Creative Listening

 

Additional note from unknown source

found in the Creative Listening booklet

So if you go to people expecting them to be something, you get it. If you go simply thinking, "I'm now going to see a son or daughter of God, somebody who really carries this wonderful divine spark inside the same as I do. I'm going to meet a sister or brother. Who knows what this will lead to, who knows what amazing promises will emerge," emerge they do, you see, as I've found out often enough. What helps these promises to emerge, when one meets people, is to make oneself very available to them, to listen very carefully.

Listening is a very important human ability which we are on the whole not good at because of the noise of our own thoughts, the noise of our own computer ticking over with its associations and its habitual responses. But if one really listens, it's an act of self-abnegation, making oneself available to that person, stopping being the automatic creature that most of us are most of the time, machine-like. One is becoming fully human, and the contact that one establishes when one is really listening and giving attention, awareness and consciousness to another person, is the contact which comes from the more real parts of ourselves below the part which is automatic and machine-like. The automatic and machine-like part is very important, of course. You have to be able to respond automatically, for instance, when you drive cars or ride bicycles or feed yourself or scratch when you've got an itch and not think about it. Otherwise it would take an interminable time. It's when this automatic part takes over what should be the human function, the human contact, then we do each other great damage. What is in our computer, the automatic part, is a skilled knowledge of how to cope with certain sorts of situations which need coping with mechanically, but it's also more. It has all sorts of false ideas, and it's ignorant about a number of things. It's also influenced by the pain from hurts which we have. They come out automatically, too, so our automatic response is sometimes based on ignorance. ... (continued in the pages of the unknown publication. )

COMMENT: Go to website : https://www.douglassocialcredit.com/Go to ESSAYS\Yorkshire Educational Association \ and find Creative Listening booklet by Rachel Spinney, reproduced as a guide to facilitating group discussions.

See also on the same page, The Tutor and the WEA.