Discipline

It has often occurred to me that a seeker of truth has to be silent and disciplined ! I know the wonderful efficiency of truth, silence and discipline. I visited a Trappist Monastery in Kashmir. A beautiful place it was. Most of the inmates of that place were under a vow of silence. I enquired with the care taken about the motive for it. He said the motive was quite apparent, “We are frail human beings and often we don’t know what we say. If we want to listen to the still small voice within which is always whispering to us, we have to be silent, it will not be heard if we always speak”. I then understood this precious lesson. I now know the secret of discipline. Experience has taught me that silence is part of spiritual discipline and truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth wittingly or unwittingly is a natural weakness and silence is necessary to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless is his speech, he will measure every word. There is no chairman in a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. This also is a sign of indiscipline. And whenever permission is given, the speaker generally excceds the time limit and keeps on asking for more time and keeps talking without consideration. This shows how undisciplined the man must have been once. All this talking is hardly of any use, when one comes to think of it, one can not but notice that almost half the misery in this world would disappear, if we knew the virtues of silence and discipline. Before modern civilisation came upon us, at least six to eight hours out of twenty-four hours were reserved for meditation. Modern civilisation has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise. What a great thing it would be, if in our busy lives we could retire ourselves each day, at least a couple of hours and prepare our mind to listen to the inner voice. This practise would indeed bring about a positive change in