Divine listening.
Divine listening.
I love you. Can you hear me?
Jul 29, 2026
The Itness of Divine Listening
The Warrior Series — The Tumbleweed Diaries July 29, 2026
I had dinner with old friends last night — the kind of table you haven’t sat at in a while, And somewhere between the salad and my enchilada. I found myself doing what I always do. Trying to interpret my own story. Trying to understand, again, what it actually means to listen.
So let me go deeper. Let me sculpt this the way it deserves to be sculpted, and take you with me — not as a lesson, but as a journey. Because I don’t believe most of us are broken listeners by choice. I believe we were never shown the stages. And you cannot climb a mountain you didn’t know was there.
There are four ways a human being can listen. Almost all of us live in the first two without ever knowing it. Very few of us ever taste the third. And the fourth is not something you achieve. It’s something that happens to you, once you finally get out of the way.
The first listening — egoic
This is where I start, because this is where I still mostly live, if I’m honest with you the way I want you to be honest with yourself.
In this first stage, I see a person. A place. A thing. A sexy relationship, or a fear wearing a familiar face. And before you’ve said a single word, I already have a story queued up — my ego’s storyteller, working the room, pulling its material from yesterday and tomorrow, because it can never quite stand to be in today. It’s a win-or-lose machine. Transactional before the transaction has even begun.
In this stage, your lips are moving, but I’m not hearing you. I’m hearing my own agenda, dressed up as attention. I don’t even give you room to finish — I interrupt, because there is only one story I’ve come here to hear, and it’s the one about me. My needs. My concerns. My version.
I don’t say this to shame you, or myself. I say it because if you’re brutally honest, you’ll find you rarely leave this room. Most of us don’t. It’s the water we swim in, and like all water we’ve swum in long enough, we’ve stopped noticing we’re wet.
The second listening — transactional
Then there’s a second kind, one degree more sophisticated but no less self-serving. I call it transactional listening — hearing by accounting.
Here, I’m listening to you, but I’m invested in me. If what you’re saying doesn’t serve me somehow, I’ll interrupt, redirect, quietly steer the conversation back toward my own benefit. I’m listening for what increases my happiness, my sexual satisfaction, my financial footing, my emotional safety — and I do it by interrupting you, again and again, until you’re saying what I came here to hear.
I’ll only listen to a person who confirms what I already believe about myself. I’ll only listen to an institution that speaks my institutional happiness. I’ll try to listen to a principle — though principles, as we know, don’t bend — and I’ll keep interrupting anyway, hoping enough pressure will bend it toward my benefit.
I already carry a story about what honesty is. And the moment I try to actually get honest, I interrupt that honesty with what I want it to be instead. The same happens with fear. The same happens in the bedroom — I’ll interrupt the person I’m with so I can have the kind of intimacy I want, on my terms, on my timing. I’ll do this for you if you do that for me. That’s the whole architecture of transactional listening.
Between these first two stages, there is almost no room left for the other person. The egoic listener doesn’t hear you because he’s too busy hearing himself. The transactional listener hears you only long enough to calculate his return.
The third listening — relational
Then there is a third kind. Relational listening. This is the listening relationships either grow inside of, or quietly die without.
This one takes real skill. Most people believe they already listen this way — I’d ask you to test that belief gently, because if you’re truly hearing what I’m writing here, you may find yourself needing to come back and read it again. Not because the words are complicated, but because you weren’t fully listening the first time. You were listening to your own story about it. That’s not a failing. That’s just how deep the first two stages run in all of us.
Relational listening is where you finally set down the transaction. Where you become present enough to just hear — no tomorrow, no yesterday, nothing to win, nothing to lose. Just sitting inside someone else’s truth without needing it to become anything.
In this space, you will hear a person’s past. Their dreams. Their fears, their anxieties, their shame, their guilt, their wounds, their healing, their tears, their joy — all of it, with a clarity you didn’t know was available to you. And in hearing them this clearly, you will often hear your own fears and your own shame rising up to meet theirs. Your own wounds, answering.
This is the gift hidden inside relational listening. If you can share what you’re hearing — honestly, without weaponizing it — you can build something rare. And if the person across from you can meet that same quality of quiet, that same freedom from agenda, you will build a love that most people spend their whole lives reaching for and never quite touching.
The fourth listening — divine
And then there is a fourth kind. The rarest. I call it divine listening.
This is where everything you’ve learned from the first three stages finally becomes useful — the egoic hunger, the transactional bargaining, the deep relational presence — all of it becomes the ground you stand on to reach something bigger. I’d guess maybe one in ten people ever touch this level, and even then, only for moments at a time.
Divine listening has no agenda left in it at all. You don’t interrupt, because there’s nothing left you need from the exchange. You’re not trading your attention for anything — not comfort, not being heard in return, not even understanding. This is listening so unconditional that you don’t even need to speak about what you hear. You simply surrender it — to your higher power, to the moment itself, to whatever is larger than the person across from you, larger than the fear in the room, larger than the sex, the institution, the principle, the argument.
The strange grace of this stage is what it does to your longing. Divine listening has none. There’s nothing left to achieve through it. It doesn’t reach back for yesterday or forward for tomorrow. It’s complete the instant it happens. You sit there, quiet, knowing you’ve already heard everything you needed to hear, everything you’re going to hear, and everything you ever wanted to hear — and you understand, finally, that the hearing itself was never any of your business to keep.
That is the itness. That is divine listening.
I don’t offer these four stages so you can measure yourself against them and come up short. Almost none of us live past the first two — I still catch myself there most days. I offer them so you can recognize the room you’re standing in the next time someone’s lips are moving and you realize you’re not hearing them at all. That recognition, gentle and without judgment, is the whole doorway. You don’t force your way into relational or divine listening. You just notice you weren’t there, and the noticing itself is the first true listening you’ve done all day.
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