Jun Po Roshi on Deep Listening: Where It Lives in You
The second question comes after someone has already admitted the first thing: yes, deep listening is in me. From there we do a dialectic, a dialogue, and that back-and-forth is itself a transmission. When I ask you whether you can listen purely, I am not asking idly. As the instructor I have to be listening at a deeper level myself, so I am speaking through to you while the listening stays present. What I offer gets reflected back, tasted, tested.
Given that, the next thing I want to know is physical. Somewhere in your body, your mind, your whole being, this deeper place of listening has a location. Is there a locus for it? Is it here? Here? Down in your feet? We have asked this of a lot of people, and about 98 percent go to the same spot instantly. You are listening to me right now. Where is the deepest point of that listening inside you?
Erik said he felt it in his heart. That is the common answer. Not universal, there is maybe 10 percent you get to play with because they land somewhere else, but most people say the heart. So I follow up: when your listening turns superficial, where does it move to? Erik said his ears. Right. The ears, the head, the brain. That is the place of I have to figure this out. But if I stop gripping and just let myself drift down into the deepness, the locus shifts. It settles into the heart center, what some would call the heart chakra, a kind of spiritual center. Maybe that center is real, maybe it is only a philosophical construct we build out of how feeling moves in us. Either way, this is what actually happens when you look.
Then the work becomes naming the difference. What changes for you when you are in heartfelt listening versus egocentric listening? You describe it. We are taking apart your perspective, your view, your position, and doing it through direct experience rather than argument, and then having you choose the words for what you found and claim them as yours. You are drawing a new map at that point. You are laying down fresh neurolinguistic ground, and you keep filling it in. Pure listening is in me. If I open to it, it sits at my heart. If it is in my heart, then fierce love and compassion is where I am standing.
Once that is established, once the truth of it is admitted and owned, the next question arrives: okay, that being the case, who are you right here, at this step? And that is where the fun starts again, because people will reach for what they think they are, or what they feel they are, and the real work begins.