The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship

By Maria Popova

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship

One fact that never fails to astound me: Despite the immense cultural changes and leaps in knowledge over the epochs, the human brain — that crucible of consciousness, roiling with the psychologies that govern the behaviors we call human nature — has remained virtually unchanged for the past hundred thousand years. How humbling to consider that what is cognitively true of our ancestors — who, lacking a knowledge of astronomy as the correct frame of reference for planetary motion, explained eclipses as acts of god and comets as omens of ill fortune — is as true of us.

The explanatory contexts in which this tendency manifests today may be different, but it manifests just the same — especially in our interpersonal relationships, where so much of the correct frame of reference that is the other person’s inner reality is invisible to us. It helps to remember that between our feelings and anything in the external world that causes the ripples of consciousness we call feelings — any difficult situation, any painful event, any hurtful action of another — there lie myriad possible causal explanations.

One fact I have learned about life through the empiricism of living: When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation; almost always, that explanation is wrong; almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us.

The Dreaming Horses by Franz Marc, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

And so, sensemaking and storytelling creatures that we are, we move through the real world in a self-generated dream, responding not to reality but to the stories we tell ourselves about what is true — stories at best incomplete and at worst injuriously incorrect, stories about what we do and don’t deserve, stories the cost of which is connection, trust, love. This is why without charity of interpretation and without candor — the vulnerability of it, the courage of it, the kindness of it — all relationships become a ricochet of unspoken resentments based mostly on misapprehended motives, and crumble.

The great Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) offers a three-step remedy for this elemental human tendency in a portion of his slender, potent book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm (public library), which also gave us his warm wisdom on the four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love.

Thich Nhat Hanh

He writes:

Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.

Whenever we see another person take an action, he notes, we must remain aware that there could be a number of invisible motive forces behind it and we must be willing to listen in order to better understand them — not only out of the vain self-referential transactionalism masquerading as the Golden Rule, in the hope that others would be just as willing not to misunderstand our own motives by their perception and interpretation of our actions, but because correcting our wrong perceptions is a basic and vital form of caring for ourselves:

When you make the effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your hurt diminishes.

Half a century after the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm detailed the six rules of listening and unselfish understanding, Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting wrong perception in relationship conflict and emerging victorious with deeper love:

The first thing we can do in these situations is to acknowledge internally that the pictures we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be accurate. Our practice is to breathe and walk until we are more calm and relaxed.

The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people who we think have hurt us that we are suffering and that we know our suffering may have come from our own wrong perception. Instead of coming to the other person or people with an accusation, we can come to them for help and ask them to explain, to help us understand why they have said or done those things.

There is a third thing we need to do, if we can. The third thing is very hard, perhaps the hardest. We need to listen very carefully to the other person’s response to truly understand and try to correct our perception. With this, we may find that we have been the victim of our wrong perceptions. Most likely the other person has also been a victim of wrong perceptions.

Total eclipse of the sun, observed July 29, 1878, at Creston, Wyoming Territory
One of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s groundbreaking astronomical drawings. (Available as a print, a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

Part of why this is so challenging to the Western mind, with its individualistic ideal of self-reliance that too readily metastasizes into self-righteousness, is that we grow incredibly insecure at the prospect of being wrong and feel incredibly unmoored by the fact of having been wrong. In a culture conflating who we are with what we know and what we stand for, the Eastern contemplative traditions can be so salutary with their gentle, steady practice of releasing the clutch of selfing and unclenching the fist of righteousness into an open palm of receptivity.

Drawing on two powerful Buddhist practices that effect this release — deep listening and loving speech — Hanh writes:

If we are sincere in wanting to learn the truth, and if we know how to use gentle speech and deep listening, we are much more likely to be able to hear others’ honest perceptions and feelings. In that process, we may discover that they too have wrong perceptions. After listening to them fully, we have an opportunity to help them correct their wrong perceptions. If we approach our hurts that way, we have the chance to turn our fear and anger into opportunities for deeper, more honest relationships.

