Life Healing Institute 

To Listen 1966 Jiddu Krishnamurti

I hope when one is listening to this talk, or to the various other talks that are coming, that one does more than hear a lot of words; hearing many words is not listening. It is like a noise among the leaves. It soon passes away. When we hear, we either accept or reject; or we translate what we hear according to our knowledge, our background; or we compare what is being said with what is already known; or we oppose one idea by another. All these characteristics of hearing deny the act of listening. The act of listening is entirely different. When one listens, there is no comparison; there is no acceptance or rejection. The quality of listening is attention; and when you attend totally with your whole mind, with your heart, with your nerves, with your eyes and ears completely, in that state of attention there is the act of listening. And that act of listening puts away anything that is not true, when you give your whole attention to something, that is, when you are completely listening. You listen to the totality of the thing. When you attend, there are no borders of inattention. When you so intensely listen, you are listening to the birds, to the wind, to the breeze among the leaves; you listen to the slightest whisper that's about you. In the same way, when you listen, that very act of listening brings about a total attention in which you see the totality and the whole significance and structure of what is being said; not only what the speaker is saying, but also when you are listening to your wife, to your husband, to your children, to the politician, to the priest, to everything about you. Then there is no choice. Then there is only clarity. There is no confusion, but right perception.

We hope that you will so listen to what is being said, not hear a lot of words, a lot of ideas; because ideas and words are not the fact. Ideas and words never bring about a radical revolution, a mutation in the mind. I'm not dealing with ideas and opinions and judgment. What we are concerned with is bringing about a radical revolution in the mind; and that revolution must take place without effort, because all effort has behind it a motive; and a revolution with a motive is not a revolution at all, a change. It becomes merely a modified continuity when there is a motive. But a mutation, a radical transformation of the mind, can only take place when there is no motive, and when we begin to understand the psychological structure of society, of which we are, which is part of us; and to understand it, there must be the act of listening - not listening to the speaker, but listening to what is actually taking place in ourselves.

How you listen is a responsibility, if I may use that word, on the part of the listener, because we are taking a journey together. We are taking a journey together into the whole psychological structure of man; because In understanding that structure, and its meaning, we can perhaps bring about a change in society. And society, God knows, needs a total change, a total revolution.