Is it possible for you to purely listen?

Is it possible for you to purely listen?

To just listen?
To listen without judgement or opinion, expectation or hope? Is it possible to just purely listen?

So if I listen as deeply as I can... beneath the judgement and opinion, beneath the expectation and hope... all that drops away and there is just pure receptive listening. So now there is just listening.

Then I become the listening, and that drops away into pure timelessness... timelessness that was never born and will never die or enter into the stream of time. It just is.

Pure empty I Am-ness.... Clear Deep Heart/Mind.

And there is no I here to notice if it is peaceful, vast, open or aware.... it just Is. And the second you have the thought that it is any of that, it's gone.

And I've caught a glimpse of what that's like for a minute or an hour maybe while on retreat with Jun Po..... Somewhere in here it is possible to drop all three bodies, gross, subtle and causal, and just be Turiya... witnessing consciousness... and I've had a taste of that in the odd sit here and there. And at some point that can drop away to Turiyatita... One Taste... which I suspect is what happened that second to last sit on the second last retreat I did where I sat, the bell went.... and then it went again... and no time had passed in between... or so it seemed.

The Buddha said, don't believe me, go out and experience it for yourself and then decide. So I have... and now I know that this is here, not there.... because I have experienced it too. It's holding awareness of this state that is the challenge... plunging into it from time to time seems relatively easy once you can focus the mind and keep the body still for a period of time.... But holding it... thats a whole other story.

But yet, this state does not come and go. WE come and go from it. We obstruct from our deeper experience by letting our mindfulness settle in the opinions and judgements, expectations and hopes of a more shallow kind of everyday listening - a listening that is mindless, not mindful. A listening that focuses on the stuff across the surface of life experience. But there is way more beneath that stuff.... and emptiness, that is completely full.

Our meditation practice should be designed to take us beneath that with the kind of view finder that shines light in the shadows in the recesses of our mind... and if it doesn't, which invariably it won't, we need a therapist. Without liberating our shadow states, we are likely to meditate our way deeper into them, thereby enhancing our egoic pathologies. So your therapist, an essential factor in a path of transformative life practice, should be qualified to help you by being advanced in spiritual intelligence. If that therapist doesn't have a sitting practice, they are likely to be intellectually intelligent, maybe cognitively intelligent also, but they won't be psychospiritually intelligent... and they won't be able to track with your psychospiritual needs - that which helps integrate the spiritual experience with the cognitive process of the mind.

I am very inspired to up my psychospiritual intelligence... With a therapist, a meditation teacher and studying psychosynthesis, I'm going for it...

:-)

Hari Om Tat Sat