Art from the 1750 book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, who originated the “island universes” concept. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

This, he observes, applies to romantic relationships, to politics, to family and workplace dynamics — in other words, to all possible configurations of one consciousness embarking on the touching, terrifying endeavor of being known and understood by another.

With an eye to the ultimate aim of this process, he adds:

The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation.

[…]

We are all capable of recognizing that we’re not the only ones who suffer when there is a hard situation. The other person in that situation suffers as well, and we are partly responsible for his or her suffering. When we realize this, we can look at the other person with the eyes of compassion and let understanding bloom. With the arrival of understanding, the situation changes and communication is possible.

Any real peace process has to begin with ourselves… We have to practice peace to help the other side make peace.

Shortly after he wrote Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, Hanh placed this insight at the center of his now-classic teachings about how to love — an insight that also animates Alain de Botton’s soulful wisdom on what makes a good communicator. Perhaps Walt Whitman, writing with ecstatic immediacy, best captured this in his intimation that the secret of Being is “to do nothing but listen,” so that the song of life — which is the song of love — may be heard.

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Hermann Hesse on How to Read a Book and How to Read Yourself

By Maria Popova

Hermann Hesse on How to Read a Book and How to Read Yourself

Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to clarify ourselves and to anneal our values. We read for the assurance that others have lived through what we are living through. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin reflected in his most personal interview.

And yet while books may give us a foothold for the disorientation of being and an antidote to our existential loneliness, the paradox of living is that no example, no parallel, no borrowed wisdom is a substitute for life itself. The story of our own lives is only ever written on the blank page of living, our store of wisdom only ever found in the deepening truth of our own experience.

In 1918 — more than a decade before he penned his magnificent essay on the timeless magic of books and three decades before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962), entering his forties, captured this paradox in a short poem of great simplicity and loveliness, found in the posthumous collection The Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Herman Hesse (public library).

hesse_books

BOOKS
by Hermann Hesse

All the books of the world
will not bring you happiness,
but build a secret path
toward your heart.

What you need is in you:
the sun, the stars, the moon,
the illumination you were seeking
shines up from within you.

The quest for wisdom
made you comb the libraries.
Now every page speaks the truth
that flashes forth from you.

The young Proust had arrived at the same conclusion in his reflections on why we read, observing that “the end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own” because “the essential book, the one true book… already exists in every one of us.”

Complement with Pythagoras on the purpose of life and the meaning of wisdom, Nick Cave on the importance of trusting yourself, and Rebecca Solnit on how books solace, empower, and transform us, then revisit Hesse on the courage to be yourself, the wisdom of the inner voice, and how to be more alive.

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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

By Maria Popova

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, “involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”

Every generation believes that it must battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it must fight harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our integrity of selfhood springs. Some of this belief stems from the habitual conceit of a culture blinded by its own presentism bias, ignorant of the past’s contextual analogues. But much of it in the century and a half since Nietzsche, and especially in the years since Heaney, is an accurate reflection of the conditions we have created and continually reinforce in our present informational ecosystem — a Pavlovian system of constant feedback, in which the easiest and commonest opinions are most readily rewarded, and dissenting voices are most readily punished by the unthinking mob.

E.E. Cummings by Edward Weston (Photograph courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography)
E.E. Cummings by Edward Weston (Photograph courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography)

Few people in the two centuries since Emerson issued his exhortation to “trust thyself” have countered this culturally condoned blunting of individuality more courageously and consistently than E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962) — an artist who never cowered from being his unconventional self because, in the words of his most incisive and competent biographer, he “despised fear, and his life was lived in defiance of all who ruled by it.”

A fortnight after the poet’s fifty-ninth birthday, a small Michigan newspaper published a short, enormous piece by Cummings under the title “A Poet’s Advice to Students,” radiating expansive wisdom on art, life, and the courage of being yourself. It went on to inspire Buckminster Fuller and was later included in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (public library) — that wonderful out-of-print collection which the poet himself described as “a cluster of epigrams, forty-nine essays on various subjects, a poem dispraising dogmata, and several selections from unfinished plays,” and which gave us Cummings on what it really means to be an artist.

