listen

Listening is being silent with another person in an active way. It is silently bearing with another person. Some people are silent, but they are not open and active. They are either asleep or dead within themselves. The true listener is one who is quiet and yet sensitive toward another person, open and active, receptive and alive. Listening is participating in another life in a most creative and powerful way. It is neither coercive nor pushy. Rather, it is bearing one another's burdens.

Travelers at sea take soundings to measure the depth of the water through which they move. This kind of deep listening is necessary if they are to safely navigate treacherous waters. This is what we do as well, whenever we quiet ourselves and go to that inner place where there is enough silence for the words to resound.

The silence of prayer is the silence of listening.

LISTEN for the voice of the Spirit, for that which enlarges the mind, frees the heart, brings together what was scattered and lost, holds fast in unswerving fidelity, instills peace, renews confidence, comforts and endures. Happy are you if hear that voice!

In meditation we turn within a state of silent receptivity with that open inner eye of love, that listening ear, and we let our self unfold and reveal to us whatever is necessary to the NOW of our experience. We truly drink from the well of our consciousness. The water of eternal life "gushing up" brings forth to our external world a manifestation of harmony, love, peace and health.

Silence is not merely negative -- a pause between words, a temporary cessation of speech -- but properly understood, it is highly positive: an attitude of attentive alertness, of vigilance, and above all, of listening.

Listen, my child, to the silence
The undulating silence
where valleys and echoes slip,
bending foreheads
to the ground.
Listen.

So often, the Spirit is blowing blessings on us, but our hearing is not attuned to this wind from heaven.

The more I listen
the more profound
the silence becomes.

You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and listen to it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. I can hear it.