Are you listening to YOU?

Last week, someone asked my mentor GD: “If there was just one thing you could teach me in this session, what would it be?”
“I would connect you to your inner navigation system… your in-built GPS,” GD replied.
The person was perplexed: “Does it even exist?
“Yes. And once you are connected, you never have to struggle with where to go or what to do with your life.”
“Wow! Sounds cool. So do you always know the next step… the larger plan?
“No, I don’t,” GD replied. “But I have learned to ‘listen’… to be open and available. At the perfect moment, the next step is effortlessly revealed.”

I was intrigued by this conversation.

So often in life we are busy stuffing our minds with information, facts and figures and pre-judgments that we don’t leave any space for something new to land. Especially in my job as a movie studio creative executive, there is a tendency to compulsively fill hours with books, movies and meetings – with the hope that, after all the friction, the spark of knowing will come. What GD was talking about was the opposite: emptying yourself – and allowing the film that wants to be made to reveal itself. He was talking about ‘listening to the person’ before you listen to the words coming out of his mouth. And about being ‘tuned into Life’ to receive the highest possible option in each moment.

“True Listening,” GD explained, “is a simple state of openness and transparency. It creates a space in which you receive constant guidance and insight from the totality of YOU. LISTENING is not to a person– it is tuning in to this alive-emptiness all around us… to this awake -presence that we are. It is being tuned to the Source, to Existence itself. Just like ‘Google’ needs to be connected to the internet to search, you need to be ‘connected’ to Source to receive your answers.”

When I look back at my life, most of the work done in that speedy space of non-listening and desperate panic has proved later to have been useless. The most successful work I have worked done has happened effortlessly in a flow – moving with an energy far more graceful than my efforts at controlling and manipulating outcomes. And yet the old habit recurs. This conversation could not have come at a better time for me, after a self-imposed 28-hour workday.

“When you are ‘connected’, life is an effortless flow,” GD continued. “There is no sense of doership or struggle… or even of choice for that matter. Everything just happens. So our primary task is to be connected… to be one with this amazing Oneness. Once this faculty is tuned, it automatically resolves all the other issues one is struggling with.”

A few days after we spoke, I came across this anecdote from Mother Teresa’s life. Dan Rather, the CBS anchor, asked Mother Theresa: “When you pray, what do you say to God?”
Mother Teresa replied, “I don’t talk, I simply listen.”
“Ah,” Dan Rather countered, “then what is it that God says to you when you pray?”
Mother Teresa replied, “He doesn’t. He also simply listens.”

When GD heard this, he added:
This is such a beautiful way to describe meditation…
You simply listen to God…
God simply listens to you…
then you and God both disappear…
and only pure listening remains.
That is the perfect meditation…
being the alive-awake-listening in which everything happens.”