When we realise the futility of words, then we should know that our life is going deeper and we have started living. We live in words from morning till night. In this run of searching for purpose and purposefulness, we lose all purpose. It goes to such an extent that we don’t even have a sound sleep. Even at night we are bothered by words. Many people speak while sleeping. There does not seem to be a rest from words. Words are the root cause of worries. You can’t have a worry without words. Your friendship is based on words.
Someone says, “Oh, you are so wonderful, you are beautiful, you are so kind-hearted; I have never seen a person like you in my life. I have been looking for a person like you all my life.” You fall in love suddenly. And when someone hurls some abuses on us, we are overshadowed. But those are just words. Life is very shallow if we base it on words. Anything that is very profound in life, deep or meaningful, cannot be expressed in words. The experience of love, or true gratitude, cannot be expressed in words. Real beauty, true friendship has no words. Have we ever sat, just in silence, with somebody whom we love? Do you remember having driven silently with somebody in the car, just looking at the beauty, the sunset, the hills, the ocean? No, we open our mouths. We start chatting and we destroy all the beauty that is there. We go on a picnic and see a beautiful spot and we keep talking. You drive in a car and see how many conversations go on in the car. There are four people and two conversations are going on. Sometimes all four people are talking. Nobody understands each other. We fill our minds with noise. The greater the agitation inside, the harder the music outside because then it feels a little soothing. The finer the level of consciousness, the more stress-free the consciousness, the more sensitive you are to the sound.
Your presence speaks what you are. A great philosopher may give discourses on love, but you would not feel that. If you are just there, being in love, it catches on to everyone. Sit within yourself, meditate, keep some silence and experience that you are love. You are made up of a substance called love. Transcend the words, then love appears. Be simple, innocent, and all gets done through that power of love. The same thing with beauty. When you see beauty, you worship, surrender to it. If we don’t surrender to the beauty, we want to possess it. Whatever we surrender to, we don’t want to possess it. We can’t possess it. God is conceived as beauty, the most beautiful. When you worship beauty, the sense of possession will simply vanish. We can communicate in silence very well. We can communicate through our hearts very well. With the silence inside, you can hear the birds and the timing between their singings. It is so perfect, so melodious. It is such a wonderful phenomenon in creation! A bird sings in rhythm without any drums or any beats. We don’t have that much patience, that much time to enjoy the song of a bird. Go a little deeper and there is a music going on very much within your own body.
The divine music is happening in our own bodies. We are not aware of it. There is so much beauty we are missing in our lives if we have not lived in that area of silence within us. Everyday keep everything aside and stand and just look at the sky for ten minutes. Look at the stars. Look at the roses. Don’t say, “This rose is beautiful; this one is big and that rose is bigger.” It is there, that is it! It is beautiful. There is so much to life! The day we realise words are incompetent, we have gained some depth in life. We are going deeper into the existence.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is a humanitarian leader, spiritual teacher and an ambassador of peace
