Anand means blissful, shravan means listening – blissful listening. And there is a difference between hearing and listening. If one is not deaf, one hears; it is the physical part of listening, the gross part. But if you are not listening attentively, if you are not hearing totally, if you are not there in it participating, then it remains hearing; it is not listening. Hearing is physical.

 

When you are spiritually in it it becomes listening. Listening is a deep participation between the body and the soul. And that’s why it has been used as one of the most potential methods for meditation… because it bridges the two infinites: the material and the spiritual.

 

And let this be your meditation; it will help you. Whenever you are sitting, just listen – to whatsoever is going on. It is a marketplace and there is much noise and traffic and the train and the plane. Listen to it, with no rejection in the mind that it is noisy. Listen as if you are listening to music, with sympathy, and suddenly you will see that the quality of the noise has changed. It is no more distracting, no more disturbing – on the contrary it become very soothing. If listened to rightly even the marketplace becomes a melody.

 

So, what you are listening to is not the point – the point is you are listening, not just hearing. That is the meaning of ’shravan’. And when you hear it blissfully, cheerfully, joyously, then it goes very deep, because it is only in joy that we open. When we are not in joy we become closed.

 

Even if you are listening to something that you have never thought of as worth listening to, listen to it very cheerfully – as if you are listening to Beethoven’s sonata – and suddenly you will see you have transformed the quality of it. It becomes beautiful. And in that listening your ego will disappear. This is my observation and the observation of the ages – that whenever the body and the soul are really together, in any act, the ego disappears.

 

It may be a dance, and if the body and the soul are really together, the ego disappears. It may be music, it may be love. Sometimes it can happen in negative emotions too. If you are really in rage and your body and soul are one, suddenly the ego disappears. Maybe that is why people are attracted so much towards anger. It gives a kind of release.

 

And this happens in many ways, it can happen in many ways. The whole point is that the distance between the body and the soul should not be there. In other words, the distance between the body and the soul is the ego. The bigger the distance, the bigger the ego, the lesser the distance, the lesser the ego. No distance – no ego.

 

- Osho, “Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There, #9”