Listening to the Word

Everything in this world is listening, except man. This is no quip, but the fruit of mature reflection, sustained by long observation throughout a professional lifetime centred upon this very question.

Is this not, moreover, what the Book of Books teaches us from the very pages of Genesis? Is not creation, from its first instant, dedicated to obedience as it sings the glory of the Creator? Man alone sets himself apart by his negative attitude toward the harmonious unfolding of that primordial impulse.

Paradoxically, one must enjoy the right of refusal in order to discover the way of consent. The latter is not here the inverse of contestation, any more than rejection is its opposite. Is not refusal, in truth, the rupture of an instant which shatters the process of adherence anchored in the deepest layers of human nature? From this dissolution, the ontological acquiescence to belonging to the world grows progressively blunted in man. One might even contemplate its complete effacement, were it not that flashes of consciousness occasionally rekindle its presence through the course of time. Humanity as a whole seems suspended upon these sudden kindlings.

Creation cannot but be suspended upon the laws which govern it. It is a whole endowed with a dynamism which propels it into an orbital dance wherein each curve possesses its own centre, itself engaged upon a trajectory reserved for it alone. This “blind” submission is Listening. The word “blind”, introduced here so unusually, is offered only to confer upon this obedience an intensity such that no room is left for ambiguity, not even for doubt, still less for refusal; reason itself finds no opportunity to insert itself there. But being in full light, with no power to suspect shadow, still less darkness, one no longer knows oneself plunged within this bath of exquisite clarity. To put it otherwise, the knowledge of a state ever identical to itself, however transcendent it may be, ultimately escapes consciousness. Henceforth, to listen or to obey — terms so intimately bound by their semiological reminiscence — take on their absolute value, excluding all that does not efficiently underpin their semantic reality. Henceforth, to go toward what one hears (ob-aud-ire — “to go toward what is heard” — or by contraction obéir, to obey), is to commit oneself, without deviation, without swerving, without feeling any constraint, upon the paths which converge toward that state of grace which reveals to us that this is the only way. The abandonment which follows, and which allows one to be directed under the impulse of an unutterable yet irresistible confidence, is nothing other than faith itself.

It is thus that Creation operates; and whilst the sidereal world obeys, or listens if one prefers, to the laws which guide it along its path of eternity, taking part thereby in the cosmic respiration, the vegetal world awakens and unfolds at the call of this communication to the rhythm of the seasons. The animal kingdom, for its part, fixed upon the orbit of its instincts, pursues throughout time its fantastical remodellings in answer to the permanent evolution of a preestablished programme.

Nothing is the result of chance, but rather the consequence of one sole and unique will, that very will which dictates to whoever knows how to lend an ear what is fitting to be done in an instant inscribed ceaselessly within a process of becoming. From this moment, urged on by this particular inclination, man may participate in creation itself.

He must disappear in order to be. He must abandon what he believes he represents, what he claims to attain. He can only be led. But he must also let himself be invaded by the desire to sail upon his own orbit. From then on, he will hear the laws of the universe dictating his conduct to him. It will henceforth suffice for him to listen to them in order to discover that he gains thereby access to liberty; there is no other liberty than that offered by abandonment. From this instant, all the refusals which claim to consolidate an independence are reduced to what they are. They are but constructions made of constraints imposed upon man so that he may attempt to survive within the labyrinth of an existence without issue; creation itself in fact awakens no dependence at all, provided one bury oneself in its laws with an acquiescence beyond reserve. Does it not, moreover, form one whole with the laws which govern it, and are we not here confronted with the very data of the most current astrophysics? The cosmos is but the coherent suspension of an energetic plasma where all holds together, where all interferes, where all listens, in sum.

Man, the conscious antenna

Perfect reflection of the construction desired by the Word, the cosmos responds to His demand with a fidelity equalled only by the harmony which guides it.

But of man, of this non-listener, what is to become? Nothing less than a being at grips with himself, whilst he believes he has built the world. His purely materialist vision leads him irrevocably to his ruin, in a universe he believes he knows, indeed understands, and which, by the same aberration, he claims to direct.

A small seed upon the thin film of the terrestrial globe, man adorns himself with his intelligence, fortifies himself behind a scientific approach to the world, to existence, to life, even to the soul… One knows into what impasse such a forced intellectualism confines him.

Ideas he has none, nor flashes of genius; all is given to him. But his listening is troubled by his own presumption of being; and even if at times he senses his frailty, and if he presumes himself to be nothing, he at once recovers, willing and thinking himself the acting unity.

No doubt he has forgotten why it was given to him to come forth from the silt:

To be an antenna in listening — for if only he would remember his emergence from the humus, he would become, in his humility, an ear entirely engaged, together with all creation, upon the utterances of the Creator.

