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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Hello, everyone.

And welcome.

I don't know if it's not as light here on YouTube.

Some of the lights are not working here at IMC today.

So it's darker here for me, but I think I brought out the spotlight.

So maybe there's a little bit more light.

You can see well enough.

So one of the names for the people who were the title or the reference word for people who were the direct disciples of the Buddha

is that they are the Savakas.

And the word Savaka means the ones who heard the hearers.

And so maybe back in the ancient world there was no books, so there was only hearing.

Any learning you do was you had to hear it.

And so, but there's something I think very profound about learning the art of listening.

Learning to listen means that we don't assert ourselves in the middle of the hearing.

We're attentive.

Kind of clear the chatter in the mind, the static in the mind, so that we can hear well.

In the ancient world where you couldn't go back and refer to books or transcripts of something.

If you wanted to remember and consider what was being said, you had to listen well enough to be able to memorize it or to really learn something about it.

And so probably it was kind of second nature in the ancient world to listen with a higher attentiveness or a certain kind of sharper attentiveness than we do in the modern world

because of this need to kind of let it register really deeply so we can remember and have it as a reference.

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