listening versus hearing: Comparing your way to death — "it turned out hearing the speaker…"
it turned out hearing the speaker means like all of a sudden hearing how fucking similar the way he felt and the way I felt were, Out There, at the Bottom, before we each Came In.
Context
The scene's explicit account of the skill recovery actually teaches, and the trap that kills people who never learn it. Comparing is the addict's self-flattering defense — cataloguing the ways you're not as bad as the speaker ("I never bled from the rectum") to license staying Out There a while longer — and it's a form of not-hearing that keeps you fatally separate. Hearing is the surrender of that difference: recognizing that the feeling at the Bottom was identical, whatever the details. Identification is thus a discipline of the ears, and the whole program depends on a newcomer learning to hear sameness where his self-preservation insists on difference. (The failure-to-connect framing as such is communication-solipsism's — cross-ref.)