a little crisis will do you good.

not really. i think it takes more than a crisis to make us listen. revelation is always waiting by the wings to capture your consciousness. whatever punches it throws at you, receive it and ask for the best wake up blow.

i think it is more about the listening that marks revelation as revelation and not just another voice that creeps into you. The key focus is also never about the voice, it's about the discernment. But let's just focus on the act of listening.

listening takes more than patience and understanding. listening requires you to disengage yourself from a collective whole into parasites of different voices, leeching on them to discern and differentiate every nuances of every single voice. Hear beyond the audible voice that you hear a person speak (and/or yourself). I always hear a second voice (i'm still learning to understand the third voice) that is the Other thought behind the sentence. It is to delve deep into and wide about the subject and object; The inaudible and unspoken. But sometimes these voices blend into each other. Nevertheless, there is always a gap between them. There is where I locate the third voice, a voice of possibility some may like to suggest. But I shall not go further into that. I think it is important or (manipulative) to be able to listen deeper into your speech, i.e. listen to yourself externally and internally. And when you do, it's not about "listening to your heart" but to find the departures, even the most subtle ones. The shocking thing is that you do not know which one to believe. That is when discernment takes over and informs you what voice to believe. It is not always the inward that is true. What is spoken might have come from somewhere you never expect. You may think it's easy but the distinction between these two voices is almost impossible if you are never critical of yourself.

i love and hate to spend time listening to myself in those different instances. Listening to myself alone is pretty straightforward, (if you ignore the third voice) but it is during actual speech and inner evaluation/motivation/contemplation/etc that separation becomes a tedious process. Frankly, not many of us do so. We do not listen often enough. I do not listen enough, especially to people around. We listen to ourselves more but we tend to focus on only a voice. My charge here really is to listen as deep and wide as possible and to not let your mind to be idle. Voices dwell in places you do not want and they take over when we become lazy. There are no essential voices, in that voices are not concerned about some holistic well-being of the person but they are only interested in their own projection. They are not distinct but they follow stages as well. The development of particular voices has to be mapped out and discovered early if possible. Voices, even the silent ones, can be monsters or angels. It is really relative to the listener/non-listener.

i hope that i learn to listen better and to be firm in the voices that I agree with. Do not trivalise such a process. Because, like I said, voices are neutral because until agreed upon, we do not really know who or what they are distinctively (maybe they can never be distinct). They only take their shapes as they grow.
but now...the truth is, can anyone truly locate all our voices and make a fool of them?

Sometimes, crisis helps because it breaks the normality of the familiar voice we listen to ever so often. Crisis shouts out to you to listen to something or someone else. Of course, it is does not always take a crisis to reveal, but the leap of revelation happens at the point when we listen differently, across all possible channels, until one particular voice feedbacks into your consciousness. Listen well. before you miss it.

i wish i could listen better.
i wish i knew how to listen to silences better.
but really, some voices cannot even be understood or defined.
but really, the discourse of silence (and blindness) is for another day after I finally grasp Levinas.
take these words as avenues for discussion.

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after mid-October, the other blogs and pseudonyms will begin to voice out their perspectives, as an experiment to listen to my disparate voices.