How do I retain this beautiful silence? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Question: While writing the questions about our lives, we were silent and it feels very peaceful right now. But how to maintain this silence? How to make sure that this silence holds, that it is not momentary?
Speaker: It is apparent that this silence is conducive to understanding. It is actually simple , isn’t it? You know what brings about, what you call as ‘environment of understanding’? Have you all tried to understand what brings this about? It is very simple and direct. Is it an external threat, a coercion, a compulsion? Is it some kind of gloominess which makes you fall silent? Is it an expectation or is it out of respect that you have fallen silent? None of that!
It is so recent, so close to you that you must find out, it is available to be found out. If you investigate you will find out that it is nothing but that you are writing questions that are relevant to YOU and each single individual is doing that. The moment you go inwards, there is a beautiful silence that nothing else can bring about. You experienced that silence. You are experiencing it right now. It did not come about because of the persuasion or influence of an external agency. The external agency might have just helped initiate it but ultimately it was because each single one of you was going inwards and writing questions that are pertinent to your life. That is a great meditation.
If you look carefully, nobody else is very much relevant in this. All disturbance ceases to affect you. Nothing matters but your own mind and your own awareness. That moment this mind that is habituated to travelling outwards starts looking within. You are using the same faculties right now that you use in at other times in the day. You are using your eyes, you are using your ears, you are using your limbs and your mind, all of that is being used. But there is one central difference. In the last fifteen minutes this mind that otherwise remains preoccupied with everything external, all objects outside, ‘What’s happening there?’, ‘Who is talking to whom?’, ‘What is there in the newspapers?’, ‘What is up for gossip?’, ‘What is there on the notice board?’, ‘What’s there on Facebook and email?’, this same mind that is occupied with all that just went inwards and asked itself, ‘What is it that fills me up?’, ‘What is it that keeps me occupied?’ and you wrote those things down. Didn’t you? That is what you did. Right?
