SILENCE : A PATH TO MEDITATION

SILENCE : A PATH TO MEDITATION

Maulana Jalaludin Rumi, one of the greatest mystics of the world, used to experiment

on various ways and methods of meditation. It dismisses the importance of logic in our

life. A logician may be an intelligent person but cannot be meditative. Meditation simply

means ‘mind without question, mind without thought.

Maulana Rumi used to experiment on this with his disciples in a monastery located far

in a desert. Once a few travelers were passing by. Out of curiosity, they stepped into the

monastery to see what was going on. They saw that the disciples were sitting on the

floor and Rumi was answering their questions, which were full of logic. The travelers

watched for some time and ultimately got fed up with the strange questions and strange

answers. They then went their way. After a couple of years on their way back, those

travelers stopped again at the monastery. But what they found puzzled them. Rumi sat

alone, with no disciples. They went to Rumi and asked, ‘What happened? Where are all

those disciples?’.

The maulana laughed. He said, ‘this is my whole work and this is what I wanted. I

crushed all their questions. A volley of questions makes a man argumentative, but not

meditative. In order to be meditative, one needs to have a vacuum happen, they had no

questions left. So I told them to go back and do the same to others, crush the questions

of the people. Tell people that logic have no place in the path of meditation. Yes, logic

provides a man razor sharp intelligence but snatches away his innocence. It is like

being in the battlefield: two persons are looking to defeat the other through a volley of

questions and logic and nothing else. When all questions are removed, there is silence

– this is the stage of meditation. Meditation means going beyond the mind. Only in uter

silence and great serenity does one realize the truth. This is the real work of a master.

-DR. NAVRAJ SINGH SANDHU, P.A.H.S.1, www.navraj@gmail.com