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I know you can hear, there is no trouble about it, but you cannot listen.

Listening is totally different from hearing. Listening means hearing without mind, listening means hearing without any interference of your thoughts, listening means hearing as if you are totally empty.

If you have even a small trembling of thinking inside, waves of subtle thoughts surrounding you, you will not be able to listen although you will be able to hear.

And to listen to the music, the ancient music, the eternal music, one needs to be totally quiet, as if one is not. When you are you can hear, when you are not you can listen.

How not to be is the whole problem of religion: how to be in such a deep silence that being becomes almost equivalent to nonbeing – that there remains no difference between being and nonbeing, that the boundaries between being and nonbeing disappear. You are, and yet in a certain sense you are not; you are not and yet in a certain sense, for the first time, you are.

When thought is not disturbing you…thoughts are like ripples on the lake; silence is like no ripples on the lake, just being…suddenly you become aware of a music that has always surrounded you. Suddenly it enters from everywhere. You are overwhelmed, you are possessed.

This is the first thing to understand. You will not be able to know truth unless you have become capable of listening to the ancient music of omkar. This music is the very heartbeat of existence, this music is the very door of existence.

You will not be able to enter the temple of God but with this music as the bridge.

Only on this music, riding on this music, will you enter Him. The kingdom of God is available only to those who have become capable of listening to the eternal music.

It has been heard, I have heard it.

You can hear it: nobody except yourself is barring the path, nobody is hindering. If you are missing, you are missing only on your own account. There is not a wall between you and the music; even if you feel there to be a wall it is only of your own thoughts, and even then the music goes on penetrating you.

You may not listen to it, but it goes on massaging your whole being; it goes on nourishing you, it goes on giving you life, it goes on rejuvenating you. Your heart throbs in the same rhythm as the heart of the whole.