The Listening Attention

The Listening Attention

  • On the Turning of Heads:

    First there must be enough trauma or suffering to turn us away from the belief in life as an end in itself.  If we are lucky enough to be thrown into the unknown, through sheer desperation or misery, we may find that we emerge ok, that something took care of us.  This forced surrender gives us renewed Faith.   We begin to trust something greater beyond life and the world of the five senses. This shift in meaning is usually synchronistic with a teacher ‘ringing our bell’.  There is an inner connection established between our inner self and this ‘God incarnate’, the Guru. Something in us awakes and our head turns towards a new view. The old values of the rat race and mundane pleasure are no longer enough, and we see our new-found teacher as proof that there is something else worth doing.


    Somewhere along here we will begin to see in a real, personal way that we are mechanical, a robot.  That as personalities, or egos, we are nothing but accidental associative reaction patterns.  We don’t exist.  But our heads are locked on this robot, identified with it in an almost absolute hypnosis. This includes inherited and learned states of mind and moods, that are precursors to reaction patterns.  Seeing this gives us a shock, and we begin to learn the hard way that no amount of tinkering with the associative pattern will give us real being: the realization that endless analysis of the robot is a dead end.  We begin to look within.  This acceptance and the following ability to turn the head inward only comes after every mental avenue has been exhausted.   We can no longer place a high value on states such as ‘happiness’, justified negative emotions, mundane pleasures, or even elevated ‘spiritual states’ or feelings of well-being, such as ‘being a good boy’, a do-gooder, etc. Confrontation, whether in a group setting or from being engaged with everyday life, helps us to see our mechanical nature and the uselessness of putting our faith in its eventual perfection.  It also helps to bring up real conscience, which enables us to have compassion for our fellow man, as we see he cannot change either, and is also not a conscious being.

    Continuing to go within, as there’s nowhere else to go, we begin to see the value in listening.  We begin to develop and place value on the ‘Listening Attention’.  We realize that we don’t know, but that knowledge is available.  We begin to hear Higher Centers and value their help.  This leads to a return of faith in the inner self and begins the inner relaxation and loosening of energy knots(egos) formed by implanted erroneous beliefs.  Given this new mental freedom, we can see the dualistic nature of the mind, with its penchant for ever increasing the subtlety of its ego through cleverness. We sooner or later separate from it and thereby realize the observing awareness that is our true self, “This I know is me”,  the self that realizes its own nothingness.

    This receiving of the experience of ourselves as awareness also leads us to see that this awareness is the same in everyone. We have become Universal after our long-lost voyage in the particular and find ourselves back Home, where we’ve always been.

    Bob Fergeson

  • The Painful Journey: How Nostalgia Leads Us Home

    Much of the deep restlessness we feel—the persistent inner ache—arises at some point in a seekers life. The child, once immersed in a state of unseparated innocence and being within, gradually emerges into a world that severs that direct connection to the inner self. Parents and society, themselves already disconnected from this inner ground, feed the feeling of loss, of  separation. The child becomes dependent on them for security, love, and identity, and in doing so loses touch with his own true self.

    This loss creates the ache, the ‘ longing’ of Rumi and CS Lewis. At first the child cannot clearly see this separation, for the parents appear as God, almost divine in their role, and the external world seems to hold promise of what was once felt inwardly. When the parents fail to live up to their divine status, the child looks to society for meaning. His restlessness leads him ever outward; the sense of lack deepens. The  search for that lost reality turns ever outward, ever farther into relationships, possessions, status, and distractions; always in the wrong direction.

    Only when the accumulated suffering becomes unbearable, when the outward path reaches its limit in sickness, depression and ennui, does the seeker turn inward occur. Through necessity and grace the mind’s attention reverses. In returning to the inner self, however this may occur, the bottomless longing is found to be simply the pain of separation from one’s own true nature—the same separation that characterized the parents and those before them.

    Stalking the Inner Self
    Stalking the Inner Self

    Had a parent remained inwardly connected, the child might have picked up on it, been positively imprinted, and returned to his inner self through a natural path. But this is rare and easily misunderstood. Strangely enough, this pattern of disconnection followed by re-connection appears necessary. Without having lost the sense of oneself, one would not see the contrast earned through the separation. Once reestablished, the entire preceding struggle appears almost absurd. We emerge from unconscious struggle into conscious being.

