listening

It’s 07.12 on Thursday morning, quite dark outside, and I’m sitting here with a cup of coffee, trying to put my thoughts in order. They are clustering around two centres. One is to do with listening. The other is to do with talking across the generations. Perhaps I’ll say something about listening today and come to the other point tomorrow.

Last night I read your piece ‘The Words We Share’ and I was struck by the Quaker text that comes at the end – the emphasis on ‘redemptive silence’, ‘the duty of listening’, ‘attentive minds and silent hearts’. I don’t think I’ve read the text before but I recognise the sentiments. Once upon a time, I used to visit the Quaker meeting house in Cambridge and these are the familiar concepts of a movement in which the cultivation of receptivity is a primary virtue. I remember struggling then with the texture of the silent meeting. I remember being bad at it. Or unskilled (which is how a Buddhist would put it). I remember feeling irritation at some of the witnessing that I heard and I remember wondering endlessly whether the time was ripe for me myself to witness. (The answer should have been obvious – it wasn’t – I was better off listening.)

These days my focus is more on Buddhist practice where sitting in silence is also of great importance, although the dynamics of sitting are understood very differently. Contrary to what people sometimes think, the practice isn’t self-centred. In fact, the point is more that it produces a ‘softening’ (not quite a dissolution?) of the self, which in turn gives rise to that most Buddhist of virtues, compassion. By observing what arises in one’s own mind and heart, one begins to stop identifying with one’s thoughts and feelings. One learns to watch compassionately as anger or grief or humiliation arise and subside in the space that one calls the self. And, in the process, one learns compassion in a wider sense – one becomes able to offer the same generous attention to other people. So – yes – the dynamic is different but the basic practice is seen as producing a greater receptivity to something beyond the self whether that is understood as listening to the voices of others or experiencing compassion in response to their suffering. In both cases, receptivity is something that must be cultivated through a certain type of practice, one that involves being present, maintaining silence, and paying attention.

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It’s evening now and I’m struck that on the first morning of writing I was thinking about language from the point of view of the listener rather than the speaker. I suppose I’d assumed that I would begin by thinking about the difficulty of using language to speak about the future. But there is also something important about making oneself receptive to the possibilities that language offers. And why examine what spiritual traditions have to say about this? Because when so much contemporary discourse on listening is so corporate – so managerial – it is powerful to read texts that make receptivity an end in itself and not simply a means of ‘dealing with difficult people’ or ‘getting the most from your staff’. The rediscovery of listening as end and not means – that is what the spiritual disciplines offer.