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Main Index
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it can be felt, it can even be lived. You can be face to face with it. It can be encountered, but still it remains unknowable. Only this much is felt -- that now we are deep in a mystery which cannot be solved. So before we enter this mystery, some points have to be understood; otherwise there will be no entrance.
One is: how to listen, because there are different dimensions of listening. You can listen with your intellect, with your reason. Mm? -- that is one way of listening to a thing: the most common, the most ordinary and the most shallow -- because with reason you are always either in defense or in attack. With reason you are always fighting, so whenever someone tries to understand something through reason he is fighting with the thing. At the most, a very rudimentary understanding is possible, just an acquaintance is possible. The deeper meaning is bound to be missed because the deeper meaning requires a very sympathetic listening.
Reason can never listen with sympathy. It listens with a very argumentative background. It can never listen with love; that is impossible. So listening with reason is good if you are trying to understand mathematics, if you are trying to understand logic, if you are trying to understand any system which is totally rational.
If you listen to poetry with reason, then you will be blind. It is as if one is trying to see with one's ears or hear with one's eyes. You cannot understand poetry through reason. So there is a deeper understanding, the second type of understanding, which is not through reason but through love, through feeling, through emotion, through heart.
Reason is always in conflict; reason will not allow anything to pass in easily. Reason must be defeated; only then can something penetrate. It is an armour around the mind; it is a defense method, a defense measure. It is alert every moment that nothing should pass without it being aware, and that nothing should be allowed -- unless reason is defeated. And even when reason is defeated the thing is not going to your heart, because in defeat you cannot feel sympathetic.
The second dimension of listening is through heart, through feeling.
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