Learn To Listen To Each Other

Question: How do we prepare people for listening and caring properly in Integral Education workshops?

Answer: First of all, we need to work on all the conditions of the connection between them. Everyone should understand that each one has his own opinion and it may be correct. Open yourself up and feel the opinions of others, don’t withdraw into yourself and let them go past you; I have to bend and submit myself to the others.

There must be a particular technique, a psychological approach, here. Someone speaks and simultaneously I try to remove my ego. We play with this. First, I listen to what someone says and after that I must go over all that he said. A person can talk nonsense, indeed, more or less on some topic, and I practice how to listen to him.

After all, we don’t hear each other. How can I nullify myself specifically in order to hear you without correcting you and without inserting your words into me with my corrections and additions, and instead be clothed in you? For this I must submit myself, accept you as a particular standard, and thereby orient myself.

In a form like this we learn to listen and to nullify ourselves towards each other. This is the first thing.

After that we pass to the next stage where we practice talking about an idea and not just throwing out words.

Now I must convey some kind of thought that is said to be very concrete, clear, and logical. At the same time, I express it with respect to others, by being incorporated within them, like parents behave regarding their children, which is to say, from a higher level to some degree.

In the first encounter I looked at you from below to above, as an example to follow, and now the opposite, I say some serious sentences, try to express myself logically, try to “enter” into you, that is how you will understand me, will accept my words, so that they will gradually sit in you.

Each one must prepare some kind of speech that is quite logical, clear, touching upon work or something else; it makes no difference. The main thing is that they listen to a speech. After all, we always think that someone else is talking nonsense. But it doesn’t matter what kind of nonsense he is saying, let’s say, about the fish that he ate in a restaurant yesterday; the main thing is that I absorb his words and follow him. And now I convey my nonsense in a logical and clear manner so that others will absorb all of this.

That is how we teach the participants of the workshop how to submit themselves immediately and listen to each other, and how to rise up immediately and bestow to him. All this is towards a more important goal, perfect listening and full understanding, and not reminding each other of any insults and creating petty intrigues. You see, we must ultimately create our collective picture.

For example, put a plate in the center of the circle and direct everyone such that we feel ourselves as adding to each other on it. Suppose that one friend is in logistics, a second friend in technology, a third friend in assembly, and so on. The main thing is that together we feel as if we are found on the same plate.

After that we learn to say to each other only kind words and in a most sincere way. We play at being right, good, friendly people learning to be free. “Here, you are already smiling. And now sing for us some song from your early childhood.”

Make them become children, become free, relaxed, become detached from all the negativity that encompasses them, say something from childhood to everyone, or about a first love. We want to bring them out from the “suit and tie,” and get them used to the fact that they can simply be human beings with each other.

Only after we teach them all the conditions for communication between them do we pass to workshops where they can begin to clarify why we must be integral. When we bring out the common integrality, why is this summation one level higher than us and as if is an elevator raising us to the next level of understanding and feelings? Why do we absorb everything through our feelings, although we don’t acknowledge this and don’t understand this? Why is a human an emotional being and not a logical being? Our logic is only clothed on emotion and this is our mistake.

So we gradually begin to talk about how we must rise to a new level of sensations and be mutually incorporated into one another.
[121930]
From Kab TV’s “Through Time” 9/23/13