Dear Avocado Friends,

The perpetual learner that I am, I'm currently following a course that involves awareness training which includes learning how to listen.  This is very useful, as unlike speaking and communication skills, listening skills are not something that are often taught.  After all, our propensity is to talk, to make a point and to air opinion.  Listening feels like a passive action, an impatient pause or lull while waiting for our turn to open our mouth and speak our mind.  As a matter of fact, many of our conversations consist of people speaking whatever it is that interests them with nobody really listening to what the other person is saying.

My professor tells me in order to really understand what 's happening and to see the big picture on how things work, it's important to connect to the deeper source of knowing within ourselves.  Observing and deep listening is crucial to arriving at this understanding, without which we cannot move forward and generate new ideas and thinking.

There are, according to him, four levels of listening.  The first is what he calls 'downloading,' where the act of listening is one of reconfirming the same old ideas, opinions and judgments of 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard that one before,' or 'I wish he'd stop talking so I could go and pick up my laundry.'  This is the level where we often operate, when we make small talk, try to be polite and pretend to show interest where there is actually none.  On this level we listen out of habit and from the perspective of our judgmental self.  The sort of superficial chitchats we make at cocktail parties.

The second level of listening is slightly deeper and more attentive.  We pay attention to what is being said and offer a different perspective or new information in a dialogue or an argument type of exchange depending on how we respond to the facts presented.  This level of listening comes from outside us as we keep our mind open to new data.  We listen not merely to reconfirm our existing belief, but are open to new information even though they are different from ours.  With this type of listening we can have a good intellectual discussion or a combative argument, depending on the direction the conversation takes us.