The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 9

How to Listen

I have begun to notice that many among you, perhaps a very large portion, do not listen to what I say. For not unoften you have put questions on a subject on which I talked in detail just a moment before, as if nothing was spoken. The fact is surely this : each one of you is shut up in his own thought, exactly as, I suppose, you do in the class also at school. You repeat to yourself your own lesson, thinking of what is expected of you—provided, of course, you are at all diligent and attentive—and do not listen to what your teacher asks and explains or what the other students answer. You miss in this way three-fourths of the advantage of being not all alone but in a group.

Here the matter is more serious. For I do not give an individual or personal answer, I answer in such a way that all may profit and if, instead of listening, you continue to think what you have in your own head, you lose the opportunity to learn anything.

That is the first point. If you are here, you

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must first of all, listen and not think of other things. But that is not sufficient, it is only the beginning. For there is a good way and there are many bad ways of listening. I do not know if any of you likes to hear music. But if you want to hear music, you must make an absolute silence in your head; you should not follow or accept any thought, you should be wholly concentrated, make yourself a kind of screen, noiseless and immobile. That is the only way of hearing and understanding music. If you allow the least movement or waywardness in your thought, the whole value of the music will escape you.

Now, to understand a teaching which is not altogether of a material kind, which implies an opening to things that are within, the necessity of silence is all the greater. But if instead of listening to what is said, you jumped about for an idea in order to put another question or if you started arguing about the things said under the specious pretext of understanding better, all you heard would pass like smoke without leaving an effect.

In the same way, when you have an experien e, as long as it lasts, do not try to understand what it means; if you do that, it vanishes, of you deform and disfigure it, taking away all its purity.

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In the same way also if you want a spiritual experience to enter into you, you must have a brain absolutely quiet and immobile, like a mirror which not only reflects but absorbs, allows the ray to enter and penetrate deep within so that out of the profundities of your consciousness it may rise up one day or other in the form of knowledge..

If you come here, come with the intention of listening in silence. What will happen you will recognise later on; the effect of this attitude of silence you will find out in course of time. But in the meanwhile the only thing to do is to be silent, still, attentive.

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