The Virtues of Silence

Sometimes we keep our silence to be careful not to hurt others. We want to concentrate on ourselves, but also impact others with our words. There is often some fear involved in speaking up. We consider whether there is a place for these words. We give weight to every word, because we understand how much power they have to influence others.

When we talk, we immediately try to calculate how our words will sound to the other person, and how we'll appear in their eyes. Will what I say make them respect me or at least not despise me? This is how we begin to consider external things and not the truth. We start bolstering our image with beautiful words, trying to impress the other person.

It is our human instinct that kicks in as soon as something comes out of our mouth, to attach the ego to it.

Here is a way to test yourself: try saying what you said to yourself inside, but this time say it out loud, in front of people. Even repeating the exact same words. Look how the words that come out immediately lose the natural expression they had when they were said inside. They become artificial and full of calculations - how to maintain my status, and protect my pride from being hurt. It is our human instinct that kicks in as soon as something comes out of our mouth, to attach the ego to it.

So as long as we talk to ourselves inside in a different way than when we speak to others, we're actually lying to ourselves and lying to others. Lying to others is sort of like lying to the universe, and this is precisely where we can work on improving ourselves. But since we have no way of actually speaking directly to the universe, our only opportunity for practicing this is when speaking to others.

Until we actually begin to care for the person we're talking to as we do for ourselves, we have no possibility of speaking in a pure way. And once we reach a stage where we truly care for the other, we no longer need external speech. When two people have such a strong and pure connection, words are no longer necessary.

This powerful bond is achieved through silence. But it's not a silent silence, because we're actually talking and clarifying with ourselves, and building a space inside us where we begin to feel our contact with our self, with society, and the whole universe. We journey inside and discover that there is someone to talk to, our self! A whole world opens up to us - many feelings, thoughts, and inquiries that we would not have reached before because we were constantly busy with the output, with the output of speech. So we're talking about a very rich silence that's good for our development, and not shutting down our systems in a way that stops our development.

Once we learn how to get rid of the clutter inside that every human is exposed to, we'll begin developing new thoughts and desires. We'll have the power to shape and determine precisely what we want to engage in.

To clear an inner space inside us we have to clear every thought from our head. Not even think about the clock on the wall, not even about the ceiling. To not try to identify or discover anything. First of all, enter the space of thoughts, the space of inner speech, and make it really clean. Delete everything that's inside. Not letting any thought come into our head without our permission requires serious effort.

This is how we begin to see that there is nothing of ourselves inside us, and how all our thoughts come from the environment we exist in. No matter where we are, we're constantly under the influence of the speech in the air, and we're constantly getting this "feed" from the atmosphere. Like an antenna, it picks up everything that wanders around the world.

But when we start learning to control our thoughts, we're also able to discover what's worth thinking about. Then we won't let thoughts and desires pop up in us randomly, but we'll rather determine what it is most beneficial for us right now. We'll become far more conscious of what we let into our consciousness, and what we want to keep out. Once we learn how to get rid of the clutter inside that every human is exposed to, we'll begin developing new thoughts and desires. We'll have the power to shape and determine precisely what we want to engage in.

That's the key thing about silence: protecting our thoughts. Because external silence, just not opening your mouth, is not a problem. Silence is really about silencing the desires, the intentions, and the thoughts that we don't want to have inside us. This is how we make way for creating new thoughts. And ultimately, these will be better thoughts for our accelerating our development.