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Listening means hearing without mind.
I know you can hear, there is no trouble about it – but you cannot listen. Listening is totally different from hearing. Listening means hearing without mind; listening means hearing without any interference of your thoughts; listening means hearing as if you are totally empty. If you have even a small trembling of thinking inside, waves of subtle thoughts surrounding you, you will not be able to listen, although you will be able to hear. And to listen to the music, the ancient music, the eternal music, one needs to be totally quiet – as if one is not. When you are, you can hear; when you are not, you can listen.
- Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines, #9"
The Art of Listening
"The art of meditation is the art of listening with your total being."
- Osho, "The Miracle, #7"
"Listening to me, you put your mind aside. Listening to the ocean, or listening to the thundering of the clouds, or listening to the rain falling heavily, just put your ego aside, because there is no need... The ocean is not going to attack you, the rain is not going to attack you, the trees are not going to attack you -- there is no need of any defense. To be vulnerable to life as such, to existence as such, you will be getting these moments continuously -- soon it will become your very life."
- Osho, "The Invitation, #14"
"The art of divine listening. And that's what meditation is. If one can learn how to listen rightly, one has learned the deepest secret of meditation. People hear but they don't listen. Hearing is one thing -- listening, altogether different; they are worlds apart. Hearing is a physical phenomenon; you hear because you have ears. Listening is a spiritual phenomenon. You listen when you have attention, when your inner being joins with your ears."
- Osho, "The Tongue-Tip Taste of Tao, #9"
One has to learn very earnestly the art of listening. It is a difficult art, and the greatest difficulty is that everybody thinks he knows it. Just because you can hear, you think you can also listen. And these are two differing things, so different that unless you start listening you will never know the difference.
In the dictionaries they mean the same thing, but in actual life hearing is only because you have ears. Listening happens when just behind your ears there is no noisy mind but a silent, receptive alertness. If there is a continuously chattering mind behind the ears you only seem to listen. Then there are going to be misunderstandings.
- Osho, "The Invitation, #17"
The real question is not the understanding, but to become silent. Hearing is not the point, becoming silent is the point. So many times what happens is that what you have understood becomes a barrier, and it is good to listen to something that you do not understand at all; then thinking cannot interfere. When something is not understood there is no way for thoughts to move; they simply stop.
Therefore, listening sometimes to the wind passing through the trees, to the birds singing, to the sound of running water is better than listening to the seers and sages. The real Upanishads are flowing there, but you will not understand them. And if you do and you can just listen, your intellect will soon quieten down because it is not needed. And when your intellect quietens, you are transported to the place you are in search of.
- Osho, "Finger Pointing to the Moon, #2"
Listen from the heart
Question 10 When listening to your lectures should we follow the intellectual meaning also?
Is there any intellectual meaning also? There is none. I am talking heart to the heart, being to the being. Don't lose your path in the forest of intellectuality, otherwise you will listen to something but that will not be what I am saying. If you want to listen to me, listen from the heart -- in fact from the navel, from the belly. Forget the head, so that the being can commune with the being. Only then the meaning will be mine. If you listen through the intellect the meaning will be given by you. You will have heard it, but I will not have said it.
- Osho, "Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 3, #8"
"Start listening to sounds, let music be your meditation. Listen to the sounds, all kinds of sounds. They are all divine – even the market noise, even the sounds that are created in the traffic. This airplane, that train, all sounds have to be listened to so attentively and silently and lovingly… as if you are listening to music. And you will be surprised: you can transform all sounds into music; they are music. All that is needed is our attitude: if we are resistant, the sound becomes noise; if we are receptive, loving, the sound becomes music. The same thing can be noise to somebody and to somebody else, music.
If you have not heard Indian classical music it will be just noise. If you love it and you have sympathy for it, it is just out of this world, it is of the beyond. People in the East who are not acquainted with the Western music think this is just crazy noise. Whenever you don’t fall in tune with something it becomes noise; when you fall in tune with it, when you start vibrating with it, when there is a harmony between you and it, it becomes music. And great is the joy when you can convert all sounds into music. Then your whole life starts becoming a rhythm."
