Krishnamurti: On Listening

Originally posted in January 2012, and expanded here. Click here for a printer-friendly version of this blog post.

Artwork: Daze, by Richard Wright

Krishnamurti: On Listening

The ability to listen well is a hallmark of a chochmah (wisdom). The Sages list "listening of the ear" as one of the 48 qualities that are necessary to acquire Torah (Avos 6:6). It is not an easy thing to listen - to listen fully, attentively, objectively, and accurately - yet, the question of how to become a good listener is rarely discussed. 

I was recently reviewing some of the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti on this topic. I would not have encountered these writings in the natural course of my learning. I only looked into Krishnamurti on the recommendation of the best listener I know. And I was not disappointed. I can see how these ideas helped this person become such a genuine, deep, and sensitive listener, and when I watch videos of conversations between Krishnamurti and his students, I can see that he practices what he preaches.

I would like to share with you several passages that stood out to me, with minimal commentary on my part. I recommend trying to read - to "listen" to - these excerpts with a completely open mind, and allowing each one to influence your receptiveness to the next (or, depending on how you look at it, to NOT allow each one to influence your receptiveness to the next).

The first excerpt (Collected Writings Vol. VII, p. 213) is, I believe, a good introduction to Krishnamurti's view on this topic: 

How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything? ... Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one's own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen? 

Elsewhere (Vol. XV 61, Choiceless Awareness) Krishnamurti emphasizes the necessity of listening in an all-encompassing manner:

The beauty of listening lies in being highly sensitive to everything about you: to the ugliness, to the dirt, to the squalor, to the poverty about you, and also to the dirt, to the disorder, to the poverty of one's own being. When you are aware of both, then there is no effort, that is, when there is an awareness which is without choice, then there is no effort.

Elsewhere (Vol. X. Action) he discusses the type of "partial listening" that most of us engage in:

[Listening] itself is quite an art. Most of us never really listen, therefore we hear only partially. We hear the words that are spoken, but our minds are elsewhere; or our minds respond only to the meaning of the words, and this immediate response prevents us from hearing that which lies beyond the words. So listening is an art; but if you can listen totally to what is being said, then in that very listening you will find there is a liberation, because such listening is unpremeditated, uncalculated; it is an action of truth because your whole mind is there, your total attention is being given. If you listen without interpreting, without remembering a quotation from some old book, or comparing all this with what you have read, then you will find that your own mind has undergone a really radical change.

Elsewhere (Bombay, March 1st 1964) he elaborates on the obstacles to listening, and contrasts this with the sense of liberation that comes when we really manage to listen - and the independence of mind that is necessary to do so:

We do not listen. There are too many noises about us; inside us, there is too much talk, too much questioning, too much demanding, too many urges, compulsions. We have so many things and we never listen to any one of them completely, totally, to the very end. And if you would kindly so listen, you will see that, in spite of yourself, the mutation, that emptiness, that transformation, the perception of what is true, comes into being. You don't have to do a thing, because what you do will interfere, because you are greedy, you are envious, you are full of hate, ambition, and all the mischief that thought can make. So if you can listen happily, effortlessly, then perhaps in the quiet, deep, silence you will know what is truth. And it is only that truth that liberates, and nothing else. That is why you must stand completely alone. You cannot listen through another; you cannot see with the eyes of another; you cannot think with the thoughts of others. But yet you listen through others, see through the activities, through the saints, through the dictum of others. So if you can put away all these secondary things, the activities of others, and be simple, quiet, and listen, then you will find out.

Krishnamurti maintains that this type of listening is necessary in order to apprehend the truth (Talks in India, 1953)

It is important to know how to listen, not only to me particularly, but to anybody. It is important to know how to listen because if we know how to listen truly, something extraordinary happens to us, because then without any bias, without any prejudice, we can go to the root of the matter immediately. But if we throw up a lot of arguments, concoct devices or contradictions to see who is correct and who is not correct and carry on with our own particular idiosyncrasies and ideas, then we will not discover the truth of the matter at all. We shall only be concerned with our own particular conclusions, with our own point of view. So if I may suggest, it is important that we should listen truly because if we can know how to listen, the truth will reveal itself. We do not have to explore the problem, but if we know how to listen to the song of a bird, to the voice of another, if we can listen as to music without any interpretation or translation, it definitely clarifies the mind; so similarly, if it is possible, let us listen with that intention - not to confute or to conform, but to directly find out the truth for ourselves.

Likewise, here is an excerpt (The Book of Life) on the relationship between learning and listening:

It seems to me that learning is astonishingly difficult, as is listening also. We never actually listen to anything because our mind is not free; our ears are stuffed up with those things that we already know, so listening becomes extraordinarily difficult. I think, or rather, it is a fact that if one can listen to something with all of one's being, with vigor, with vitality, then the very act of listening is a liberative factor, but unfortunately you never do listen, as you have never learned about it. After all, you only learn when you give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics, you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention. If you want to learn about a leaf - a leaf of the spring or a leaf of the summer - you must really look at it, see the symmetry of it, the texture of it, the quality of the living leaf. There is beauty, there is vigor, there is vitality in a single leaf. So to learn about the leaf, the flower, the cloud, the sunset, or a human being, you must look with all intensity.

And here is another excerpt (ibid.) on the relationship between listening and freedom:

When you make an effort to listen, are you listening? Is not that very effort a distraction that prevents listening? Do you make an effort when you listen to something that gives you delight? ... You are not aware of the truth, nor do you see the false as the false, as long as your mind is occupied in any way with effort, with comparison, with justification or condemnation ... 

Listening itself is a complete act; the very act of listening brings its own freedom. But are you really concerned with listening, or with altering the turmoil within? If you would listen ... in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease. You see, we are constantly trying to be this or that, to achieve a particular state, to capture one kind of experience and avoid another, so the mind is everlastingly occupied with something; it is never still to listen to the noise of its own struggles and pains. Be simple ... and don't try to become something or to capture some experience.

Lastly, here is an excerpt (Beyond Violence pp.37-38) on how listening to someone else can enable a person to listen to himself or herself:

You know, there are two ways of listening: to listen casually, to hear a series of ideas, agreeing or disagreeing with them; or there is another way of listening, which is not only to listen to the words and the meaning of those words, but also to listen to what is actually taking place in yourself. If you listen in this way, then what the speaker says is related to what you are listening to in yourself; then you are not merely listening to the speaker - which is irrelevant - but to the whole content of your being. And if you are listening in that way with intensity, at the same time and at the same level, then we are both of us partaking, sharing together, in what is actually taking place. Then you have the passion which is going to transform that which is. 

Does Krishnamurti's approach to listening correspond to what Chazal were referring to when they listed "the listening of the ear" as one of the prerequisites for Torah? Frankly, it doesn't matter to me. In fact, I admit that there is some tension between Krishnamurti's paradigm of listening and the type of Torah-learning we are accustomed to do - especially the part about suspending questions, analysis, and judgment. 

Nevertheless, I see - and have experienced - the value in being able to listen in the manner described by Krishnamurti. I know that if I can learn to listen like this, I will be a better teacher, a better learner, and a better friend. And if I can figure out how to integrate the principles of listening elucidated by Krishnamurti into the methodology of Torah learning in which I have been trained, then that would be truly wonderful.