So there is no reason why it will not be happening. The only thing that hinders it – and there are not many things that you have to remove – the only thing is a preoccupied mind. If you are too much preoccupied with something – it does not matter what it is – then you cannot be open. If you are not preoccupied, then there is nothing to prevent the opening. But almost everybody is preoccupied, although the objects of preoccupation are trivia. If you look at them attentively, you will have a good laugh at yourself, at what kind of nonsense goes on within you and creates a tremendous barrier for listening.

Hearing of course happens because you have your ears and they are functioning, but the poor ears cannot manage to listen – they are instruments only for hearing. If your unpreoccupied mind is behind the ears, then hearing becomes listening. And without listening there is no understanding. So just watch what your preoccupations are and drop them.

Don’t go directly to make some positive efforts, because that is not the way great things come to you. They always come when your doer is absent, and the preoccupied mind is also your doer. Emptying the mind is possible. It is your doing; you can undo it. But listening is something beyond you, something far greater than you – you cannot manage it. You can simply allow yourself to be overwhelmed by it, to be flooded by it. But one thing you can certainly do: you can undo the preoccupation.

What are our preoccupations? What do we go on thinking, and why do we go on giving so much nourishment to thinking? What has it produced in the long life you have lived up to now? Is it not a sheer wastage of time? And it is standing there almost like a China wall.

All the religions, all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the civilizations have helped you to remain preoccupied. They have all changed you into deaf beings as far as listening is concerned; they don’t want you to be people of understanding. They are afraid of your understanding, because in the light of your understanding all their fictions will disappear and they are living like parasites on those fictions. They want those fictions to remain in your mind as a reality.

For example, all religions have insisted on repressing sex. The moment you repress any natural instinct, it becomes your preoccupation. The repressed energy goes around your mind. Sex becomes cerebral; you think about it.

An old man had gone to the doctor. He was feeling very weak and it looked almost as if his story was coming to an end. The doctor said, “There is not much that I can do. I can only give you a suggestion: cut your sex life in half.”

The old man said, “Okay, which half – thinking or talking?” Real sex had disappeared long before; it was now only thinking and talking.

All the religions have made your sex energy become transformed into thinking and talking – that has become your preoccupation. I am just giving you one instance – one of the most important. And there are many. Anything that has been prohibited, inhibited, anything that has been condemned, takes on a tremendous attraction and that attraction creates a preoccupation. You may be doing something but you are preoccupied.