Keeping Quiet Is Up to You
Excerpt from The Fire of Freedom
Satsang with Papaji
Edited by David Godman
Question: I still have so many concepts, and they are all swirling around inside me. Theories about different states of consciousness, theories about energy and light coming up in certain places, and so on. All these different things.
Papaji:Yes, different books describe these things in different ways. These differing accounts are meant for different kinds of temperaments. What kind of spiritual exercise you pick will depend on your spiritual temperament. Because everyone wants to keep his mind engaged in activities, many different methods are prescribed for all the different types of people. But no one teaches anyone to keep quiet. The teachings that people receive are all about doing things and keeping busy. You can keep the voice busy with chanting or singing, you can keep the body busy with yoga or pranayama, or you can keep the mind busy by making it concentrate on an object of meditation. While you are busy in all these different ways, you are never keeping quiet. Religions and teachers can only thrive as long as they have activities to prescribe and enforce. If you keep quiet, the religions will fail, the teachers will fail, and the teachings will fail.
Just keep quiet. That is the way to find peace and love among people. Keep quiet and the whole structure of religion will collapse.
Religion teaches you fear: ‘If you don’t do this or that you will go to hell.’ All religions are based on fear, fear of the consequences of not doing what the religious teachers tell you you must do. No religion teaches you to keep quiet, to rest quietly in your own Self.
If you can keep quiet for just a few minutes of your whole span of life, perhaps you will win peace. This is the way to approach reality, liberation, nirvana. Keeping quiet is up to you.
People who want to be busy don’t come to satsangs such as these. Since they can’t sit still even for a few minutes, their temperaments will take them somewhere else. They will go to the hills. They will go to the Himalayas, crying out that they must visit this temple or that one. They will spend weeks walking to Badrinath or Kedarnath. These places are twelve thousand feet high, and you need to expend a lot of effort to get there. These people who cannot spend five minutes sitting quietly in their houses will happily suffer physically for weeks on their journey to one of these places. If you ask them, they will say that they are going to these places because their religion prescribes such activities. The real reason is that they can’t keep quiet for five minutes, so they have to do something else instead.
If a teacher just tells you to stay at home and keep quiet, his business will not flourish. He cannot run his business giving out advice such as this, so he has to tell you something else instead. No religion will survive on advice such as this. No teaching will flourish and no books will be published.
Just keep quiet. This is the way. Without this, you will not find peace anywhere. Doing and thinking will not produce peace.