The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Good day and welcome to this Monday for a talk of our next series.

And following last week's discussion about why speech.

I'd like to do this week to do a wise listening.

And I thought it might be nice to do it in the same five guidelines for speech.

And to apply those to listening.

Listen in a timely way.

Listen in a truthful way.

Listen with a nourishing way, a pleasant way.

Listen in a way that really can touch people's hearts and are listening.

Listen from the heart.

And then listen in a way that's beneficial.

Listen when it's beneficial.

Know how to listen in a beneficial way.

And then to listen with good will.

So that's what we'll do.

Now listening is a metaphor, both a practice in itself and a metaphor for practice.

And there are times when we're communicating where it's not literally listening.

Some people are deaf and so not literally listening.

But there is a ways in which we receive into our life, into our self.

The communication that other people are providing.

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