Are you Listening?

The other important fact of course is “Listening” Yes! Listening… hold on… this is not just listening… it’s about beyond the definition of listening.

So first let me tell you the definition I found for the “Listening” via web…

Listening is the conscious processing of the auditory stimuli that have been perceived through hearing. [1]

Listening differs from obeying. Parents may commonly conflate the two, by telling a disobedient child that he "didn't listen to me". However, a person who receives and understands information or an instruction, and then chooses not to comply with it or to agree to it, has listened to the speaker, even though the result is not what the speaker wanted. [2]

As you see, according to the definition it says “a person who receives and understands information or an instruction, and then chooses not to comply with it or to agree to it...”

So, listening as in term of this definition should not be happen with Buddhism when you listen to the Dhamma. 

For an example… imagine you are listening to something for the very first time in your life.  You have no idea about it… no previous knowledge… no data at all to process while you are listening to it.  Then imagine the state of your mind on such occasion… are there any process going on or is it blank…?

Yes, it is blank … isn’t it… there is nothing to process while you are listening to what you hear.   First let’s do something practical…

Here I am repeating few lines of what we discussed earlier with some background scores…

<< Some background music>>

Could you listen to what you heard… what exactly did you heard? How this happens when listening to Dhamma?  Let’s find out through the next few topics!