• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Can you hear what’s between the lines? Can you sense where the words are coming from, not just hear the words? Can you perceive and even feel what others are feeling as they speak? Good fences may make good neighbors, but good listeners make good friends. We can learn to hear with whatever is being said in the present moment. Simply tune in to a greater emotional bandwidth, and receive more channels and stations. Some people can hear the music of the celestial spheres along with the dakinis, the muses, angelic hosts, and other celestial songsters. Tune in to all that is. It’s worth it.

WORDS FROM THE HEART

When I was about six, one of our neighbors was a very elderly man who had a medical condition that made it impossible for him to speak. Instead of talking, he made a noise that sounded like “boop-boop.” At the time it seemed as though the only people he talked to were the neighborhood children, whom he always greeted with his signature sound. He really seemed to enjoy communicating with us in this way. My sister and I called him Mr. Boop-boop or the Boop-boop Man. Every day we would run outside and wait for him to walk by at his regular hour. He was happy to see us, and we made him smile. We had a real relationship, and we loved him because we could feel that he loved us. In fact, I think we had more of a relationship with him than we did with any of the other adults who lived on our block at that time. I don’t really remember much from the early fifties about the other adult neighbors—how they looked or what they said. But every now and then I still remember and think fondly about Mr. Boop-boop, with a smile on my adult face and a large burst of laughter from my inner child.

Often when we think we are communicating with sentences, we are really communicating as much or more through energy, emotions, and gestures, body language, eye contact, and facial expressions. Mr. Boop-boop radiated kindness and warmth. As children, that’s what we responded to; that’s why we felt as though we had a real relationship with someone who couldn’t speak with words, yet spoke eloquently heart to heart.

Frequently in life, words are extraneous, although we depend on them so much. Think about the people with whom you have relationships that are built primarily on smiles, hand waves, and body language. The mailperson, the helpful dry cleaner, the kind woman who owns the bakery, the nice guy who butters your bagel and smiles when he hands it to you, the jolly person on the corner who sells you your newspaper, the cheerful supermarket cashier, the good-natured car mechanic, or the neighbor who sees you standing on a wintry street corner and offers to drive you home. Pets and other animals are extremely communicative, and we love to commune with them, don’t we? We often seem to understand each other quite well, almost without words. I get a lot of teachings and inspiration, along with love, from my dog, Bodhi-dogma, and my friend’s cat, Bodhicattva. These nonverbal relationships add joy and dimension to our lives. We could scarcely live without them.

THE TREASURY OF SACRED SOUND

PRAYER AS SACRED SPEECH

My greatest weapon is mute prayer.

—GANDHI

In theistic religions, prayers are addressed to a supreme being or higher power. In nontheistic Buddhism, as we pray, we are not petitioning for something so much as we are reaffirming our intentions and asserting our vows. The word we translate as prayer in Tibetan is Monlam. It roughly translates as aspiration-path or wishing-path. In the Dzogchen tradition, prayers are like the self-resound of Buddha-nature, Dharmata, a spontaneous display of innate wisdom mind—as prayers to the primordial Buddha in the Dzogchen tantras say.

The following, my own daily morning loving-kindness prayer, is based on an original Buddhist scripture called the Metta Sutra. It’s an excellent example of how we can cultivate benevolent intentions and bring them forth through the speech door in the form