Are we losing the art of listening? 200 words
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The Lost Art Of Listening
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It can be said in general that most people no longer know how to listen–either to one another or to themselves. Though most of us have ears that can hear very well, we do not actually know how to use these ears to listen. Listening has indeed become a lost art. And the results are obvious not just in education, society, business, and politics but also in the very fabric of our individual lives.
To be sure, there are many who teach listening skills for education and business. In a classic and informative article (“Listening to People”) written in the 1950s and published by the Harvard Business Review in 1988 in a collection entitled People: Managing Your Most Important Asset, the authors (Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens) remind us that whereas the average speech rate of the majority of Americans is around 125 words a minute (and, of course, comparable numbers would hold true for other languages as well), the human brain processes words at a much faster rate. When we listen to someone speaking, therefore, we are asking our brain to slow down dramatically in relation to its ordinary speed. This means that we are left with a lot of spare time for thinking, “and the use or misuse of this spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person can concentrate on the spoken words. … A major task in helping people to listen better is teaching them to use their spare thinking time efficiently.”
Deep Listening
The relationship of thinking to listening is an important subject, not just for individuals but for society as a whole, and one that the authors go into in great depth in relation to developing better listening skills. In this essay, however, we will keep this relationship in mind but our emphasis will be slightly different. Our emphasis will be on listening as a way of self-knowledge and self-transformation. Our emphasis will be on the being of the so-called listener. Our emphasis will be on what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “deep listening.”
Deep listening has to do with the very essence of our relationship to ourselves and others. Deep listening requires love, being, and understanding. From the perspective of self-knowledge, self-transformation, and self-realization, to listen deeply means to welcome, to make ourselves fully available to, what is actually taking place now both in and around us. This is only possible, however, when we are inwardly quiet, alert, and sensitive, when we are in a state of receptivity. Deep listening requires a balance between activity and passivity. It requires us to empty our minds without losing them. It requires us to find a “middle ground,” a space in ourselves, where the vibrations of life can enter and be reflected in our consciousness without discrimination, where the forces coming from both outside and inside can be experienced without attachment, fear, interpretation, or judgment.
Deep listening has nothing to do with our so-called will power. It most often begins spontaneously at the very instant we realize that we are not listening, when we see our self-importance puffing up, when we see clearly how our “identification” with our thoughts, feelings, or sensations interferes with what is being said or offered. At that moment, if we continue to be sincere with ourselves and don’t react with inner criticism, we realize that there is something in us–a deeper level of silence, a deeper “self,” a witness–that can include our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the process of listening. We also realize that this deeper silence comes into play only when we can confront the truth about ourselves without any judgment, or, in other words, with compassion. It is this inner silence that will not only allow us to hear the subtle nuances of what is being said but will also bring us to a central, more-balanced place in ourselves. For if our attention goes too far outside ourselves we begin to react to the events around us too aggressively, whereas if it goes too far into ourselves we fall asleep or dream. In both instances we lose touch with the subtle dance, the moving interaction, of inner and outer impressions that sustains our lives.
HOPE IT HELPS.