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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

This is the fifth talk, the final talk on why is listening.

That's borrowing from the Buddha's criteria for why speaking

to

and the fifth one is to speak with friendliness, to speak with

metha, with loving kindness or goodwill.

And so if we're listening to listen with love, with goodwill, with friendliness,

and it might be easier to listen with goodwill, friendliness, generosity,

than it is to speak that way.

Sometimes speaking, we don't know what words to say, sometimes speaking,

maybe can feel a little bit like we're offering ourselves too much to someone else.

And maybe the impact we're unsure of, if you walk up to a stranger,

or you sit down with a stranger on the bus, and you say, I love you, who knows what's going to happen.

But if you sit there with a stranger on the bus, and listen to them attentively with care,

and with love and the listening, it could get complicated, of course.

But it's probably much safer to just listen with respect attentively,

as if the person is valuable and important, as if the person's worthy of being known,

being heard, being seen.

And I suspect that there's a kind of a crisis in our society of people not being seen,

and heard, and respected enough, and we can do it with our capacity to listen.

And it is, listening is intentional.

...