- Osho, "Don’t Bite My Finger, Look Where I’m Pointing, #6"
"As you listen to music, listen to me that way. Don’t listen to me as you listen to a philosopher; listen to me as you listen to the birds. Listen to me as you listen to a waterfall. Listen to me as you listen to the winds blowing through the pines. Listen to me not through the discursive mind, but through the participant heart. And then something that you are continuously feeling is missing will not be missed."
- Osho, The Tantra Vision, Vol 1, #2
"And listening to sounds will be very helpful. Not to any sound in particular, because that becomes a concentration. Mm? this noise of the train… the traffic, some dog starts barking… an airplane passes by; all have to be accepted. Not that you have to concentrate on any sound – listen to all sounds from everywhere. You have just to be alert, listening, with no choice. That will help you immensely and that will become your meditation."
- Osho, Only Losers Can Win in This Game, #26
"If one starts from the mind, one remains confined to the mind. He collects words, becomes a scholar, an intellectual, but it is not intelligence. His first step, to begin with the mind, is unintelligent. I have never come up against any intelligent intellectual. That looks absurd because ordinarily we think intellectuals are intelligent people, but that is not true. Intellectuals live only on dead words. Intelligence cannot do that. Intelligence drops the word -- that is the corpse -- and just takes the living vibe in it.
- Osho, "The Path of the Mystic, #2"
Listen to it, don't remain just hearing.
Question 4: Yesterday you said that there is no goal, no path, no one to lead and no one to follow. Is this statement a lie again? Were you kidding us yesterday?
That's what I am doing every day. That's the only possible thing to do. ALL statements are lies. Truth remains unstated. Truth cannot be reduced to a statement, it cannot be reduced to a formula. It is vast! How can you reduce it to a statement? The moment you state anything about truth, the very expression becomes a barrier. Words cling around truth like chains.
Truth can be transferred only in silence. So those who really listen me, they don't listen to what I say - they listen to what I am. They listen to the gaps, they listen to the intervals. Words are not important, but there are small gaps between words and the meeting between you and me happens in those gaps.
Those gaps are of meditation. Slowly slowly, words move on the periphery and my meeting, my communion with you becomes the center phenomenon. Words are there, just distant, on the periphery. Silence starts happening.
If you fall silent listening to me, then you have listened to me. If listening to me your mind stops and there are moments when there are no thoughts, all is still and quiet, then you have been listening to me.
Hearing me is one thing; listening to me is quite another. Those who come near to me for the first time, they hear. And those who stay with me for a longer time, slowly slowly the transformation happens. Hearing starts changing into listening.
Listening is non-verbal. Then my presence is listened to - then something is bridged between me and you. Then my heart and yom heart start beating together in one rhythm. Then it is a song, a dance of energies.
This is what in the East is called SATSANG - to be in the presence of the master. It is not a verbal communication at all. Then why do I go on speaking? Why can't I sit silently here? That much silence you will not be able to absorb. You can absorb it only in homeopathic doses, only once in a while.
And my words help. They don't state the truth, but they help, they indicate; they are fingers pointing to the moon. They are not the moon themselves, just fingers pointing to the moon, arrows. Don't be obsessed by the fingers, don't start clinging to the fingers, don't start worshipping the fingers - because that is how you will miss the moon. Forget the fingers and look at the moon.
That moon is silence, utter silence, where not even a single word has ever been uttered.
You have that space inside you. I have become one with it; you are not one with it. But once in a while, moving with me, flowing with me, hearing my words, listening to my silences, once in a while it happens. And those moments are of grace. In those moments you have the first taste of God.
Slowly slowly, you will become more and more capable. That's why I go on speaking.
And then new people are always coming. For them I have to speak. For the older ones, slowly slowly they will not be bothered by my words. Hearing will disappear completely. They will listen to my words just as they listen to the sound of a waterfall They will not search for any meaning in them.
They will not search for any truth in them. They will not search even for any coherence in them.
They will not be constantly looking into consistency, contradiction, logic, illogic - no, all these things by and by disappear. They will listen to my words as they listen to the songs of the birds, or the wind passing through the pine trees. You don't ask what the meaning is. You simply listen... and in that listening you become that sound passing through the pine trees, you become that wind.
