When I went abroad for the first time, I just could not sleep on the very first night. I was wondering why I couldn’t sleep. It was a very spacious room for one person. It had everything you’d ask for. It had air conditioners, state of the art television, dvd players, refrigerators etc. It had everything, but one. A fan. A ceiling fan. That’s when I realised that I can’t sleep without a ceiling fan. I’ve got used to the rhythmic sound of the ceiling fan so much that the silence in that hotel room was disturbing. The silence was even eerie.

It didn’t take me too much time to realise that I can’t sleep in utter silence. Some of us are not used to silence. I was not. I’ve grown up in noisy neighbourhoods. Even at home, you always hear a voice. Silence is not really experienced. Silence is like truth. Too much of it is really uncomfortable. I realised that I needed some noise around me to sleep peacefully. Quite an irony but that was the case. So, I switched on the television and left it on a music channel at reasonable volume for a midnight. I think I was then asleep in about 10 minutes.

Even at home, we’ve got air conditioners in every living space but the fans are a must in the nights. The fans are supposed to run all day and night while air conditioners will be on and off. I’m writing this today because something happened yesterday too. I was putting my daughter to sleep in the night. My wife was busy with some work in the kitchen. While my daughter was falling asleep, I was suddenly thinking ‘why am I feeling like I’m a hotel room?’. The air-conditioner was running and the fan was off. That was it. So it was not so much about the ceiling fan. It’s about the sound of it. The fact that the fan does not leave me alone. It gives my mind some company with its noise.

Going back to the point about utter silence, how often have we got to experience utter silence? There is always some noise or sound or music that always surrounds us wherever we are. Those to some extent keep the mind busy. It helps the mind not to think anything in depth. While we are thinking about what to do in office today, we also hear the blaring horns of the truck, the radio music from the tea shop, the noise that children make etc. As we hear and register them, subconsciously we they keep our mind busy. Think for a moment that there is absolute silence around you. Or you have the remote for this whole world and you hit the mute button. In silence, 24 hours will be like 48 hours. I can’t explain you but I’m sure you can feel it. In silence, you tend to think a lot and then stop thinking altogether. It is the stage where we think a lot that we would normally find it difficult to cross.

Silence can be of many types – silence of the external world, your own outer silence and your inner silence. Contrary to public perception, these are not really mutually exclusive. Some minds can achieve inner silence even while the whole world is being bombed. For the untrained minds, it has to be a gradual process. That’s why you’re told to find a calm place (silence of the external world), and then sit quietly in a posture (your outer silence), and let your mind wander and finally stop thinking (your inner silence).

Since the world does not have a remote control, the idea of muting the world is purely imaginary. Believe me, you can mute the world as well. Because it is your ear that hears all the noise. If you choose not to hear, you don’t hear anything and you’d have muted the world. Forget muting the world, the idea of muting yourself is certainly possible. In Hinduism we have this ‘mouna vratham’ which is a ritual of silence. The less we speak the more we understand the importance of silence and also that of words. We don’t have go looking for moments of silence. But when they present themselves, we don’t have to run away from them, like I did in those abroad nights or yesterday night.

Our problem may be very simple in life; we find that we must keep doing, thinking, going, listening, running, talking or else what shall we be? We love to be filled with noise, images, words, thoughts, memories, fantasies, sensations, people, pleasures and good feelings. When these things are not, we feel bored, alone, scared and quite possibly angry and confused. The brain needs input almost continuously.

Isn’t it the case? We need to keep the mind filled with nonsense. If we don’t, the mind will go looking for the truth. And we don’t want that, do we?