October 25, 2015

October 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

I am so glad you are there. I know you are there. I hope this writing will encourage you to listen to yourself while you speak. Many of my students have done the extra credit assignment, which starts with the simple sentence: “When I listen to the sound of my voice while I speak then I..” The paper has to be two pages long. It helps them to take time and listen to their voice while they speak. It is such a joy to read these papers as each paper confirms how important it is to listen to your voice while you speak. 

If you would do this assignment you would discover for yourself why it is so meaningful. Most likely, like many of my students, you have never really listened to yourself. This is because you were told to listen to others. For most people ‘listening’ means to listen to someone else. Even when others are listening to you, listening is focused on the other and it is outward-oriented. It is no exaggeration to say that our ears are conditioned to listen to others. As of yet, we can’t really listen to ourselves as nobody stimulated it and we are not used to it. There are no situations in which we are stimulated to listen to ourselves, so we keep on listening to others or we keep on trying to make others listen to us. The situation in which you would listen to yourself is one in which you are supported by others to fully express yourself in your own words, in your own pace and in your own rhythm. When does that ever happen? It happens very seldom. And when it happened, it happened accidentally and not deliberately. We never created, maintained and prolonged the situation in which we fully express ourselves as we don’t know how to do this. We wanted others to listen to us and others attempted to listen to us, but we failed. 

No matter how much we have tried to listen to each other, we have not listened to ourselves. We have never recognized that if we don’t listen to ourselves, we cannot really listen to each other. We were never completely satisfied with how others were listening to us as they were always listening to us in a different way than they were listening to themselves. Since we seldom listen to ourselves, there is an enormous difference between how we listen to ourselves and how we listen to others. This difference would decrease if we would listen to ourselves more often. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is happening. We are more and more focused on making others listen to us or on listening to others. The speaker as his or her own listener is almost completely ignored and forgotten. Another reason that this occurs is because we are inclined to attach all sorts of spiritual connotations to this process. This convolutes the simple phenomenon of listening to ourselves while we speak. Only when we do this do we realize that the speaker and the listener are one. This oneness is obvious as the one who speaks is of course the one who listens. There is no difference between the two. This difference is only there because of a particular way of talking, which I call Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker and the listener are separated. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) there is oneness between the speaker and the listener. You can explore this on your own and try it out. When you have talked for a while and when you have verified and explored there is a way of talking in which the speaker and the listener don’t separate and remain one, you want to have such a conversation with someone else. After you familiarized yourself with SVB on your own, you can go to a friend and ask him or her to listen to him or herself, while he or she speaks with you. When you will speak with that person, you can now both listen to yourself.

What you will find is that when you hear the other person talk, it is as if you are hearing yourself talk. The other person will also find that he or she feels one with you. An unusual openness reveals itself which has never been felt before. The experience of oneness while talking is of great significance. This oneness is very different from togetherness. In togetherness the communicators still remain separate, but when SVB is expressed by these communicators, the stress that was still involved in the togetherness will be dissolved. This is not a belief or an imagination, but a realistic experience, which can be prolonged for as long as you want. 

Given your behavioral history, in which you have been listening to others, in which you have coerced others to listen to you, in which nobody was really listening to anyone, in which you were hoping, longing and imagining that others would one day listen, in which you have talked and talked and talked, but didn’t listen to yourself, in which others dominated you and forced you to listen to them, but they didn’t listen to themselves either, you are bound to fall back to the communication habit called outward orientation. Self-listening includes other-listening, but other-listening excludes self-listening. The oneness can only be restored if you again listen to yourself while you speak and if any other speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

SVB will create a completely new order. We are all unique individuals, but we are no longer separate as speakers and listeners. When someone else speaks, it is as if we ourselves have spoken and everything that is known to others can also be known to us. Likewise, all that we have come to know, due to our unique behavioral history, will be effortlessly shared with others. Moreover, there will be continuous learning due to our stimulation of positive emotions. Our conversations will be dynamic and full of action and less and less time will be spend involved in NVB.