https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/72304Listening
Listening is all that meditation is about – how to listen to that which is already there. [....]
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"
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Hearing is mechanical. You have ears, you can hear. If you are getting deaf then a mechanical aid can help you to hear. Your ears are nothing but a certain mechanism to receive sounds. Hearing is very simple animals hear, anybody who has ears is capable of hearing -- but listening is a far higher stage.
Listening means: when you are hearing you are only hearing and not doing anything else -- no other thoughts in your mind, no clouds passing in your inner sky -- so whatever is being said reaches as it is being said. It is not interfered with by your mind; not interpreted by you, by your prejudices; not clouded by anything that, right now, is passing within you -- because all these are distortions.
Ordinarily it is not difficult; you go on managing just by hearing, because the things that you are hearing are common objects. If I say something about the house, the door, the tree, the bird, there is no problem. These are common objects; there is no need of listening. But there is a need to listen when we are talking about something like meditation, which is not an object at all; it is a subjective state. We can only indicate it; you have to be very attentive and alert -- then there is a possibility that some meaning reaches you.
Even if a little understanding arises in you, it is more than enough, because understanding has its own way of growing. If just a little bit of understanding falls in the right place, in the heart, it starts growing of its own accord.
-Osho, "From Misery to Enlightenment, #2, Q1“
