“The first duty of love is to listen.” Paul Tillich
“Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.”
If only someone would understand me!!! What a significantly large number of people in this world yearn for understanding. The need to be understood is one of the most basic needs that we have, and yet, how few of us have the good fortune to have this need fulfilled completely. And why is this? To understand we have to listen, and to listen we have to use far more than our ears.
What most of us tend to do is to hear, rather than listen. When you ‘hear’, your conditioning, your belief system, and your opinions, colour this process and you hear what you wish to hear. It might surprise you to learn that another’s words pass through many layers of your filters before they reach your mind where they can be processed. Each layer of the filter removes more and more of the truth that the other wishes to convey. The result? Misunderstanding, conflict, disharmony.