Have you heard the riddle? There were 30 cows in a field, twenty ate chicken, how many didn’t?
Most people go “what?” then after explaining its a riddle they hear “twenty eight” and give the answer as “two!”
It takes hours days and on one occasion 4 days for someone to work it out?
Another one, “listen” – If you were asked to empty a bathtub full of water, and was given a teaspoon, a cup and a bucket, how would you do it?
So what is this phenomena called “listening”? Actually for the most part although we are saying “listening” what is going on is “hearing.” Not “Listening”.
After hearing the word “thirty” we hear “twenty eight” not “twenty ate”. Why?
It seems we don’t listen, we hear and interpret what we hear and that interpretation is what we called listening.
It always has a back story of what we know and familiar with and how we are conditioned by that familiarity to interpret everything we hear in that cozy familiar way and along the way missing out on actually listening.
To listen requires no past or familiarity. It requires to be in the present being present. If we are present we listen, if not we hear and interpret from familiar past based fixed views which colour what we hear into us listening in a familiar cone of hearing we inherited.
So if you give up your familiar pattern of listening now and listen from now, being here and now, being present to now?
If you were asked to empty a bathtub full of water, and was given a teaspoon, a cup and a bucket, how would you do it?