Listening to Ourselves

Student: What instruments do people use to begin the process of listening?

Barbara: Their ears! Everyone knows, I suppose, from reading don Miguel’s books that we have a voice that is constantly going in our heads, what he calls the Voice of Knowledge. You could call it thinking. It is happening all the time, and it is going on without our conscious awareness. Very much the way breathing goes on, without our conscious awareness. We can become very aware and very attuned to the rhythm and quality of both our breathing and our thinking.

When we begin to listen to the way we think, and listen to the way those thoughts come out in our speech, and are manifest in our behavior, then we have a chance to modify according to a new way of thinking and believing that has to do with loving more, judging less and always accepting yourself as you are, no matter what you see and what you hear going on in your mind.

I think that most of us go on the assumption that our body is feeling stress and our body is manufacturing emotions, and we have to somehow tame that. The body is responding to the messages given by the mind and it is up to the mind to take responsibility for the messages that it gives to the body, so that we can have that serenity that is so sought after in most religious and spiritual teachings.

We can have that good health that is so sought after in a world of stress and distress. Listen to the way that you communicate with the body. Listen to the way you express beliefs that you accept as absolute truth, and start modifying them according to the body’s needs. The body is manufacturing emotions all the time in accordance with the messages it gets from the mind. It is either in alarm or in a state of calm because of those messages.

Student: We use words and phrases such as “belief”, and “belief system”, our “sense of reality”, and “not believing” a lot. We said that we have to “unlearn”. Can you elaborate?

Barbara: We learned how to interpret what we see and what we sense, through those who taught us language and behavior. In learning how to interpret all that we perceive, we develop a system of beliefs – ideas that we hold to be self-evident and truthful. Those ideas grow into realities that we also don’t question. Based on those realities, we create our own personal identities that conform to a reality based on beliefs.

Let’s start from the point in our lives when we first learned how to communicate, say at two or three years of age, that marvelous time in human evolution known as the toddler. Emotions came and went without the weight of meaning or consequence. To those responsible for our development, it was incomprehensible that we could be happy one minute and crying the next. Through their unconscious tutelage, we learned that we could extend crying time beyond its natural life cycle and create a personality based on melancholy, a personality based on quick temper, a personality based on cheerfulness, a personality based on self-rejection. In other words, we took fleeting emotions and turned them into life-long realities.

So when we begin our process of listening to ourselves, we hear ourselves say improbable things, like, “I inherited my mother’s melancholy”, “I’m a temperamental human being”, or “I’ve experienced so much betrayal that I can’t trust anyone.” These words have the power to create an entire reality. They have the power to filter the way we perceive life so that we, in fact, construct a reality that is filled with betrayal, filled with anger, filled with melancholy, or filled with self-rejection. The power of our word is all-important.

Student: And we often add to that the words “this is the way I am. I am just like that, and because I am free, I don’t have to change for anybody.”
Barbara: Well, of course we’re not free, because we put ourselves into a terrible stuffy little space, believing we are what was created by a belief system born out of those earliest days of domestication. When we start to listen to ourselves, listen to the way we speak, listen to the way we think, we give ourselves an opportunity to break those agreements about what we are. Once that process is begun, there is no stopping it. Our natural hunger for truth guides us from one misguided interpretation of who we are to another to another to another. This is the great adventure, discovering how you created the idea of yourself, how you live the idea, and then dismantling that creation one idea, one belief, one opinion at a time.

Student: Is this the procedure for “unlearning”?

Barbara: Yes. And it begins with the simple, and yet profound mandate not to believe yourself or anyone else. Not out of disrespect, but out of a need to simply give yourself a chance to redefine yourself and question that constant voice of knowledge. Question, question, and question. What you think is not the truth, it can only be experienced.

Student: So, then, all of the techniques we read about in books. The techniques that teachers have given individuals, that they have written about, they are really a means to this end. In a particular individual case, by a particular teacher, for a particular time.

Barbara: Yes. You can call up any mythology and it will bring you to another point of view about yourself and life. But when you invest so much in that particular mythology or that particular discipline, or that particular spot on earth, you are no longer allowing life’s discourse to inform you. You are allowing knowledge to inform you. You just rearrange the knowledge and give it another story.
Knowledge is what we have learned from our domestication. Wisdom is what is left when we detach from having to know things, facts, and theories.

What we’ve learned to do, is to open ourselves to, you can say, absolute wisdom, or the message of life itself, so that we do not need a plan, do not need an agenda, a curriculum. We begin a discourse, one word, one sentence, and life, you could say, miraculously speaks through us. This is not channeling, this is just getting knowledge out of the way, where you can express truth as art, through the words you’ve learned since you were two years old, through the language as you’ve learned how to use it, through symbology, through story, and through metaphor.