In this episode of “5 Minutes”, Dr. Svoboda talks about how taking time out of our day-to-day lives to be silent can benefit us.

I would like to consider mauna, or silence, in the context of Pratyahara. The five senses — of course, when we think of the sense organs we think of them mainly as taking in information from the outside, but in India we say there are actually ten senses: five for taking in from the outside and five for putting out to the outside, and one of those senses is the sense that is often called Vak, and that’s the ability to speak.

In Buddhist thought in particular the karmas, actions, are often divided into three groups: the actions or the karmas involving thought, word, and deed. So word often takes a place in between thought and deed, and therefore, in the context of human civilisation, speech is in some ways more significant than other actions that the organism can perform, because it is not only something that can impel other people to action or not to action, but it acts as a sort of — it’s sort of on the threshold between action and thought, in the same way that the voice apparatus is in between the head and body.

So silence has for a long, long time in India been regarded as something worth cultivating. My mentor Vimalananda was always fond of saying “Maunam Sarvartha Sadhanam”, meaning “silence will assist you to achieve any goal”. Here we are of course talking about relative silence. Someone who has become completely silent, and who has gained the ability to take his or her energy and desire to express externally and brought it completely inside and made it quiescent, becomes a muni, the absolute paragon of silence. This is the one end of the spectrum, and the other end of the spectrum is the person who has no concept of silence whatsoever and simply blabs about everything — whatever comes in elicits a response, and out it comes.

So possibly for many people the first stage in silence is not to stop talking, it’s to stop talking all the time — to think at least for a few seconds before you open your mouth and say something, because otherwise you are simply reacting instead of actively acting. But there is a lot to be said for at least taking the opportunity on occasion to not talk for some period of time. Preferably you do this when you don’t have to be going out into the world and doing complicated body language and maybe writing notes and so on, but if you are in a place where you are not going to disturb too many people, it is useful to not use your vocal apparatus — which is the way we have been using for millennia to communicate — but rather to, only when necessary, employ body language, scribble a very small note, restraining yourself from this pressure to express whatever is inside you, which is of course becoming more and more dramatic as we expose ourselves to social media, in which we have to be expressing ourselves all the time, with words or with photos or with a combination of the two.

Just discouraging yourself sometimes, just being silent from the perspective of all the ways in which we could communicate, is also a very valuable thing to do — taking a break from all of the interactive possibilities that we have nowadays.

So taking some time, preferably on a Saturday, even half a day, even a couple of hours, where you are not speaking, where you are actively not encouraging your internal mechanism to come up with things that you could say, is a good way to get a better perspective on exactly who you are, how you are interacting with the environment, and how you might do so more effectively.