Devotional Listening: Listening as Love, Lover, and Beloved

Paying attention is a kind of giving forth, making an offering. When we give of ourselves mindlessly to scrolling and to routine habits, we are making an offering of our attention, of our energy, to these tasks. Instead, we might turn ourselves around to attend to awareness. In doing so, we not only make an offering of ourselves to what we are attending to, but we also make an offering to awareness itself, to the very presence that is listening. It is a sort of lending of oneself wholeheartedly to be drawn into the listening. For no gift can quite be given without containing a piece of the giver, so here the gift is the one given. This is what is truly meant by devotion: to give of yourself fully, to make an offering of yourself.

Devotion is to be devoted to. Find out what it is like in your listening meditation to become devoted to the listening. To place your breath as a bouquet of flowers upon its altar. To lay all your concepts and cleverness down at its feet. Devotion is necessary for absorption, for without giving oneself totally one remains a separate entity who is considering, who is practicing, who is going or getting somewhere. Even though devotion is often a dualistic act, it is necessary for the non-dual embodiment to give of oneself entirely to the entirety. By devoting oneself to that of your devotion, then all that is left is the ladder. As the Sufi saying goes: God is love, lover, and beloved. 

Listening at once becomes the love, the supreme love, the means, essence or vehicle we awaken and ride on. And, it is the devotee, the subject who awakens to, is aware of, and attends to that listening that is love. And, equally, it is the object of their devotion, the goal, destination and abode that one abides in. 

All three come together in devotion: the path, the vehicle, and the destination. Rest in this. Come home to this. Devote all of your attention to the loving presence of listening.