by Alan Lowen,
founder of The Art of Being
I well remember
the first, and still the most poignant lesson I ever received in listening. I
had not long been leading workshops and was still recovering from the pain and
turmoil of a disastrous marriage. Because we shared a daughter, my wife and I
were struggling to come to terms with what in each of us had made living
together impossible and still made relating with each other very difficult and
often unpleasant. I was being trained and taught at the time by an
extraordinary man. Not only was I in therapy with him, but he accompanied me
when I led workshops, and in each break he would work with me on all that was
going on in me during the workshop.
One day, knowing
the story of my marriage, he asked me to organize a workshop that my wife could
attend. She was very averse to groups, but having met my teacher-therapist and
trusting where he was coming from, she agreed. By the end of the weekend she
was very in touch with herself and all that she carried about me. The other
participants had left and my teacher sat down with the two of us. Before doing
so he spent a little time with me alone. I canŐt remember his exact words all
these years later, but I clearly remember their meaning. It went something like
this: ŇIŐm going to encourage Joan to speak everything she needs to express.
Some of it is going to be very hard for you to hear and you will want to have
your say. You are not to say anything! Never mind that what she says seems to
you untrue, distorted, projecting. Even if she attacks, donŐt defend! Just listen! Feel what you feel, but
donŐt express your emotions. Leave the space entirely for her. After we leave
you can have the space to express anything you need to. This time is for her!Ó
I donŐt
remember a word of what she said. What I remember is how excruciating it was to
sit and let her say the things she was saying, how many times I wanted to
defend myself against her unfairness, how hard it was to feel maligned and
misrepresented and not to utter a word; how hard to hear truths mixed in with
untruths that seemed from my perspective to distort everything. It was not that
she deliberately falsified. But what she believed she believed, and there was
nothing I could have done except what I had been doing throughout our
relationship with each other, to fight in my own defense. Now, not only was I
not fighting. I was also listening.
This was the
medicine that was being given to both her and me. Hers was the freedom finally
to be able to say it all the way she felt it, no matter the distortions,
without my battling for more truth and so not really hearing anything. My
medicine was to listen. It would have been possible, and much easier, to simply
shut down inside so that in a sense I didnŐt have to hear what she was saying;
to deaden myself so that nothing she said could touch me. There is nothing
unusual about this. Millions of people live their lives this way!
But my teacher
wanted something different for me and there was no question of my objecting. He
required me to feel, as much as I could, all that was hit, hurt and cut in me
as she spoke her one-sided story; not for the sake of being hurt, but because
he saw that I was as trapped as she was in having to fight back. What he saw that I at that
time could not see was that I fought her because I could not bear to feel what
she provoked me to feel, not because she was right, but precisely because she
was wrong. My personal prison was not that she invalidated me. It was how much
it hurt to be invalidated and how unwilling I was to feel that hurt. My
unwillingness to feel my hurt compelled me to fight against her. What my
teacher gave me was the first real opportunity in my life to say hello to this
hurt in me that I found so unbearable. It was the first of many such encounters
spanning all the years from then until now.
My experience
this summer of being invalidated by someone locked into his belief system was
by comparison pleasant. It began with my perhaps na•ve belief (my belief!) that all we needed to do was to
communicate with each other for him to see that I was innocent of his
accusations. The whole episode lasted only a few days and when I saw that I was
giving myself a hard time in seeking his understanding it was easy to let go. I
felt grateful for the opportunity to revisit an old wound and to learn
something important about belief. This, as it turned out, was just the
beginning of the lesson. The greater part goes on ever since September 11th
as the USA and its allies prepare to wage war.
In fascinating
juxtaposition to both this global-scale happening and my own personal story, I
watched yesterday a participant in one of my Art of Being training courses
holding obdurately to her beliefs about another; it made no difference at all
how much his presence and behavior contra-indicated what she believed. There
were 30 of us in the circle, and I donŐt think there was a single person there
who was not deeply touched and grateful for being present with what happened as
the woman at the center of it all found her way, step by tiny step, to the
realization that she was not seeing him or experiencing him at all. She did the
apparently impossible: she emerged from her belief-defined view of him and saw
him with her eyes, ears and all her senses and feelings open to experience him.
Who she saw was
someone she in a sense had never met even though she has known him for some
years. It was an immense privilege to be present at such a happening. The real
miracle, however, was not her meeting with him; it was who she became in coming
out of her belief-system. She appeared, open, innocent, beautiful in her presence, with a kind of
love for existence shining in her eyes.
I know that
love. It is how we experience life when we are simply present to it, present as
a creative participant in an existence that is felt, touched, received and
played as one might play a musical instrument to elicit its beauty and magic.
Such a here-and-now connection with life in this moment is always a love-affair;
it is why the enlightened are blissful! When we experience life so, we are
belief-free. There is nothing marring our vision, there is no noise distorting
the signal. We see, hear, taste and are touched by what is. We have the finest,
clearest perception of reality. This all happens because we are not busy with
our preconceptions, concepts, attitudes, beliefs. There is nothing between us
and what is. There is no more intelligent way to experience life!