It is to be this conscious antenna that listening was allotted to him. For through it, he received the unique privilege of formulating the glory of the Creator in a modulated verbalisation with which he alone was endowed.

Conceived in the image of the divine, is he not destined to participate in the fantastical and majestic spectacle given by creation, which perpetuates in a space as vast as eternity the unreserved renewal of its joy at having been brought forth?

Intelligence and “deafness” to the divine dimension

Thanks to his own particular structure, man is capable of detecting what the cosmos in which he is included delivers to him. Not only is he able to sing praise, but he can also formulate in conscious manner his total participation. Thus he may insert himself deliberately into the cosmic symphony and bring himself into unison with the rhythms which modulate the sequences of time within the sidereal immensity.

Thus listening takes on its meaning. Doubtless it is made possible only because the Creator is Himself listening to His creation. In reality, He alone is empowered to enjoy this faculty in fullness. And thanks to His immeasurable generosity, a network of interactions, of inter-dialogues, of intercommunications, in sum, is established, operating without constraint, as a matter of course. Hence the total harmony which is manifest, and which reigns throughout this universe perpetually creating itself.

Every obstacle to this attunement, to this sympathy, is a source of suffering, of rupture, of non-communion. Man alone is plunged into suffering and goes astray within it, powerfully drawn aside by his desire to exercise his power of opposition. Because of him, a wound bleeds somewhere in the universe. His suffering, his miseries, his pains and his sorrows bear witness to the whole of his strange behaviours, outside the customary norms required for the perfect equilibrium of creation. These are not norms imposed but useful, indeed indispensable.

It is true that man received a most particular gift from God: intelligence, thanks to which he was rendered capable of understanding his own creature in the fullness of the potentialities devolved upon him. This interlogos was to permit him to address himself to his Master and Lord in all liberty, that is to say in all love.

One knows what germ of pride was to render him “Deaf” to that dimension. From then on, he was to seize upon the gifts which God had lavished upon him, and imagine, in a senseless delirium, that all had been generated by his own brain.

What is a brain?

But what is a brain? Everything and nothing.

EVERYTHING, it is for the scientist who attributes to this exceptional organ of singular complexity the capacity to produce “thought”, “ideas”, and better still, to innovate, to invent, in sum, to discover…

The whole of human behaviour is easily explained, according to this same concept, not only by the neuronal dimension of man but by the subtle interplay of an endocrine equilibrium. Indeed, in proportion to the researches carried out over the last two decades, science wavers between, on the one hand, the desire to attribute excessively all human activities to the nervous system, whose particularly elaborate structures are now known, and, on the other hand, the temptation to grant to the endocrine system a primordial role which may appear exaggerated.

Wiser, it seems, is the acceptance of a combination of the two potentialities, which are known to interfere one with the other. Yet it must be confessed that if one wishes to build the world by dissecting man to the extreme, by analysing him down to his ultimate molecular dimensions, one is stupefied but also disconcerted before the surpassing which imposes itself. To centre everything upon a “reductionism” may seem insupportable.

Man will remain an interrogation for man so long as he claims to discover himself by himself, and so long as he persists in explaining all things by his mental mechanisms.

NOTHING, it is for him who is aware that man is an organic “complex” composed of 80 % water and 20 % mineral salts, but whose overall arrangement answers to a programmed architectonic structure, within a universe itself obedient to the imperatives of an evolution in process of accomplishment.

Just as a nebula gathers and contracts upon itself in entering the interplay of the forces which solicit its formation and its motion, so matter obeys the sequences which the programme preestablished for it delivers.

Man’s good fortune is to be able to enjoy the joy of following the elaboration of this programme. This is what differentiates him from the mineral, vegetal and animal kingdoms. Man may participate in this cosmic dynamism, in which he is included as a stakeholder, and this thanks to that understanding of things which has been delivered to him. So much so that, under such conditions, he knows himself to be that listening nothing which, in some corner of the universe, sees unfold before him the fabulous spectacle of a living cosmos, launched in an endless dance, sustained by the strains of a symphony whose harmonic structures sing untiringly the glory of its Creator.

To hear is not to listen

There are, however, false notes which jar this harmony and which go so far as to occlude what should be perfectly perceived. Whence then come these disenchantments? Without any doubt from the stubborn obstinacy of those who, though endowed with good ears, continue to be non-listeners.

To hear does not imply to listen. To hear is to be inundated by a message in passive manner, or at most to let oneself be impressed by it with the aim of analysing it, of criticising it, and of judging its value according to criteria which are the very foundation of an arbitrary decision claiming to discern. And then, in the end, of doing only as one pleases.

