Quiet Your Mind When Listening, Learning and Discovering Your Inner Self

The Book of Life presents 365 Daily Meditations on Freedom, Personal Transformation, Living Fully, and Much More, from the Man the Dalai Lama Described as “One of the Greatest Thinkers of the Age”

Listen with ease

Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still?

Then you hear everything, don’t you?

You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are very close by, the immediate sounds–which means really that you are listening to everything. Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change that comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.

To learn, the mind must be quiet

To discover anything new you must start on your own; you must start on a journey completely denuded, especially of knowledge, because it is very easy, through knowledge and belief, to have experiences; but those experiences are merely the products of self-projection and therefore utterly unreal, false. If you are to discover for yourself what is the new, it is no good carrying the burden of the old, especially knowledge–the knowledge of another, however great.

F0r the discovery of truth there is no path… When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not?

If your mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an impediment to the new; the difficulty for most of us is that the mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an impediment to the new; the difficulty for most of us is that the mind has become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist simultaneously with the known. Thus knowledge and learning are impediments for those who would seek, for those who would try to understand that which is timeless.

Active self-knowledge

Without self-knowledge, experience breeds illusion; with self-knowledge, experience, which is the response to challenge, does not leave a cumulative residue as memory.

Self-knowledge is the discovery from moment to moment of the ways of the self, its intentions and pursuit, its thoughts and appetites. There can never be ‘your experience’ and ‘my experience’; the very term ‘my experience’ indicates ignorance and the acceptance of illusion.

Complement The Book of Life with Julian Treasure On 5 Ways To Listen Better. Listening as making meaning from sound. It’s a mental process, and it’s a process of extraction.