Am I Deaf?

WHY CAN’T I HEAR YOU? AM I DEAF?

You are not deaf. And you also hear me, but you are not listening. And you don’t know the distinction between hearing and listening.

Anybody who has ears can hear, but it is not necessary that he will be able to listen. For listening, something more is necessary than just having ears: a certain kind of silence, a serenity, a peace– the heart standing behind the ears, not the mind.

It is the mind which makes you almost deaf, although you are not deaf – because the mind is constantly chattering, it is a chatterbox.

Just sometimes sit in your room, close your doors, and write down whatsoever comes into your mind just to see what goes on in it. Don’t edit it – because you are not going to show it to anybody, so just write down exactly what comes to your mind. And you will be surprised: just within ten minutes you will see that you are not sane; your mind is the mind of an insane person. Just somehow you are managing, covering it up, not allowing anybody to know what goes on inside you. And you have become experts, so much so that it is not only that you don’t allow others to know what goes on in your mind, you yourself don’t see it. And it goes on, yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak. Because of this constant mind making noise… although you are not deaf, you cannot listen. You can hear.

Listening needs a silent communication.

The words that I am speaking to you are ordinary words, you know them. I do not like to use any kind of jargon. But in another sense the words I am using are extraordinary because they are coming from a depth, from a space within me. And certainly they are carrying with them some perfume, some fragrance of that space. If you are silent, the word becomes inessential and the fragrance that it is carrying becomes essential.

If the fragrance reaches you, you have listened.

And the beauty of listening is that you don’t have to think about it. If it is coming out of truth, it carries truth with it; you feel the truth. If it is just mind stuff – not coming from experience, but just bookish – you will not find the fragrance in it.

But you have to be so alert, so silent, that you don’t miss that which surrounds the word. The fragrance is its validity, its logic, its philosophy. And if there is no fragrance, then it is just a dead flower like you sometimes find in BIBLES, in BHAGAVADGITA. People keep roses, dry roses in a BIBLE, with no fragrance, with no life.

When you simply hear, if one hundred persons are here there are going to be one hundred versions because the mind immediately starts interpreting – what does it mean? The mind is blind. It cannot see, it can only grope in the dark. Groping in the dark is called ‘thinking’. One hundred people sitting here will have heard one hundred meanings.

One evening Gautam Buddha was speaking to his disciples… and this was his everyday evening sermon. After the sermon he used to say to his disciples, ”Now, go; and before going to sleep, don’t forget your real work” – and that real work was meditation.

But that night one thief was there listening, one prostitute was there listening. The thief said, ”My God, this man is dangerous. He is saying ‘Before going to sleep, don’t forget to do your work.’ It is time, I must go.”

The prostitute thought, ”I am sitting so far away, and how did this fellow recognize me… that my work starts in the night?”

The thief went to steal.

The prostitute went to her work.

The sannyasins went to meditate.

Buddha had said only one thing: ”Don’t forget the work,” but the interpretation is going to be yours. The final decision is going to be yours. The word cannot decide for you; you have to decide what it means.

When you are only hearing, your mind is standing there scrutinizing, screening…. Now it is an established psychological fact that the mind only allows a certain percentage of information to reach you, there is a censor. And the mind has created very clever ways to censor things: it allows that which fits with your conditioning, and it simply does not allow that which goes against your conditioning. It makes you hear that which fits with you; it lets anything that is not fitting with your conditioning slip by, it does not pay attention to it. It does not take it in.

Hearing is not the right method to be with a master. It is good in a school, in a college, in a university; listening is not needed. But to be with a master hearing is not needed, listening is needed. Your interpretations should not hinder what is being said from reaching your heart – because those words are carrying delicate messages. Your interpretation is going to destroy that delicate message; you should not think whether it is right or wrong. I am not saying that you should accept it – there is no question of acceptance. I am simply saying you should neither accept nor not accept. You should be just a mirror reflecting whatsoever is the case. The master is saying something; let it reach to the heart.

And let the heart decide, not the mind.

The mind is always wrong, and the heart is always right, because mind knows only logic, the heart knows love. Let love be decisive – and love has never been wrong, and logic has never been right.

The father of logic, Aristotle, who created the whole science of logic, wrote in his book that women have less teeth than men. Because that was the prevalent idea in Greece. It was part of a bigger idea, that women cannot have anything equal to men. How can they have equal teeth? It was a natural corollary.

To be with a master, you need to learn how to listen. Hearing is not enough.
—
It is very difficult to hear what is being said. You hear what you CAN hear.

One parent was listening to her six-year-old at his math lesson: ”Three plus one, the sonuvabitch is four,” he said. ”Three plus two, the sonuvabitch is five. Three plus three, the sonuvabitch is six.”

The mother’s jaw dropped in astonishment. ”Johnny, where in the world did you ever learn to talk like that?” she angrily asked. ”Oh, that’s the way they teach us at school,” said Johnny.

Unable to believe it, Johnny’s mother visited the teacher and demanded an explanation. But the teacher was as horrified as the mother – she had no idea where Johnny had learnt those words.

Then she realized what had happened.

”I get it,” she laughed. ”We teach the children to say: Three plus one, the SUM OF WHICH is four; three plus two, the SUM OF WHICH is five!”

I may be saying one thing… you may be hearing another. Then it becomes very difficult. I talk from my vision; you listen from your vision. There is a vast difference. So each word that is said to you is being translated by you, even though I am speaking the same language that you understand – still it is being translated. —

It is a mystery to open the doors for listening, because everywhere only hearing is needed. In the marketplace, in the universities, in the churches, only hearing is needed. Listening is something out of this world; only lovers know something of it, only poets know something of it. Only mystics know the whole miracle and the whole magic of it.

And the master is only a door. Once you have started listening to him, you will be able to listen to the sound of the running water, you will be able to listen to the wind passing through the pine trees. You will be able to listen to the music of silence in the dark night, you will be able to listen to the music of the birds in the early morning. You will start listening to so many things that you will be in a state of immense amazement that this world was available to you– and so close– but you were not available to this world.

As far as I am concerned, right listening is the only way to be religious because right listening makes you wonder about everything around you: The whole existence becomes a mystery, a poetry, a song, a dance. Gone are the days of misery, anguish, tension, death. You have entered on the path of eternal benediction.

The Osho Upanishad: CHAPTER 25. LISTENING LETS THE HEART DECIDE Q 1 (Excerpts)
Osho: The Perfect Master, Vol 2: CHAPTER 2. THERE IS NO SELF, NO OTHER (Excerpts) =====================================
लहजा कि जैसे सुब्ह की ख़ुश्बू अज़ान दे
जी चाहता है मैं तिरी आवाज़ चूम लूँ …………………बशीर बद्र

lahja ki jaise sub.h kī ḳhushbū azaan de
jī chāhtā hai maiñ tirī āvāz chuum luuñ ………………..BASHIR BADR

(O my Master/ my beloved)
The tone is like the morning fragrance of call to prayer
I feel like kissing your voice.

When you listen through your heart, then in every heartbeat you can feel the footsteps of your beloved and this song by Lyricist Sayeed Quadri suddenly assumes a new meaning. Dedicating this lovely song to our beloved KK (31) Dil Ibadat Kar Raha Hai Full Song (LYRICS) – K.K | Tum Mile | Pritam, Sayeed Quadri | Emraan Hashmi – YouTube