Swami Premananda once spoke of a great mahatma who, as a school student, was once accused of stealing fifty rupees. When the teacher questioned the class, each student denied the act, and suspicion fell upon the boy sitting nearby, this future mahatma.

“Did you steal?” the teacher asked.

“No,” replied the young student.

The question was repeated. The teacher, convinced of his guilt, began to beat him so that he might confess. Each time he was asked, the boy remained silent. He endured a severe beating yet did not protest or repeat his denial. Later, the truth came out. The boy was innocent; someone else had committed the mischief.

The teacher, filled with regret, asked him, “You said no once when I asked you. Why did you remain silent after that? Why did you not protest while you were being beaten? Why did you not keep saying no?”

The boy replied, “My mother had taught me to answer only once and then leave everything to fate. She told me to keep my mouth shut and keep chanting the name of God. That is exactly what I did. While you were beating me, I was enduring and chanting the Naam. There was no problem at all.”

Premananda Swami said, “This is a big lesson. I say this not just to discourse, but I speak from personal and direct experience. When you adopt this method of keeping quiet and chanting the Naam, you will notice things going wrong all around. But you continue chanting. You stay quiet. The more you chant Naam, the more pain and anguish will arise, and it will start burning you from within. But you go on chanting. The heat of the pain will grow intolerable and you might feel like giving up, but this is the test. Only a little more to go, don’t worry, go on chanting, go on chanting. Let it burn, you go on chanting. If you are a hero and if you don’t give up, you will triumph. The heat and anguish will last until all your defects are burnt down with Naam. Once all of it is turned to ashes, you will no more feel any anguish.”
This instruction of Swamiji is indeed very deep. It defines mauna.

The moment one steps into mauna/ silence, the outer noise drops, and what was already running inside becomes audible. It feels as if silence has created thoughts, but in truth it has only exposed them. It’s like entering a quiet room where a ceiling fan suddenly becomes loud, the mind begins to hum. Then the commentary starts, ‘I am doing mauna’, ‘I am thinking of Guru’, ‘I will remain silent while others speak’. This inner narration is the real disturbance, not the absence of speech.

The key difficulty is that this commentary feeds on intention. The more you define mauna with reasons, the more the mind gets material to speak about. If you say ‘I am doing mauna to control my mind’, the mind immediately begins to measure, judge, and comment. If you say ‘I must remain silent’, it creates a watcher who keeps reporting. In this way, the very purpose of mauna is broken from within.

To understand this clearly, take a simple illustration. Imagine a still lake at dawn. The surface is naturally calm. Now suppose you stand at the edge and keep throwing small pebbles into it. Each pebble creates ripples. Your intentions, your inner explanations, even your spiritual justifications are like those pebbles. The lake does not need to be calmed. It needs you to stop disturbing it. Silence is already the nature. The disturbance is the commentary.

There is also a deeper parallel within us.

Just as no thought can arise without the subtle sense of aham – ‘I am’, no speech, whether spoken or mental, can arise without an underlying silence. That silence is not something you create. It is the base, the adhara.

The aham, the I-sense, feels like an undercurrent beneath all thoughts. In the same way, silence is the undercurrent beneath all speech. Nisshabda! Words rise from it and fall back into it. Mental talk is no different from spoken words in this regard.

Ramana Maharshi points to this when he asks you to attend not to the many thoughts, but to the source, the ‘I’ itself. When attention rests there, the I-thought begins to lose its grip and sinks back into a deeper stillness. You are not forcibly stopping thoughts. You are withdrawing attention from their branches and allowing them to return to their root.

Mauna works in exactly the same way when it is understood rightly. The question is not how to do mauna, but why you enter it. If the why is filled with many reasons, the mind keeps speaking. But if the why becomes single, pure, and living, there is success.

When you enter mauna/ silence only to remain with Naam, to hear nothing within except that sacred current, then the mind is given one दिशा. There is absorption.

Consider another illustration. A child is restless in a room full of toys, running from one object to another. If you try to stop the child forcefully, the restlessness increases. But if you place in front of the child something deeply engaging, a single प्रिय वस्तु, the running stops on its own. Attention gathers, and with it, stillness comes naturally. In the same way, when the mind is gently anchored in mantra or Naam, the urge to speak, inside or outside, begins to recede.

Then mauna is no longer an imposed discipline. It becomes a return. The speech-wave, like the I-thought, is drawn back into its origin. Words subside into silence, not because they are suppressed, but because they have found their source again. What remains is not an effortful quiet, but a living, जागृत शांति, where even if thoughts arise faintly, they no longer carry you away.

~ Raj Supe (Kinkar Vishwashreyananda)
Editor, The Mother