Talking

 

 

It is better to be silent, says Hakim Sanai, because at least in silence you will not be lying to anybody. And you will not be lying to yourself either. In silence at least you will be ignorant; you will not pretend knowledge.

 

If a person can remain silent for a few hours every day he will become aware of his whole phoniness, because he will see his real face again and again. If you continuously talk and continuously relate with people you forget your original face, because you have to wear masks continuously. For twenty-four hours you are talking, using words. And when you continuously use words, slowly slowly you start believing in those words, in the sound of those words.

 

Words have a hypnotic power. If you use a certain word again and again, it hypnotizes you. If you use the word 'god' again and again, slowly slowly you start thinking that you know what you mean, that you know what God is. It is very dangerous to repeat words.

 

But people go on talking. They don't give any gap in which they can simply be silent and be. If you are silent for at least one hour every day, you will be aware continuously that your talk is nonsense. And then ninety-nine percent of your talk will start disappearing. What is the point of talking nonsense?

 

But why do people talk then? They talk just to hide themselves behind the noise. Whenever you are nervous you start talking.

 

Now it is a known fact: if people are forced to live in solitude, after three weeks they start talking to themselves. They cannot bear silence, it becomes intolerable, so they start talking to themselves. They have to talk; words somehow keep them clinging to their personality. Once words disappear, they start falling into the impersonal. And they are very much afraid of the impersonal.

 

The impersonal is your reality. And you are afraid of the reality and you are clinging to the illusions that words create.

 

-Osho, "Unio Mystica, Vol 1, #3"