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By remaining silent or by speaking less, not only do we learn control over what we speak, we also conserve our life energy. Silence saves us from unnecessary disputes and also from the problems that get created after disputes. On the other hand, those who cannot remain quiet habitually and keep talking to exhibit their intelligence, are often more likely to get into difficulties. It is possible to express ourselves even by remaining silent. Though there is no language in silence it can still cast a great influence upon others.

Not talking is not silence. Often people confuse silence with discontinuation of talking. But if thoughts are creating a chaos in mind, or if tides of attachment or jealousy towards another person are waxing and waning inside the mind, then this cannot be called silence. Restraint of speech is only external silence whereas silence of mind is the inner and the true silence. The true and complete silence is when both mind and voice are completely silent.

Silence helps in restraining our senses. The mental energy that gets expended while talking gets conserved by silence. It is said that a person who can control his tongue saves himself from a lot of sufferings. We can learn and realize deep, intricate aspects of life only by remaining silent. From time immemorial paeans extolling virtues of silence have been sung. The great rishis and spiritual masters adopted silence as an integral part of their lives during their penance and carried out intense spiritual practices. By remaining silent they could stay away from worldly, materialistic affairs and attain the inner peace.

We can get acquainted and then truly understand ourselves only by remaining silent. Silence gives us an opportunity to look at and analyze our activities, actions and behaviours minutely. Introspection and analysis of our inner selves is possible only by remaining silent. Through this alone can we discover the complexities of our mind and weed out its distortions. As more and more perfection gets attained in the practice of silence, the hidden capabilities of a person begin to emerge.

Silence is a golden pathway of spirituality which leads to conservation of inner energy and development of personality. Silence takes a person to immeasurable depths of sadhana and brings serenity and equipoise in his personality. Just like in the great depths of oceans there is stillness and serenity and no movement, similarly as the practice of silence nears perfection the inner stillness increases within a person and in this state he succeeds in achieving whatever he wishes for.

When a person speaks a lot and without relevance, he not only wastes his energy, his mind also becomes unsteady. Just like waves in a river keep rising and falling, thoughts keep wavering from one useless fantasy to another in the mind of a talkative person, and such a person is never successful in any worthy task. So it is necessary to develop timely awareness of this habit and save ourselves from speaking unnecessarily so that a comprehensive conservation of inner energy is possible.

This does not mean we must be silent always. Whenever necessary we must speak, but express our thoughts in pithy and meaningful sentences. We must not get involved in unnecessary arguments. A famous saint Maluk Das has said, “No result comes out of meaningless arguments. Disputes generate anger. Both fighting sides compete with each other to prove them better, more truthful and more intelligent than others.” When one side’s argument counters the opinion of the other side, anger brews. There is only one way to subdue this anger; we should stop trying to prove ourselves as wiser than our opponent. On the contrary we should behave as if we do not know anything. The opposite side would not continue arguing for too long then and would become quiet on its own after a while. There is a wise saying – the person who knows when to keep quiet can defeat hundreds.

We normally disregard our inner mind and get involved in external activities. Our attention is always in finding others’ faults which distracts us from our goal. Our mind does not get silent and focused and we lose sight of success. Once Guru Atmanand taught a lesson to his four disciples. After the lesson he told his disciples, “Study the lesson carefully. Make sure that none of you speaks a word while studying. I will discuss about this lesson with you after sometime.”

Guru Atmanand left and all the four disciples sat separately and began to study the lesson. Suddenly it grew dark and overcast and rains seemed imminent. A disciple spoke out, “Looks like it is going to rain heavily.” On hearing this second disciple said to the first, “You should not have spoken.” The third disciple said, “You two have broken the discipline, Guru ji is going to punish you now.” Only the fourth disciple kept quiet and continued studying.

After sometime, Guru came back. Seeing him the first disciple pointed to the second disciple and said, “Guru ji, he did not stay quiet and talked.” The second replied, “But you did not remain quiet as well.” Third disciple also jumped in and said, “Guru ji, both of them spoke and broke the discipline.” This angered the first two and they spoke sharply, “You also did not remain quiet.” The fourth one still remained quiet.

Looking at them Guru said, “Only this fourth disciple has truly followed my instructions. In trying to point out mistakes of the others, you all three made the same mistake. This is what people normally do. They look for others’ mistakes and in pointing them out, they commit the same mistake themselves. They do not even realize and begin to walk the wrong path themselves.” All three disciples realized their mistake and felt sorry for the same. They vowed never to make the same mistake again.

Yug Rishi Pandit Shriram Sharma Acharya has laid out four disciplines of sadhana – (i) worship, (ii) abstinence, (iii) conservation and accumulation of prana and (iv) silence. Extolling the virtue of silence Acharayaji has said that by learning silence not only the above disciplines can be easily perfected, but additional activities like self-study, self- control, service to others etc can be carried out easily as well. By staying silent we not only conserve our energy, we also get the required concentration to properly utilize this energy. So silence is an absolutely essential spiritual practice. With attainment of perfection in silence, all other difficult spiritual practices can be perfected too.

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