Deep Listening: A Dialogue with Jun Po Roshi

Jun Po liked to begin with a bell. He would strike it and ask a simple thing: can you listen without forming an opinion? Hold the sound apart from the deeper act of listening. Push against it if you want. Tell it to stop, tell it to go away. The tone keeps moving past all of that anyway, sinking further and further in. What happens on the surface is reactivity. The bell, meanwhile, travels down into a quieter region of receptivity. So the question stands. Can you let the ego drop for a moment, can you open the mind and the heart at the same time?

Erik admitted the obvious problem. It is hard to hold that open state for any length of time. Jun Po agreed without hesitation. That is exactly why there is practice. He reached for the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall. You put in the hours. The result arrives in proportion to the time and energy you give to the discipline, nothing more mystical than that. Do the work and something comes back; skip it and nothing does. Spend the hours in quiet, inward training and the depth of what surfaces will track the effort you put in.

From there the method opens into a second question. Once a person grants that deep listening is already present inside them, the two of them carry on a kind of dialectic, a back-and-forth that Jun Po treated as a transmission. When he asked whether Erik could listen purely, he was obliged to listen more deeply himself. He spoke toward Erik, but the listening was the thing being offered, so it could be reflected, tasted, received. Given that, the next move was to ask where. Where in the body, the mind, the whole being does this deeper listening sit? Is there an actual location? Here? Here? Down in the feet? Jun Po noted that roughly 98 percent of people point to the same place the instant they are asked, right while they are listening.

Erik said he felt it in his heart. That is where nearly everyone lands, Jun Po told him, though about ten percent go somewhere else and those are the ones you get to play with. So when the listening is deep, it settles in the heart. And when the listening is shallow? Erik named his ears. Right, Jun Po said, the ears, the head, the brain. That is the zone of effort, of this matters, I have to work this out. But drift off the effort and sink toward the deeper place and the locus moves to the heart center, the heart chakra, something close to a spiritual center. Whether such a center exists in any literal sense or is only a construct built on how feeling gets interpreted, this is simply what people report.

Then comes the comparison. With the location named, Jun Po asked what the difference actually was. What changes for you between listening from the heart and listening from the ego? Erik would describe the gap between the two states in his own words. That description was the whole point. They were taking his perspective apart by experience rather than argument, pulling his position open and handing him the task of finding language for it and claiming it as his own.