Listen …Till You Disappear

By Martin Kettelhut, PhD

The way you listen creates your world. In Listen…Till You Disappear, author Dr. Martin Kettelhut shows that by listening better you will hear what your highest aspirations really are and discover the best way to attain them. Most of us are working much harder than we need to get what we want.

This book guides you through the noise of life so you can hear what’s ultimately important, it brings you home to your primordial vision of life, reveals the structural dissonances blocking your progress, and teaches you how to live well. Stopping to listen will give you the power to accomplish what you want, procure the things you desire, and lead a purposeful life.

Listen…Till You Disappear shows how learning to refine and deepen your listening—to yourself, others, and the world around you—will free your mind, focus your power, and bring profound fulfillment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483422572

Book preview

Listen …

Till You Disappear

Martin Kettelhut, PhD

Copyright © 2014 Sacred Holdings LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2256-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2257-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014921292

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/23/2014

CONTENTS

PART I: RELEASE THE PAST

Prologue

Chapter 1   Be Still and Discover Yourself

Chapter 2   Ignite Mutual Power

Chapter 3   Create Space for What Is Important

Chapter 4   Leap for the Experience

PART II: ENVISION THE FUTURE

Chapter 5   The Implicate Order—All Power

Chapter 6   Access Power

Chapter 7   The Way to Love

Chapter 8   Sculpt Space and Compose Time to Your Liking

Chapter 9   Be Done All the Way to Being Done

PART III: DESIGN WHAT YOU WANT

Chapter 10   Four Blind Spots and the Power of Intentionality

Chapter 11   Self-Care

Chapter 12   Relationship Care

Chapter 13   Let It Be

Epilogue

Endnotes

To Mom (Helene) and Dad (Robert)

1929–2014 and 1933–2011, respectively

PART ONE

Release the Past

PROLOGUE

I was fast asleep, resting deeply after a full day of work and exercise. It was the wee hours of the night, and the whole neighborhood had been very quiet for hours. My apartment, just across Sixth Avenue from Balboa Park in San Diego, was perfectly dark, except for a small greenish ray from the streetlight that shone through the blinds across the living room floor.

Suddenly there came a knock on the back door, just a few feet from my bed. It startled me. Some adrenaline shot into my blood and tripped my heart into high frequency, but then I took a conscious breath, became quiet, and listened. What I heard wasn’t a needy rap or threatening banging. Although it was delivered with enough eagerness to awaken me, I intuited supplication in that knock. I opened the door in the cobalt night.

Hey mister, the stranger hushed in the eucalyptus air. You left your keys in the door.

I thanked him, and he went on.

It’s only in the present that we can hear the truth. I experienced no time between hearing the knock and opening the door—no time for the mind to interpret, analyze, judge, or doubt. The economy of that knock and my acceptance of its entreaty were high-order expressions of love, unsullied by anything psychological.

Had I stopped to think about it, I might very well have missed the goodness available in that moment; not heeding the knock and leaving the keys there, I also could have been burgled and assaulted. Were I to have assumed the worst, I also would have robbed that kind stranger of the fullness and satisfaction that was his for being so considerate.

You may wonder, What does this have to do with my life? Like most people, you’re most likely preoccupied with questions like:

• When am I going to finally get out of debt?

• How can we repair our relationship?

• What do I need to do to gain security in my career?

• Could I ever afford to travel abroad?

• May I please have some relaxation time?

• What am I really meant to do with myself in this life?

These are the types of questions we as individuals currently face most pressingly. We believe that answering these questions effectively will make us happy, and we wouldn’t be asking these questions if we didn’t sense (correctly) that there are, indeed, possible answers to them.

It is possible to get out of debt.

It is possible to repair a relationship.

It is possible to gain security in your job.

It is possible for you to afford to travel abroad.

It is possible to take time to relax.

It is possible to do what you are meant to.

The answers to these questions we face regarding our fulfillment are not to be found in the isolated facts about our circumstances. Just because you’ve been broken does not mean you need to be broken going forward. Just because people have been unreliable does not mean you cannot create reliability with them. The answers to our questions regarding fulfillment are also not to be found in anyone’s individual opinion about what we should do with those facts. Opinions are like belly buttons, my grandfather used to say. Everyone’s got one. The answers do naturally lie in the larger scheme of things. That is to say: if you were able to see the whole picture (the past and future; the perspectives of everyone involved; the emotional, physical, and intellectual preconditions and ultimate impact—in short, everything relevant to those questions regarding your fulfillment), you would know how to attain everything you want.