    What I’ve found resolves the longing and sense of separation is not formal psychological analysis or tracing chains of past events. Such investigation can become another form of avoidance. The intense nostalgia which leads us finally within, can be seen as a remembering. Nothing is really created, but we find the thread back to what we covered up, the real, with ego-centered feelings and thoughts. The key is not conceptual understanding as much as a direct seeing, looking at the little life created ‘self’, what I have called the ‘little man’. The difficulties and lost feelings we carry as this little man are present in every moment, not only locked in childhood memories requiring excavation. Ask yourself the hard questions, in the now, without rationalization. What does it feel like? What does it want? Why does it hurt? You may find instead of incidents and words, hidden knots in one’s being.

    The direct approach is to turn toward the present feeling itself, in the here and now. Sit with the ache as it is right now, without fleeing or explaining it away. Watch the pain regardless how much the ego wants to run away into distraction and pleasure. Observe it openly, allowing the quiet awareness within—the inner self—to regard it plainly and honestly. What does this sensation reveal about the longing and pain? What is it truly seeking? The cause and the resolution are embedded in that immediate experience, accessible only through unmediated seeing in the present, not through retrospective analysis. It hurts, yes. But avoiding the pain feeds the knot, which continues to live in the unconscious. Facing it until we have removed the pain through patient acceptance can eventually bring peace and understanding.

    That seeing, when sustained, is where the separation between what we have become and what we truly are, ends. The ache itself proves to be a pointer, not an enemy—quietly directing attention back to what was never truly absent.

    – Bob Fergeson

  • On Learning to Listen

    “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

    – William Shakespeare, Macbeth

    Paracelsus was known to be able to look at anything, an herb, plant or mineral, and divine its essence, and thus its purpose and use. A direct knowing, given by the Universal Intelligence, to one who had ears to hear. How might we tap into this direct insight of the universe? Most of us are trapped with only a very limited ‘knowing’ which is basically the description of opinions derived from an arbitrary point of observation; a fixed pattern, based only on the recalled past. This ‘knowing’ or ego/mind, is hardly capable of knowing itself, much less the essence of an herb, plant, or our Source. This ego is derived from the experience of a character in a story, who is basically unconscious; a scripted unwitting idiot telling a tale, ultimately signifying nothing. To know directly, as Paracelsus, we would have to leave our story-drama and its trap, and become something wider, deeper. We are capable of hearing more than the mind’s obsessive chattering about our personal character’s recalled experiences. We may begin to wake up, and feel as Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Did I do anything wrong today, or has the world always been like this and I’ve been too wrapped up in myself to notice?”

    Only something which has no vested interest in the drama can look outside of the character in its tale, and see the universal reality behind the dream of life. This is a very scary proposition, it threatens the very system of the drama, for we derive our identity from our character and story-line, each defining the other. The drama is seldom questioned, for this can only happen by stepping outside of it; a paradox. We refuse to listen to the voice of the silence within, because that would imply we don’t know it all already. How can we learn to turn to this inner listening, to hear the voice of intuition, of insight?

    Spending time alone is one way. We take a break from the distractions of our electronic age with its cell phones, computers, TV’s, etc., plus the well meaning but distracting voices of our friends and family. This can give us time to learn to appreciate silence, and to listen. Perhaps we’ll reacquaint ourselves with a long lost companion deep within: our own heart. Time spent alone removes the relentless pressure imposed on us by society to conform to its standards, and allows our mind to clear and become quiet. Another pressure is the ego’s defense against its main fear, the unknown. This also requires much time and energy, and blocks out anything that doesn’t fit the storyline. Nothing from the higher power within is allowed to get through.

    Another way is to spend time with those who value listening within, and have found their connection to the inner voice. These fellow seekers can save us time and energy, having been down the long road to their inner self and thus able to help us along our path as well. The higher energy fields of these companions will give the inner self a taste of its own potential. Their inner calm and quiet are a stark contrast to the tale of sound and fury we have been dreaming so hard, without question.

    The world of dreams is similar to this drama we call our life. When in a dream, we take it for real, and the experiences of the dream as telling us a true ‘knowing’ about the dream-world. But when interpreted upon awakening, we see it as only a story of our character’s mind, and this ‘knowing’ as being simply a description of this mind291 that made the dream-world. The individual pattern or view-point is what’s known. Nothing is objectively known about the so-called things, inhabitants, or possible reality of the dream.

    To find the reality behind the dream, and possibly behind the dream character, we must find something higher. This universal intelligence is constantly speaking to us, always trying to get our attention. This voice of insight or intuition is drowned out by the voices of the characters in our drama. Look bravely at the plots of the dramas in life you’ve seen. They all end the same, and nothing is gained. Death conquers all, and the story with all its sound and fury, endlessly repeats. Question the character you’ve been lost in, and the drama of your own so-called life and its significance. Search fearlessly to find the nameless Something behind the play; the calm, clear reality beyond the dream, where nothing is done, nobody’s there to do it, and all is perfect in silence.

    Bob Fergeson