When, on the
other hand, we react to existence from inside our belief system, the noise of our own mind
deafens us. I use the word ŇreactÓ very deliberately, because the fact is that
functioning from within a belief system we have no experience of existence. We
never touch it and are never touched by it. Our mind, run by belief, is already
made up and has a complete monopoly on our relationship with existence: instead
of experiencing life happening, we only experience our mindŐs reaction to
whatever it is that may be happening. We experience our mind, not existence.
Whatever is agreed with is allowed to exist. What is disagreed with is argued
against and forbidden. In ordinary everyday life of course we donŐt usually
have the power to annihilate the things that we reject according to our
beliefs; so we settle for destroying them intellectually or emotionally. Look
at how racists regard blacks or Hispanics, how anti-abortionists regard people
who accept abortion, how Christian fundamentalists regard sexual freedom, how
Islamic fundamentalists regard Americans, and so on and on and on.
Above all, look
at how we conduct our personal relationships when they are governed by our
beliefs rather than by our here-and-now experience of each other. It does not matter what the issue is;
the simple fact is that bound up in my beliefs I am not available to experience
existence. What can I do then but invalidate you, whoever you are? Even if you
conform to my beliefs, I still donŐt experience you. I donŐt experience
anything in existence, period. The only way someone who is locked inside a
belief can experience existence is to come out of the belief. All
self-realization and all spiritual awakening involves liberation from
believing; the experience of existence happens in the same moment as that
liberation. You step out of prison and you discover existence!
There are two
things that are profoundly important about this.
One is that we
can only have truly happy and fulfilling personal relationships when we are not
functioning from within our beliefs, because within them we cannot meet anyone,
and the only fulfillment in relating with another human being lies in the real
meeting, when I touch you and am touched by you, and you touch me and are
touched by me. I donŐt mean just physically. I mean us open, awake, receptive
and giving to each other in our bodies, feelings, senses, hearts, minds and
souls. Intimacy cannot happen for us when we are unable to experience each
other. The attraction and the longing may be there, but they are mixed up with
the beliefs that distort our vision and eventually cause our struggles and
conflicts. We think we are struggling with each other, but really we are busy
with our own minds. We may feel keenly the distress of not reaching each other,
but even this doesnŐt help; our beliefs drive us instead into arguing, and
blaming the other. We cannot see the prison of our own making. Belief only
believes in itself!
The other is
that from within our belief systems today we are in danger of drifting into a
world war that would bring carnage, destruction and horror beyond anything we
have ever known. Our only hope is to come out of our beliefs and listen! Partisanship, no matter what its
color, is just another belief. Patriotism is the infantile belief in Ňmy
countryÓ as distinct from ŇyoursÓ. Citizenship of this country or that is a
quirk of fate. We were born or became somehow or another a citizen of the USA
or England or Afghanistan or Iraq or Iceland; and for religion it is the same.
Change slightly the geographical and familial foundations, and the IRA
terrorist becomes an Ulster paramilitary, the Bosnian Serb an Albanian Muslem,
the Hutu a Tutsi; change it a little more and the Christian fundamentalist may
become a Taliban cleric. It is all so haphazard from a more universal
perspective!
What is
required of us, if we are not so fixed within our belief systems that we are
beyond the reach of existence and unable to be touched by it, is that we learn
to listen. Listening
means being willing to be touched by all that is and to open to what is touched in us. Listening is not
partisan. It doesnŐt hear only our side of the story. Yes, we hear the cruel
insanity in bin Laden and the psychotic brutality of the Taliban; but we hear
too the poverty and the deprivation that are the breeding-grounds of their
terrorism. We come to understand the perception in many parts of the world that
their countries have been exploited, disregarded, disrespected and even
terrorized by the policies of the USA and by its corporations. Listening, we
are lifted out of our own little belief system; and all belief systems are
little compared to that which becomes available when we step out of them.
The fact that
bin Laden and his followers are unable to emerge from their frightened and
frightening mental prisons is no excuse for us. With courage, heart and
willingness we can grow out of our own one-sided perspective and begin to
listen to all that needs to be heard. Then we can conduct something far more
effective than a war in its capacity to bring terrorism to an end. At times
military action may be called for, as it is now; but conducted not in the
archaic garb of Ňus and themÓ. Rather, as a necessity chosen with awareness,
and with real regard for all. Then too we can use our economic and financial
resources to honor everyone with a decent existence and the opportunity for
real education rather than indoctrination (including our own).
As I watched
yesterday the woman in my workshop psychologically inching her way towards her freedom from the beliefs
that held her, I was touched and awed by her courage, and by the fact that this
could happen. It is not simply a matter of intellectual understanding. Belief
lives in the realms of the unconscious. To liberate ourselves from our
belief-bound perspective involves us in deep encounters with our fears and
childhood wounds. This calls for a different kind of courage.
©
Alan Lowen 2001