To listen lies upon an altogether different plane, and the discernment which goes with it bears upon the discrimination of what is to be followed or of what it is fitting to avoid. But from the moment one knows how to juggle these two functions, one is in a position to hear what should not be taken into full consideration, and one is on the contrary all listening before that which answers to a deep reality, to a truth, in sum.

It goes without saying that the attitude which then takes shape is altogether other than that which man ordinarily conceives. And this all the more so since his education and his culture condition him to traverse the maze of his existential labyrinth. Henceforth, in the course of his human history, more or less accidented, more or less dramatic, more or less tragic, he will accuse fate of bending him to follow a journey full of torments and of snares. There is no fate save that which he fashions for himself.

Humanity proceeds in this way, as best it may, led by shepherds themselves deprived of listening and centred only upon what they desire to hear: their political ideal, into which their personal interests insinuate themselves.

Whichever way one turns, human solutions carry little weight unless the listening to that which Is be established. That which Is, is the universe which sets it forth for us and which translates for us, in its own manner, what the Creator signifies to it.

What is: man listening to the Word

That which is, is the conscious man, all listening opened wide to apprehend what God announces to him.

That which is, is this discourse without flaw which emanates from the Lord.

That which is, is the permanent listening to the discourse which takes on the value of dialogue when man engages himself to let flow from him the word which is offered to him.

It is God henceforth who speaks through man. But it is also the Lord who listens when we are but His instrument.

The human body, its neuronal system, are scarcely other than the active instrument of a God who wishes to make of man the steward of the earth which He has entrusted to him. And the steward is he who makes fruitful for his master that which has been entrusted to him.

To listen is to go beyond understanding; it is to act according to a plan answering to the desire of the Master.

But what joy and what liberty emanate from such an attitude! To know oneself led in this way for a time — that very time necessary for the apprenticeship of the things of God — to be destined to advance toward the most perfect accomplishment in order to satisfy the Master at every hour and in every place: is this not accession unto the plane of the beatitudes?

The sage’s ideal — an ear that listens

The finality: to know how to listen

The finality, if there be one, is precisely to know how to listen, that is, for man, to invest himself fully in the role assigned to him. And this finality consists in fact in the establishment of that which must be. Hence, rather than seeking a horizontal communication, it will be fitting for man to gain access to a plane answering to the true verticality: that of the Spirit.

At this level, beyond the miasmas, far from the harmful influences which neutralise in each man the desire to live, or — what amounts to the same — the desire to listen, all is but communion.

The Spirit is that which speaks to the man who listens, and he who listens can answer only with a “Fiat”.

It is true that all is not as easy as one claims. As we have made plain on several occasions, from the very origin the “deaf” animal — the serpent in this instance — taught man not to listen, that is, to disobey. This, no doubt, will have been understood.

What, then, is to be done? Before a situation marked by such deep-rooted and such ancient habits, must one disarm? Surely not. If the institution of men is built upon a false language which resounds in each individual, in each ethnicity, in each tongue, yet not all is in reality fundamentally and irreducibly irreducible. Indeed, listening appears at first glance to be ontological, so much is it anchored in the very depths of the vital nucleus, so much is it the response, or better still the most perceptible manifestation, of the resonance of being. It is the consequence of life itself, which can only be perceived through a permanent and subtle attention. It is the expression which consciousness underlies. It is the indispensable link by which the body sets itself in resonance with creation, since governed, like it, by one and the same programme from which nothing escapes.

It is true that such a position eludes rapidly all the theoretical scaffoldings of rationalism, of positivism, or of materialism, for, in truth, it leads to the self-evident. Indeed, if one but surveys the whole of these fluctuations of the human mind, one is quickly brought to observe that they are scarcely more than inaccessible utopias, all the more so as they are administered by men whose ideological — and often personal — interests are known to intervene, thereby annihilating the theoretical edifice proposed.

This is to say that the human mind is not the divine Spirit, and if the latter passes through man, He dwells in him only if he effaces himself as a personage, to become no more than a unity plunged into the great whole.

What one observes in the sociological dynamism of peoples, pulled this way and that, is doubtless found again in the human sciences derived from philosophy. Better still, the same phenomenon is met with in the domain of the pure sciences. Indeed, the objectivation of the observer is very quickly counterbalanced by the desire of that observer to identify himself as an observer. Here again, it must be recalled that it is granted to certain beings to succeed in bringing facts to light. But do they not tend to forget that these phenomena exist from all eternity, and that they are merely offered the chance to bring their self-evidence to the fore? And, what is more, for the benefit of others.

