i don’t know if you have ever examined how you listen, it doesn’t matter to what, whether to a bird, to the wind in the leaves, to the rushing of waters, or how you listen to a dialogue with yourself, to your conversation in various relationships with your intimate friends, your wife or husband. if we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate we hardly listen to what is being said. in that state there is no value at all. one listens and therefor learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence in which this whole background is abeyance, is quiet; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate.