Osho,
Why can’t I hear you? Am I deaf?

You are not deaf. You hear me, but you are not listening. And you don’t know the distinction between hearing and listening. Anybody who has ears can hear, but it is not necessary that he will be able to listen. For listening, something more is necessary than just having ears: a certain kind of silence, a serenity, a peace – the heart standing behind the ears, not the mind.

It is the mind which makes you almost deaf, although you are not deaf – because the mind is constantly chattering, it is a chatterbox.

Just sometimes sit in your room, close your doors, and write down whatsoever comes into your mind just to see what goes on in it. Don’t edit it – because you are not going to show it to anybody, so just write down exactly what comes to your mind. You will be surprised: just within ten minutes you will see that you are not sane; your mind is the mind of an insane person. Just somehow you are managing, covering it up, not allowing anybody to know what goes on inside you. And you have become experts, so much so that it is not only that you don’t allow others to know what goes on in your mind, you yourself don’t see it. It goes on, yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak.

Because of this constant mind, making noise… Although you are not deaf, you cannot listen. You can hear. Listening needs a silent communication.

The words that I am speaking to you are ordinary words, you know them. I do not like to use any kind of jargon. But in another sense the words I am using are extraordinary because they are coming from a depth, from a space within me. And certainly they are carrying with them some perfume, some fragrance of that space. If you are silent, the word becomes inessential and the fragrance that it is carrying becomes essential. If the fragrance reaches you, you have listened.

The beauty of listening is that you don’t have to think about it. If it is coming out of truth, it carries truth with it; you feel the truth. If it is just mind stuff – not coming from experience, but is just bookish – you will not find the fragrance in it.

But you have to be so alert, so silent, that you don’t miss that which surrounds the word. The fragrance is its validity, its logic, its philosophy. And if there is no fragrance, then it is just a dead flower like you sometimes find in Bibles, in the Bhagavadgita. People keep roses, dry roses in a Bible, with no fragrance, with no life.

When you simply hear, if one hundred persons are here there are going to be one hundred versions, because the mind immediately starts interpreting – what does it mean? The mind is blind. It cannot see, it can only grope in the dark. Groping in the dark is called “thinking.” One hundred people sitting here will have heard one hundred meanings.