But what good does it do to talk about the grand scheme of things? you might well ask. Sure it’d be wonderful to be omniscient and know the answers to all the most pressing and fundamental questions in my life, but that just isn’t possible.

You are right. We are not omniscient. Omniscient people probably don’t read books about how to live well.

However, what you might not realize is that there is a way for you to gain substantial access to the bigger picture—indeed, enough understanding to allow you to get those things you intend in this life. The way to access the larger picture is to listen—to listen carefully, deeply—and to discriminate in your listening the answers you need from the noise surrounding the questions you’re asking about how to get what you want. Listening¹ is the way to the richest life in every sense.

Here are a few quick examples out of context. Once I stopped trying to impress potential customers and instead listened to their needs, sales went up over 250 percent. Once I quit judging my father’s reaction to my career change and instead listened to his concerns, his position transformed right in front of my eyes. Once I gave up complaining about all the little things I thought were causing me stress in life and started listening for a way to get everything I want and need in life (including plenty of exercise and relaxation), I was able to create a thirty-hour workweek with a great income.

Every day I see in ever-starker relief the difference it makes when we refine our listening. I grow ever-more grateful for the training I have received as philosopher and coach. It has taught me what makes for profound listening and guidance of the highest order.

If you are like most people, you think of listening as a passive affair. It’s not that we don’t need to lift a finger to get what we want; however, most of us are working much harder than we need to attain what we consider fulfilling. Many of us are unfulfilled because we’re working on achieving what someone else says would make us happy. It is by listening better that you will hear a) what your highest aspirations really are, and b) the best way to attain them. This is what gives you the power to:

• accomplish what you want effortlessly, either for personal or altruistic goals

• procure all of the things you desire—money, clothes, good looks, houses, travel, you name it

• have deeply satisfying relationships at home and work and with everyone you meet

• lead a purposeful life doing things that are meaningful to you, which might include leaving a legacy for future generations

• enjoy the best of health

• take plenty of free time to appreciate the finer things, relax, and rejuvenate

• be happy doing all of this

• do it all ethically

These benefits represent the A-list of human goals in life. These things are accessible through well-tuned listening. The power of listening is enormous. It lies within you; you’ve seen this when you took a moment to really understand someone or when you allowed your heart to help you modify your life plan in an important way. The ability to listen in a way that changes the world is well within your reach; you just haven’t distinguished it and practiced it as such.

The Myth of Separation

The power of listening is not a force like the kind it takes to lift heavy loads or run long distances; it is also not willpower, like what it takes to sort through large amounts of information or control other people.

You have probably been trying very hard and using force or will to get the things you want in life. You may have become resigned or what some would call realistic about attaining these things because they appear to be impossible, not a real part of this life, or drastically removed from the world we live in today. Indeed, they are impossible by means of force and will.

When you start to hear how little time, money, and stress it can actually cost to get what you want out of life, you may be stunned. The very fact that most people think that to get what they want requires so much time, money, and or stress just goes to show that they have been trying to find fulfillment by changing something in the external world. Yet, everything on the A-list of human goals is an inside job. That is to say, getting what you want is first and foremost about turning your attention inward and aligning with your native power rather than about attempting to move mountains and stretch time by brute force or sheer willfulness.

Not only does trying to change external reality entail effort, but it’s also not sustainable. Changes to external reality eventually break down; they’re not built on anything that lasts. The things you generate from within do not require extra shots of energy (such as caffeine, others’ approval, or capital) from the outside in order to keep going. Whatever you generate from within will be self-sustaining. Whatever you undertake using the craft of listening will level any physical or psychological forces that would otherwise resist upsetting the status quo of your life to date.

You may ask, But how can I get what I want without changing current reality?

Answering this most important question involves putting attention on a fundamental assertion of LISTEN: there is a technē² to listening that you can learn here. By doing the exercises in this book, you will experience how to transform your life. I will say briefly why this is, but you must practice in order to see for yourself the truth of these assertions.

