Listening with Impartiality

Student: Most of us understand that the hardest part of this teaching is getting to the point of listening with impartiality. What is impartiality, and how do we go about gaining an impartial point of view?

Barbara: As you know, one of the fundamental suggestions in this teaching is that you come prepared not to believe yourself, and not to believe anyone else. The reason for this is obvious, because there are no new ideas in the world. Everybody is re-circulating ideas that they have heard since they learned how to communicate. So the voice of knowledge is literally chatting, communicating, suggesting, persuading, all the time in our heads and it is called thinking.

Once you even get the idea that is possible to not believe yourself or anybody else, you begin to listen to what you are telling yourself and what it is you are being told. Listening becomes a habit, and ultimately an art form.

If you don’t listen, you cannot modify. From that point we get to a very essential agreement. A new agreement called, “don’t take things personally.” Now you don’t know if you are taking things personally if you are not listening to yourself.

You listen closer to see what it is you do believe, in order to see what directives you are giving your body, and what information you are spreading out into a world of listeners. With that consciousness you can understand and exercise the art of not taking things personally. You realize that what is going on in your head has nothing really to do with anybody else, it doesn’t reflect on their reality. Whatever is going on in their head doesn’t reflect on you. This is huge. This is impartiality.

Student: It is obvious when you hear yourself say, “I wish my eyebrow was higher,”, “my ears were smaller”, “my weight was such-and-such”. But then there are things that just spill out in general conversations such as, “not bad for a person my age!”, or

Barbara: “I’m stupid, but after all, nobody is perfect!”

Student: Exactly. There are all these little expressions. What I have seen is that they come out over and over and over again. You hear exactly the same wording said over and over again.

Barbara: But you have to listen!

Student: Once you have heard and taken notice, what goes on in the head of a warrior?

Barbara: Number one, you don’t believe it. That may be a little more complicated than it sounds, because believing it has ultimately created the structure that you call you.

Not to believe it is inviting the destruction of that image you have of yourself. The mind says, “Oops, if I don’t believe this, who will I be?” There is going to be a reaction of fear and distressn the body. This is because you as a mind said, “I can’t believe myself.” You created or signaled an instant response of distress within the body. Nevertheless, that is the first step. I don’t believe myself.
We are here to cause distress in a belief system. We are here to unravel a belief system that we no longer question, and therefore we can’t modify. So, I just heard myself say, for example, “I am too heavy. I am too slow. Everybody understands the world except me”, and all these things, “my eyebrow is too this and that”. I just heard myself say, I don’t believe it.

If I don’t believe it, that means I have no motivation to say it again. That doesn’t mean you won’t still hear yourself saying things like that on an automatic reflex, trying to fill this void of silence which makes us so socially uncomfortable.
You may hear it again but now you hear it the minute you say it or even before you say it, and you can try not believing it again. Which means it loses power, every time it is repeated, until, ultimately it doesn’t even try to come up in your file system. It is like old files in a computer. They are forgotten; they’ve been thrown in the recycle bin. You can bring them back up, but why would you?

You have to start by hearing them, saying “wow! I say these things to myself!” and modifying it immediately with, “I don’t believe it,” and even, “I think that’s funny.” I think there is nothing more valuable in the process of evolution than to be amused by yourself. If we can be amused by ourselves, not with judgment, not with condemnation, but just, “boy. That is amusing, how I am saying all these things and I don’t even know that I am saying them.” We are on the road to healing, and modifying, and ultimately transforming the way we are.

We don’t have to be us, means we don’t have to live up to all of the dialoguing and image making that we do for ourselves that create a belief system and a way of behaving with each other that makes no sense.