Illustration from Enormous Smallness by Matthew Burgess, an illustrated tribute to E.E. Cummings

Addressing those who aspire to be poets — no doubt in that broadest Baldwinian sense of wakeful artists in any medium and courageous seers of human truth — Cummings echoes the poet Laura Riding’s exquisite letters to an eight-year-old girl about being oneself and writes:

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Page from Enormous Smallness by Matthew Burgess

Cummings should know — just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship — the MacArthur of poetry — Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of breaking with tradition and being nobody-but-himself in his art. With an eye to that unassailable creative integrity buoyed by relentless work ethic, he adds:

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

Complement the thoroughly invigorating E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised with a lovely illustrated celebration of Cummings’s creative bravery, then revisit Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren on what it really means to find yourself and Janis Joplin on the courage of being what you find.

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Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

By Maria Popova

“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin observed as he offered his lifeline for the hour of despair. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

When we do save each other, it is always with some version of the mightiest lifeline we humans are capable of weaving: tenderness — the best adaptation we have to our existential inheritance as “the fragile species.”

Like all orientations of the spirit, tenderness is a story we tell ourselves — about each other, about the world, about our place in it and our power in it. Like all narratives, the strength of our tenderness reflects the strength and sensitivity of our storytelling.

That is what the Polish psychologist turned poet and novelist Olga Tokarczuk explores in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Olga Tokarczuk by Harald Krichel

Tokarczuk recounts a moment from her early childhood that deeply moved her: Her mother, inverting Montaigne’s notion that “to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” told her small daughter that she missed her even before she was born — an astonishing gesture of love so total that it bends the arrow of time. Across the abyss of a lifetime, along the arrow of time that eventually shot through her mother’s life, Tokarczuk reflects:

A young woman who was never religious — my mother — gave me something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world’s greatest tender narrator.

Our present bind, Tokarczuk observes, is that the old narratives about who we are and how the world works are untender and clearly broken, but we are yet to find tender new ones to take their place. Observing that in our sensemaking cosmogony “the world is made of words” yet “we lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables,” she laments the tyranny of selfing that has taken their place:

We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.

This optics of the self, the way in which the individual becomes “subjective center of the world,” is the defining feature of this most recent chapter of the history of our species. And yet everything around us reveals its illusory nature, for as the great naturalist John Muir observed, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Art by Arthur Rackham from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. (Available as a print.)

With an eye to her lifelong fascination with “the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors” — the subject of her Nobel-winning compatriot Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Love at First Sight” — Tokarczuk reflects on our creativity not as some separate and abstract faculty but as a fractal of the living universe:

We are all — people, plants, animals, and objects — immersed in a single space, which is ruled by the laws of physics. This common space has its shape, and within it the laws of physics sculpt an infinite number of forms that are incessantly linked to one another. Our cardiovascular system is like the system of a river basin, the structure of a leaf is like a human transport system, the motion of the galaxies is like the whirl of water flowing down our washbasins. Societies develop in a similar way to colonies of bacteria. The micro and macro scale show an endless system of similarities.

Our speech, thinking and creativity are not something abstract, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of transformation.

We sever this dazzling indivisibility whenever we contract into what she calls “the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self” — something magnified in all the compulsive sharing on so-called social media with their basic paradigm of selfing masquerading as connection. Instead, she invites us to look “ex-centrically” and imagine a different story — one tasked with “revealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections.” Amid a world riven by “a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing,” accelerated by techno-capitalist media systems that prey on the greatest vulnerabilities of human nature, Tokarczuk reminds us that literature is also an invaluable tool of empathy — an antidote to the divisiveness so mercilessly exploited by our “social” media:

Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.

Art by Virginia Frances Sterrett, Old French Fairy Tales, 1920
Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

She calls for something beyond empathy, something achingly missing from our harsh culture of dueling gotchas — a literature of tenderness:

Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed.

Echoing Iris Murdoch’s unforgettable definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Tokarczuk adds:

Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.

It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self.”

Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin on storytelling as a force of redemption, then revisit Toni Morrison’s superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the power of language.

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