Whatsoever I say is a device so it is a lie. Truth has never been said, cannot be said. Truth is unutterable. But you can listen to it. It is unutterable, it can't be said, but it can be listened to.
Let me repeat: it cannot be uttered, but it can be listened to. You can catch hold of it - in silence, in love, in communion. I am not able to say it, but you are able to listen to it. Hence this device of talking to you every morning, year in, year out. This is just a waterfall... listen to it, don't remain just hearing.
And I am so contradictory by arrangement. I manage it, because if I am very consistent, you will never be able to listen to me, you will go on hearing me. I am so contradictory - sooner or later you are tired. You say, "What is the point? because this man is going to say one thing this morning and tomorrow he is going to contradict it." Seeing it happening again and again.... You will cling to my statement and then tomorrow I contradict it, I have to contradict it. Whenever I see that somebody is clinging somewhere to any of my statements, I have to contradict it immediately - to relieve him of the burden, to relieve him of his clinging, to relieve him of the words that he has accumulated inside himself.
So I will go on, zigzag, contradicting myself a thousand and one times. Slowly slowly, the understanding dawns on you that there is no point in clinging to any words of this man, there is no need to bother about what he says. But by that time you have fallen in love with me. By that time you are in a totally different kind of relationship with me than you have ever been with anybody else.
By that time, you have started enjoying my presence. By that time you have started imbibing me.
By that time you have started feeling the nourishment. Now you don't care what I say: now you care more that I am. Then listening has started.
And you will understand me only by listening. You will understand me only when you have forgotten all about understanding what I am saying. All statements are lies. Lao Tzu is true. He says: Tao cannot be said, and the moment you say it you have betrayed it. He is absolutely true.
Truth is so infinite and words are so finite. Only when you have something infinite in you... silence is infinite, unbounded - it can contain truth. Love is infinite, unbounded - it can contain truth. Trust is infinite, unbounded - it can contain truth.
Be natural, spontaneous here with me. Be in the moment, as if all time and space has disappeared, as if the whole world has stopped. The mind has stopped... and suddenly there is truth in all its radiance, grandeur, splendour.
It is here, right this moment. If you have ears, hear it. If you have eyes, see it. And if you cannot see it, and if you cannot hear it, then don't go on clinging unnecessarily here. I am in a hurry - I don't want any weeds here. I will find every possible means and ways to drop people who are just sitting there like rocks. Either throb with me, or get lost. Either be with me, or don't be here. Because I MEAN to do business!
-Osho, “Take It Easy, V.1, Discourse #6, Q4”
Listen to the sounds, all kinds of sounds
"And listening to sounds will be very helpful. Not to any sound in particular, because that becomes a concentration. Mm? this noise of the train… the traffic, some dog starts barking… an airplane passes by; all have to be accepted. Not that you have to concentrate on any sound – listen to all sounds from everywhere. You have just to be alert, listening, with no choice. That will help you immensely and that will become your meditation."
- Osho, "Only Losers Can Win in This Game, #26"
"Start listening to sounds, let music be your meditation. Listen to the sounds, all kinds of sounds. They are all divine – even the market noise, even the sounds that are created in the traffic. This airplane, that train, all sounds have to be listened to so attentively and silently and lovingly… as if you are listening to music. And you will be surprised: you can transform all sounds into music; they are music. All that is needed is our attitude: if we are resistant, the sound becomes noise; if we are receptive, loving, the sound becomes music. The same thing can be noise to somebody and to somebody else, music.
If you have not heard Indian classical music it will be just noise. If you love it and you have sympathy for it, it is just out of this world, it is of the beyond. People in the East who are not acquainted with the Western music think this is just crazy noise. Whenever you don’t fall in tune with something it becomes noise; when you fall in tune with it, when you start vibrating with it, when there is a harmony between you and it, it becomes music. And great is the joy when you can convert all sounds into music. Then your whole life starts becoming a rhythm.“
- Osho, "Don't Bite My Finger, Look Where I'm Pointing, #6"
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