Listening is our basic nature. We are more or less accustomed to listening to an object, to our surroundings and to our nearest environment: body, senses and mind. But I speak today of the listening where there is nothing to listen to.
You can never think this listening, you can never objectify it, you can never fix it; and in listening there is not a listener, there’s no place for a listener, for a controller, a doer, for an enjoyer, for a sufferer. Listening is free from all furniture, from all memory. It is a non-state. In a state you go in and come out; listening is a continuum. When you are listening to your body, senses and mind, then your listening is completely open; there’s no grasping, no taking. The perceived comes directly to your openness.
One can say that every object heard brings you back to your home ground, to listening. When the perception is sustained so that the concept does not arise, then the perceived brings you back to your listening. Listening in the beginning may be understood as a brain function , but it doesn’t belong to a specific organ, an ear. So when the listening is sustained, then it becomes awareness, lucidity. Listening is constant meditation, without a meditator or an object of meditation. This may be the content of our dialogue.
-Jean Klein
From Transmission of the Flame, p.3 (1990) Image may be NSFW.
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