Image thanks to this site.
There was a puddle of water on the ground. I was moved to peek into it and suddenly I found myself pulled deep into it. I was falling weightlessly and perceived Hime floating along whispering the following thoughts into my mind:
“You can have all the discussions that you want. After all, while there is a mouth, there is always the inclination to want to talk. If you observe carefully at people in public places, they are always talking. The lips never seem to stop. It keeps moving and keeps making sounds. It leaves you wondering that people have so much to say about so many things.
One often overlooks that compared to one mouth; nature had decided to give human beings two ears. But how many do actually listen. They may hear what you say, but do they listen? Do you listen to what you hear?
To listen is to understand what is being said. To hear is to hear the sounds, the words - not the meaning.
Listening is one of the major activities of human beings that have been grossly overlooked. You mortals have never made the time and effort to cultivate this skill. Hence, you have many problems.
People listen to what they like to hear. It does not matter if it is simply a myth or an untruth or a deep seated prejudice born of ignorance.
They simply hear what they do not want to listen; even if it is the truth that can save them.
If you insist only on hearing and never listening, how then can you ever “progress to higher levels”? How then can you ever, ever live as one? Refusing to listen, mortals can never live as one in true harmony on this transient planet called earth.
For expediency sake, you live a life of mutual tolerance until you reach the brink of it. Without acceptance born of understanding and knowledge, there can never be lasting, genuine relationships. You simply move on from one relationship crisis to another, with short spans of occasional truce.
What is the point of discussions when each partakes with preconceived ideas cast in stone? While the other is expounding his views, you hear what he says but in fact you are listening to what is in your mind that you want to say when the other has finished.
You do not allow at all for what is in your mind to be tested, to be challenged or to be verified by facts and alternative perceptions. Hence, your ignorance and your standards remain with you and your clan. Completely incestuous level of thinking.
Your refusal to listen enables your views to be fortified over time until it becomes not only the truth but the absolute truth to you. Over centuries of faithful repetition and rote learning by your descendants, even the lie becomes the ultimate truth.
Any other alternative viewpoints hurts you and you are willing to hurt back harder. Centuries of repetition has made even the lie your true culture and value. An invitation to reevaluation is seen as an affront on your “sacred’ way of life and culture.
Each clan with its insistence of its own ways, buttressed by the support of its very own experts in its midst. Clan struggle and futile aggressive proselytisation of the others to your ways without inviting thinking has become a norm among you.
Hence, you should never be surprised that mortals will orphan another, make another a widow, kill a son or a mother, or father or the beloved one of another simply in the name of maintaining one’s own ways.
Your refusal to listen to each other solidifies the bridge that is between you. The bridge will forever be there, without which your relationships will cease to exist. With the bridge, the relationship will never grow into one unity, especially if the bridge is merely a convenient tool.
Humans have become such fools they keep repeating the phrase “to bridge relationships” when a bridge is nothing more than an intermediary between two terrain and two things. As long as the intermediary is there, the two can never be one. AT each end of the bridge, each crawls back into its accepted cocoons. Shouldn’t you be forging relationships instead? Shouldn’t you be accepting each other as unique creations without the need to be uniform like a factory product?
Of course you can never allow your diverse nature’s to come alive as each of you do not listen to what nature has been telling you for ages. ‘Since each of you wants the other to be like you, the strongest tribe among you will succeed in dominating the others’. Domination invariably equals oppression. Anything oppressed, over time naturally springs back. The natural law of the coil.
Any and every type of domination is bound to create strife, discord and tension within the community of humankind. Call it culture, call it religion, call it laws, call it norms or call it by any fancy name or jargon but domination is never the same as structured living. Hypocrisy for a while, and rebellion or revolution at the end. Your refusal to listen to each other creates miseries for you all.
If not listening is already dangerous, consider the indoctrinating techniques that are systematically used to make you not listen to each other. My dear mortals, ironical though it may seem, humans are being trained and indoctrinated in the art of NOT listening to each other for centuries. Mortals are not aware of this because it has become common place like breathing. That is how successful the techniques are.
The techniques are given various labels – religion, race, class, family honour, country, love, culture, belief, language, etc, etc. Labels meant for convenience of understanding have become monstrous tools of division and hate and misery.
Even a snake occasionally sheds its old skin. But each of you not only want to continue wearing the old skin but want others to follow suit. Other wise, you deem others as negatively different and that is bad. Human beings – even in death they insist on differences. Alas for this species and its preservers!”
I struggled and finally pulled myself out of the puddle, scarcely drowning. Puffing for breath, I realized Hime was gone and I was left accompanied by myself again.
