The Beauty of Silent Listening

and the simplicity of being present

Mar 14, 2024

This is all so simple. Simply being here. Being alive. Being fully present. Giving whole-hearted attention, which is love, to this one bottomless moment, just as it is. Listening. Opening. Awaring. Being.

In simple presence, there is beauty everywhere. Everything is alive, sacred, filled with light. The love, the light, the radiance, the beauty is in everything. The chair, the wall, the blazing yellow of the Forsythia bush, the glass of water on the table, the piece of trash in the gutter. This light shines in all the amazing acts of human kindness, and it is hidden even in the apparent mistakes and misfortunes that so often bring us Home.

Awareness is the great healer, the great transformer, the great revealer. Awareness is unconditional love, beholding (being and holding) it all. Awareness is what we are. Don’t believe that or think about that, but feel it. You are it. Feel the undeniable awaring presence that is always right here now.

This is nothing complicated or mystical. It’s the one thing we cannot deny—being here, present and aware. No one needs to tell us this. We know it. It is our most fundamental experience. It cannot be doubted. We can doubt anything that gets added onto it, all the stories of being somebody, but not the simple fact of being. Being nobody. Being this vast open space, this seamless awaring presence that is free, unbound, limitless and all-inclusive. This is our direct experience right now. Simply notice this.

In the light of awareness, the deepest reality is everywhere, dazzling us, speaking to us, calling us Home. Once we have discovered this jewel, this unconditional love, our work is in opening to it again and again, cultivating a growing faith in it and a faithfulness to it, and forgiving ourselves and others when we fail. Dissolving, melting, relaxing, opening, releasing again and again, now and now, into spaciousness. Letting go, opening the heart-mind, being what we most deeply are, living from that. And noticing how we turn away, how we do our suffering and confusion, and the more clearly all of that is seen, the more it dissolves.

It is a wondrous possibility, marinating in silence and stillness, dissolving in that, finding the deepest reality in this ever-present Here-Now. But remember, this presence is showing up as this whole indivisible happening, just as it is, and life includes contraction as well as expansion, agitation as well as serenity. The appearance is ever-changing, so don’t expect an experience of perpetual bliss or a permanent loss of all sense of individuality. This isn’t about “me” dissolving into some me-less state and then staying there forever. The sense of being “me” is an intermittent appearance that comes and goes, but the impersonal awaring presence is always here beholding it all. The character in the movie of waking life and the boundless awaring presence are not one, not two. Nothing is other than this presence, but this presence is not restricted to or contained by any apparent form that appears. All our suffering is from the perspective of the character. When we let go into wholeness or groundlessness, suffering evaporates.

We might ask, what about all the difficulties and horrors in the world? Perhaps the best gift we can offer the world is to discover in ourselves the roots of human suffering and confusion, so that we have compassion instead of hatred and blame, so that we can behold it all from wholeness, as awareness, as unconditional love. When action comes from that open space, from wholeness, it is more intelligent, more effective, less likely to simply pour gasoline on the fire. It may also help to reflect on the ways our own past suffering has informed us and given us wisdom and unexpected blessings, so that we may come to realize how the light and the dark go together and cannot be pulled apart. Seeing it all from wholeness, we discover the peace that passeth understanding.

And however far we fall, there is always the possibility to get up, to forgive ourselves and one another, to understand that all our actions, abilities and lack of abilities in each moment are the result of infinite causes and conditions. This is one whole undivided happening—seamless and boundless—ever-fresh, never the same way twice. Always changing. Always right here. Always NOW.

So, when it invites you, return to what is most simple. Return to NOW, the place we never actually leave, but return to it with whole-hearted open attention. Be here fully. Rest as thoughtless presence, uncluttered by ideas and beliefs. Simply be. It’s enough just to be alive, right HERE in (and as) this ever-present immediacy. Nothing needs to be added or subtracted. Feel that there is space here for everything to be as it is, and for everything to dissolve and the whole universe to be born anew in every instant. Feel the openness of this vast space, this listening presence. Know that you are this vastness, beholding and releasing it all.

I’d like to share a video of Toni Packer with you. The title of this Substack article comes from this talk. If I may make a suggestion, I would say, when you listen to a talk like this one, give yourself totally to listening. In other words, don’t listen while walking, driving, cleaning the house, knitting a sweater, painting a picture, or anything else. Instead, be still. Give the talk—and more importantly, the silent presence from which it emerges—your full and complete attention. Listen whole-heartedly. Discover this kind of deep open listening. The magic isn’t in the words; it’s in the listening presence, the stillness, the awareness that you and Toni and all beings share:

I once asked Toni why she talked so much about the me-story and the smog of emotion-thought instead of talking more than she did about wholeness and boundless aware presence. And of course, she did talk about presence and awareness: “Pure awareness is the essence of what we truly are,” she wrote. “We are not the different states and feelings, moods and tempers succeeding one another. All of it comes and goes lightly, cloudlike, without leaving a trace.”

She was always pointing to open boundlessness, but she did often talk about the clouds that can seem to obscure this. And when I asked her why she did this, she said that if she talked too much about wholeness and boundless aware presence, people would turn it into concepts and beliefs. She knew it had to be discovered directly, experientially. So she gave a lot of attention in her talks to illuminating and seeing through what seemingly gets in the way of fully embodying and living from the ever-present natural state (aware presence / wholeness). But even when she was talking about the smog of me-centered thinking, she always spoke out of that listening presence. She spoke from wholeness, from undivided awareness. And that’s what her talks so beautifully evoke if you are joining her in that. And that requires deep listening, listening in stillness.

Toni said, “The essence [of what she called ‘the work of this moment’] is to come upon a profound kind of listening and openness that reveals the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas—not just individually but collectively—and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves. The other aspect of this listening is to come upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.”

Regarding my email: For those of you who read my message yesterday, everything now seems to be working fine. Apparently there was some software update and re-setting going on at the web administrator for my email accounts that would have taken down all domains for a brief period. So, as it turned out, much ado about nothing. Apologies for sending all of you what proved to be an unnecessary message. I have deleted the post.

Love to all….

Right Now, Just As It Is

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