Getting what you want in life is about relating in apposite ways to the world, people, and yourself in particular. The key to realizing a befitting and fulfilling relation to the world is listening.

In Western culture, we have been taught that we are separate: physically, psychologically, and spiritually. So most of us have been trying desperately to bridge the gulf between ourselves and the things we want or the resources for getting what we lack: intimacy, security, energy, happiness. Up to this point, getting what you want has therefore felt like an uphill battle. This is why—so far—your life has been about pushing, reaching, convincing, getting it right, protecting, prevailing, and the like.

You have experienced a lot of fear and doubt about attaining the things on your A-list too, because if you don’t attain them, you believe you’ll have failed in life, reveal your powerlessness, and be alone. However, when you can hear yourself as an instrument of life blending with the whole universal orchestra, you’ll see that failure is really not an option. When you master the craft of listening, you will see that you already possess all the power you need to have everything on your A-list by dint of your innate relationship to the world and that everything that has happened in your life is integral to the process of your succeeding at your A-list. You are already connected to all the resources necessary to achieve everything you want. There is an advantageous harmony for your fulfillment; you’re just not tuned in to that frequency right now.

You actually have been listening all along, just not very discriminatingly; unfortunately, you’ve been listening to the deluding hopes and doubts, expectations and disappointments of outside voices that tell you that you are separate. Those voices say things like: Who are you to think you could have what you want? You’re not like those folks who really live well. What does it matter if you waste a little time or money? It’s all pointless anyway. You should be in control of your situation. Business is business; personal is personal. The likes of these divisive thoughts have come to dominate your life and deafen you to the truth of your connectedness to all things: you, your heart and soul, all sentient beings, and the myriad phenomena of nature as well. The unconscious way we’ve been listening might be called extra-active, because it has left us very busy, fearful, and ineffective at producing our A-list of wants and needs. Listening instead to how everything in the universe is connected, indeed listening to how you relate to the heart and soul of everything, you will be able to realize all your aspirations with ease. This is what I call the InnerActive approach. (You can learn more at the following website: http://www.InnerActiveInstitute.com.) The sharper you tune your listening, the more you hear the amity of all things.

Listening in the way you are going to learn here is not about passively letting things happen. Once you hear the pulse of your own heart, once you hear the pulse at the heart of all things, and once you get even a hint of the fact that the pulse of your own heart and the pulse at the heart of all things are one and the same, then you understand beyond understanding what you actually want and how this is what everything real and true in the universe wants as well and is already at work with you to create. The technē of listening will show you how your personal freedom and your destiny are one and the same.

Like certain dances, the LISTEN technē is a three-step process: clear, imagine, design; clear, imagine, design; clear, imagine, design.

Step One

Listening for the rhythm of the whole shebang can only start with you hearing the obstacles in the way of your deeper listening (i.e. the ways you’ve been separating yourself) and clearing these. There lies the initial challenge. Listening is going to allow you to understand better what’s really going on and how to make the most of it. You’ve seen this whenever you’ve been committed to a relationship (familial, organizational, athletic) and the relationship goes through a difficult time. As you’ve seen, it’s important to take the perspective of what will nurture the relationship over what is merely self-serving. Likewise, when you’re trying to find your pitch in the chorus, it’s important to listen for the whole chord in order to hear how to harmonize.

By listening deeply to yourself first, you discover what is in the way of your flowing with the universal energy so that you can then clear the way to fulfillment. Before you can hear the dance music, you must catch up with yourself, plant both feet by taking stock and understanding what has been going on up to now in your life, and own it. That way, you can put closure on it and, from this moment on, think and feel your life in fresh new way. What has been the case in the past needn’t be so anymore! This will happen naturally as you engage in Part I: Release the Past.

Step Two

The second step of the LISTEN dance, Part II, is called Envision the Future. When you sense that the slate of experience-forms and experience-strategies that defined your past has been completed, you will naturally find yourself ruminating on what is possible to have in its place going forward. It’s crucial to develop a clear mental picture of what you want and how you will feel when it is attained. Once you do so, you can focus on experiencing the end result during the process of completing the project. You can feel the weight of effort and frustration lifting off your shoulders. Your vision protects you like a force field whenever you get attacked by doubt or distraction and stuck in your work toward the goal. There is a craft to effective visioning, for which listening is essential. You will learn to use it successfully here.

