Listening without effort...

A quotation from Krishnamurti's Book of Life arrives in my email in-tray every morning. Sometimes they are provocative. Sometimes - like this morning - they echo what I'm writing myself. Always they are worth reading...

You are now listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just listening; and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find a remarkable change taking place in you—a change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind. And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything—not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying, to the birds, to the whistle of a locomotive, to the noise of the bus going by. You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen—it is only then that there is a struggle.

A pic, licensed today, of the half-timbered Guildhall in Lavenham, Suffolk...