtered?
I’d like us to discuss, If we can, the listening for non verbal communication. – how to better filter for it. Paralanguage.
I’d like us to play with cultural listening (if we can) (meaning making)
Pretty. Simply. Looking forward to listening (and learning from) this course.
Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate, wandering. Where we go matters less than what we notice.
there are two things that interest me about *listening* and they both have to do with silence….what I am practicing (and want to continue practicing in this group) is a kind of *listening* that penetrates beneath the normal cacophony of daily life….a listening that penetrates into what (I believe) enfolds and is within everything….I want to hear and feel the silence of the mountains, of the night sky, of the babbling stream, of the forest….for me, silence is not the absence of sound – it is That from which sound arises….it is also a palpable presence for me (not always, but sometimes, and this is the practice I most want to follow)….my own experience of *listening* takes place in my clinical work….listening to people’s stories for the better part of 30 years…..last year (and continuing now) I had an experience with a client in which I was given the opportunity to *listen* at a level I had not experienced before….due to a jutaposition of her despair/suicidality and my helplessness/fatigue, I was “forced” (so to speak) into a place of silence…..I found myself *listening* to this client in a different way, from a different place inside my body and I found that *the right thing to say* emerged from that place, often without effort…..the word I began to use to describe the experience was grace – I said/did things that were (for me) out-of-convention and they were “always” the right things for the moment….both my client and me were transformed by the experience.
A bit:
1. When listening to my own Voice, how can I be sure if it’s really being Heard knowing how many filters it passes through in its receiving? ie…. when do I know, with any reassurance, that what I hear is ultimately trustable?
2. Listening, at the level I’d like to be capable of, is going to be a lifetime devotion.
3. Learning to bring awareness to what is felt in the midst of experience, and to pay attention to those feelings, and how they are signaling. Finding that I’m probably not any more or less aware of my “inner whisperings” than I have been in the past, but rather simply more capable of interpreting those communications.
4. One experience (that I’m becoming more aware of), is that it’s difficult to really listen in the midst of an experience with an other. It seems I “listen” better solo… recapping the aforementioned experience… but, I see the “danger” of processing after the fact… not in the moment. Stepping in then stepping out is not possible (?) while actually with-in an interaction. It’s like I want to record the experience for playback later when I can better implement my own under-standing/or not. But what might result is not being fully present during that interaction.
What does it actually mean to listen? To what do I listen – to sounds, meanings, the We-space? Do I listen with my ears? my brains? my heart? soul? spirit???
There are many layers to that. I listen to the sounds surrounding me. Then there is the interpretation. Oh, that’s a bird, that’s a car, that’s the heater… And there is silence from which all sounds arise…
I listen to the words and phrases others tell me. Here listening is already much more than hearing sounds. It is much more like listening to interpretations of and being attuned to their (and my) meaning-making process. So, I listen to what I think they want to tell me… nothing to do with my ears. Can I figure out what they mean with my mind? Can I listen with my heart? soul? spirit? What does that mean? What of me is involved?
And: What is the difference between hearing and seeing?
What I realize in my own process: there is (sometimes) a sharpening of my senses going on which seem to become more awake. When I walk through a forrest just by myself, for example, I can often hear and see and smell and taste and sense so much more than I used to. And it feels like the senses become ONE, as a unified way of perception. There is movement… sensations… I see/hear/sense the mice, the birds, the colors, wind, movements… They make themselves seen/heard/felt… I am in the forrest and the forrest is within me… Everything is becoming more brilliant than before… I walk a path with my feet sensing and caressing the ground… and the path is within me simultaneously…
And there is the same going on in my inner life… There is often a sense of attunement to something bigger than me… some kind of possible realities opening up… as possibilities… not sure yet which one will be actualized… And I am seeing/hearing/sensing into them… watching/listening for a way through… something I can do from my set of gifts that I have to offer… for the highest good of the ALL to unfold… And there is a picture emerging which holds a possible solution… which is not an image like a photograph but more a way of perceiving the patterns and movements unfolding… There is a felt-sense of what is possible and necessary, and I need to feel into it, listen into it… to give birth to it… so it can come through me, in me, as me… into the world that is unfolding through me, in me, as me and through, in and as all of us… And sometimes it becomes very real and concrete… something I can do or say in a very practical way right here, right now…
I want to learn to act, speak, see, LISTEN… from that place in a more and more consistent way… practice it… live from it…