Step Three

The crucial third step, part three, of LISTEN is Design What You Want. The injunction here is probably both generally patent and completely mysterious in detail at the same time. We are going to be looking at structures in part three, the nuts and bolts arrangement of mental and physical objects that holds your reality in place. In this section, you will learn how to identify, alter, and/or replace past structures that held in place your previous ways of thinking and behaving. Now it is time to buoy the future you want by consciously designing the physical and mental arrangement of the world to serve your highest aspirations. It’s impossible to apprehend the enjoyment of this third step (creating new structures for fulfillment) right now; however, it will ring true after the first two steps.

The most important part of LISTEN is the exercises. When you practice the exercises, you will master the technē of listening. You will need to have a journal for writing your experiences with the exercises. There are other ways of attaining the short-term appearance of getting the things you want, but it is only by listening through the profusion of noise around you to the opportunities available in connecting with others and to the universe’s readiness to host your contentment that you can secure the things on your A-list. The technē of listening will circumvent everything that has ever gotten in the way before, so I invite you to aim for your highest aspirations and take the journey one step at a time. You will indeed achieve what now looks impossible.

CHAPTER 1

Be Still and Discover Yourself

There’s a marvelous bumper sticker that reads, Don’t believe everything you think! As human beings, we all have constant commentary running through our minds, an aggregation of internal voices judging ourselves and others, analyzing our experiences, comparing this and that, wondering, regretting, planning, worrying, and on and on. It never stops.

Where do these internal committee voices come from? Like in your dreams, they are voices from your past, amalgamations of people you know and celebrities you think you know, inventions of the ideal you, and delusions of the monsters out there.

The bad news about this, which is much easier to see in others than in yourself, is that constantly listening to your internal committee voices as if this were the only station on the radio is tantamount to identifying with your ego. It keeps you from understanding what’s really going on in the world. It influences your behavior in odd ways. It narrows and dulls your experience of life. It slows your productivity. It separates you from others and leaves you with no peace of mind.

The good news is that you are not your thoughts and feelings. With practice, you can learn to readily distinguish those voices from your true self. You will be free to choose behaviors in alignment with your real commitments in life rather than the promptings of your incessantly chattering ego-mind.

Truly powerful people—from corporate CEOs to professional athletes, from domestic engineers to community leaders—give themselves a pregnant pause two or three times every day. They use these moments of peace to discriminate the powerless default mode that causes them to identify with the barrage of junk streaming through their minds. Taking time to be still is like pressing the reset button. It puts you back in touch with who you really are and gives you the self-awareness to shape your day in alignment with your true self.

There is no access to your genuine power, which allows you to make what you want of this life, without the practice of being still and rediscovering your true self. The practice begins with turning your attention to noticing the sensations in your body. Feel your muscles in your back holding you up. As you observe this, you hear the chatter of those voices in your head saying, I’ve got to get a new mattress, I wish someone else would cut the grass for once, or I’m looking forward to that steam bath after I work out this evening.

Here is your first and most important LISTEN Exercise. Read through the steps of the exercise first. Then, before reading further, close your eyes and follow the steps below. The tendency will be to just read on. If you do no other exercise in this book, please do not skip this one.

LISTEN Exercise

Simply notice all of the thoughts and feelings moving around inside of you. Take your time. For once, let yourself just observe what’s going on inside your brain and body without reacting.

Sense the feelings and emotions (like excitement, tiredness, anxiety, compassion, dread, skepticism, and longing). This is like your internal weather report.

Notice sensations in or on your body like tightness in certain muscles, butterflies in the stomach, warmth around your face, chilliness in your legs, or the feel of your clothing on your skin (rough, snug, smooth, loose)—whatever is present.

Stay in the mode of observing these thoughts and sensations, rather than becoming involved with them, until you witness them subsiding and are left in deep peace with yourself.

Good.

Whatever you just experienced in the exercise is exactly what you needed right now. You will learn more every time you do this exercise. Eventually, you will find yourself falling into the practice of being still multiple times in the course of the day. Often people say that the first several times they try to be still and practice distinguishing thoughts and feelings, they wonder