The misfortune for him to whom this gift has been bestowed is that more often than not he comes to think that his personality is out of the ordinary. The honours done to him moreover confirm him in this idea. Therein lies his undoing. Throughout the ages, since the beginning of the beginning, in accord with the determined moment, things come to pass, reveal themselves, are discovered; and to render them perceptible to men, they employ heads predestined to be questing heads. There is no merit in this. The fact of being a seeker is the response to a vocation, to an inner voice which speaks, which induces, and which therefore leads the elect in such or such a direction. But this too is the consequence of a particularly keen listening. It can be encountered only when the subject attains the most stripped-bare level of humility. To be a man is to be of the humus, listening to Life. One knows what Life is.

How to awaken this listening

As one may easily suppose after taking cognisance of these various considerations, one is entitled to ask whether there exists any way out, any path whatsoever capable of leading the human being, beyond the possibility of hearing, toward the faculty of listening. Assuredly yes; but what a long road, and what a deep decision are required, in order to see deep modifications arise in the play of the inner dynamism, so long altered?

All things, however, are possible. How many men, since the dawn of time, have travelled this journey? Today, if only one will trouble to consider what present-day technology is able to offer, this passage may be made easier. But is it not bold to wish to associate a discourse such as the one we have just developed with any novelty born of man? Is this not the very negation of what we have advanced in the preceding lines? One now knows what our opinion is concerning the discoveries born of the genius of man. We have explained ourselves upon this matter. There is no more genius than there are discoveries. It is only granted to a few well-organised brains, out of the ordinary in their preoccupations, to be in connection with “the things” which discover themselves of themselves.

One may, therefore, know, in part at the very least, what listening is, and, knowing it, one may awaken and arouse it in its plenitude. The listening subject is henceforth in possession of means inherent to his human condition, of which he was ignorant. He is often led upon the path of his real mission in this world. There is a sudden activation of his poetic, of his creative faculty — but of a creativity, we will dare to say, “purified”. For real listening, if it addresses itself to the body, does so only in order to know it and to govern it as a listening antenna for all that constitutes the familial, scholastic and social environment, and is translated into action without necessarily passing by way of an auditory sensation. There exist, it seems, beyond the auditory range, territories in which our perception functions upon other wavelengths — intuition, for example; parapsychic, telepathic, prophetic phenomena.

But once again, such a disposition demands a renunciation of any power whatsoever, an abandonment of every pretension in personal action.

Let it be clearly understood: this does not mean that one radically suppresses all that makes the joys of daily life. It is only the attitude before this daily life which changes entirely. One forgets that one exists as an individuality, and one becomes aware of belonging to the whole — to that whole which surrounds us, which itself constitutes a parcel of a larger entity that may be a state, which in its turn is inserted within a humanity embracing at once past, present and future.

Thus each man is a “cell” which has been, is, and shall be upon the planet, and which, by this very fact, may claim to be on his own scale one of the links of this evolutive continuity of the world.

The point is understood. To invite man to pass from hearing to listening pertains to a true conversion. And the undertaking, though possible, may be long, subterranean, even painful. Yet it is easy at present to accelerate this process by means of technology. We know that the latter, when well managed, may be placed at the service of man. It may be so, but on the express condition that whoever engages himself therein consent to submit to it. From then on, it is possible “electronically” to reveal what listening is to him who desires to make use of this faculty.

One sees what such an “education” requires. Many individuals consent to engage themselves in it, and from deaf as they were, they accede to the stage of hearing. But blocked by their reason — which we know to be the first form of their alienation — they go no further. Their critical intellectualism aiding, they could not even glimpse what to listen really signifies. Happily, others find themselves literally borne away toward listening, and feel taking place within them a true conversion, a real metamorphosis. All happens, in fact, as though there were a change of polarity, a displacement of the epicentre which, from then on, is no longer egotic. It is situated somewhere else, withdrawing ever further to insert itself into that horizon which marks the beginning of the world, there where the “creative principle” has its seat.

There remains then only to participate in the unfolding of the world and in its evolution. There is no longer occasion to feel any constraints whatsoever, but only to take part, in conscious manner, in the construction of the universe. Man becomes thus the verbalised echo of the generative Word. He knows how to formulate in human language what the cosmos sings in its dynamic function.

Doubtless one is curious to know how, by a modern technique such as electronics, one may lead the ill-listening man to change his manner of being. So as not to break the unity of this discourse, we shall take the liberty of developing this pedagogy of listening at a later stage. It is in our view of primordial importance, and doubtless should be inscribed in the very first rank of the processes of education.

Listening to the Word

Lecture by Dr Alfred A. Tomatis (Paris 1998).