• skyblack
    545
    Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word

    Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
  • skyblack
    545
    Reading the above, one is confronted with the question of listening. What's involved in listening and how does one listen? Does one listen if they are caught in the movements of acceptance and rejection? Is one listening if the new is being filtered through the old? Surely not.

    Only a mind that isn't being pulled in different directions by contradictions, and is free from a listener that is heavy with the past, can truly listen. Such an innocent mind is free from compulsions and suppression, which distort listening.
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k
    Does one listen if they are caught in the movements of acceptance and rejection? Is one listening if the new is being filtered through the old? Surely not.skyblack

    How can one understand what is being said without comparing it to the known, then to estimate it's potential value for acceptance or rejection on the basis of what is discovered by reason or known from memory to be good or bad?

    If Herman Hesse's passage was read aloud or written in original German (if he wrote it in German) to us non German speakers, we could not begin to listen (as some would have us listen) until we learned German. What is the exercise of language and learning but an evaluation of the new through the old?

    Do we require language (connected to the network memory of our past and its associations) to listen?
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k
    [img]http://QYuW9LY.jpg

    An innocent mind must be properly conditioned to listen in order to perform for the benefit of other innocent minds.
  • Sir2u
    3.5k
    An innocent mind must be properly conditioned to listen in order to perform for the benefit of other innocent minds.Nils Loc

    But would a conditioned mind still be innocent?
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k


    Good question, if posed innocently?! Who can discern your sincerity! You must sit quietly and observe your breath, the bellows rhythm of your respiration, as the flow of the universe. Know that you are one with the dancing bear.
  • Sir2u
    3.5k
    Who can discern your sincerity!Nils Loc

    Err. you have my word as a gentleman on it.

    You must sit quietly and observe your breath, the bellows rhythm of your respirationNils Loc

    It's 9pm, and about 30 degrees, I can only observe my breath that if I sit in the refrigerator. Bollocks to that.

    Know that you are one with the dancing bear.Nils Loc

    Hope he can do better than me, I have not been able to dance for many years.
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