Silence The cold ground of wisdom

The maestro prescribed me two hours.

When he said that, I imagined silence was a doorway to something extraordinary.

I thought that by entering it, I would discover hidden messages, spiritual presences, altered states of consciousness, perhaps some form of power. Deep down, I transformed silence into fantasy. And that alone shows how far I still was from understanding what it truly was.

One day, my maestro told me something very simple:

“Two hours of silence daily. Every day.”

That was all.

My first reaction was almost insolent in my mind:

I didn’t obey.

It took me three years to begin practicing what he had suggested.

During that time, the idea of silence haunted me. And, curiously, I wasn’t thinking about silence itself. I was thinking about what it could give me.

Today I see with clarity: until then, my relationship with silence was still utilitarian. I wanted results. I wanted reward. I wanted something extraordinary. I still didn’t understand that silence’s first gift is not power.

It is reality.

Silence anchors us to reality

I would say that silence not only helps us return to the present.

It helps us, above all, to return to reality.

There is a very deep relationship between fantasy and future. The mind usually constructs the future from fantasies—some positive, others negative. And that is, often, a way of escaping reality.

If my current reality is poverty, for example, I can fantasize a future where I will become a millionaire and, thus, avoid looking honestly at what is happening now. Or, on the side of fear, I can fantasize an even worse future and sink into the image of total misery.

Both things are fantasy.

When I enter silence, I am brought back to reality.

This reality can hurt.

In fact, it almost always does hurt.

But when the mind finally sees it, it has already taken the first step on the path to healing.

That is why silence is not light at the beginning. It doesn’t come to entertain. It doesn’t come to anesthetize. It doesn’t come to make us appear spiritual.

Silence comes to show.

What the mind does to escape

When I finally began to practice, I discovered very quickly that the hardest part was not staying without speaking.

It was staying without escaping.

The first time I tried, I didn’t last fifteen minutes. I already wanted to turn on music, hear something, call someone, distract myself. Anything seemed better than remaining there.

It is difficult. It is sad. It is hard to listen to yourself.

To listen to what the heart really has to say, outside of the fantasies the mind creates. To listen to your own sadness. To listen to your own inner truth. To listen to your own voice.

It’s curious: many people say they can’t meditate because the mind won’t stop. But the deeper problem is sometimes not that. Sometimes the mind won’t stop precisely because it fears what silence can reveal.

Because, in silence, we already have nowhere to hide.

Saturn, not Venus

Silence is not Venus.

It is not immediate pleasure. It is not perfume. It is not sweetness.

Silence is Saturn.

It is discipline. It is structure. It is serene confrontation with what is. It is that austere teacher who is not trying to please us, but to mature us.

That is why I say silence is cold ground, not a dessert.

It was not made to seduce us. It was made to order us.

And that ordering changes life.

When a person begins to build a quieter life, they also become more strategic. They begin to make decisions with more wisdom. They stabilize their emotions better. They stop disturbing themselves so easily. They learn to distinguish between impulse and direction.

This doesn’t happen because silence gives magical ready-made answers.
It happens because it keeps cleaning the noise that prevented us from seeing.

The spiritual seeker’s fantasy

There is a common fantasy among spiritual seekers: that evolution means living in beautiful states all the time.

Constant peace. Luminous intuitions. Signs. Refined energy. Beautiful, elevated things, almost perfumed.

But much of real growth happens when we sit before what we avoid feeling.

Silence is not spiritual decoration.
It is sober medicine.

And, like all true medicine, it doesn’t always taste sweet.

At first it may seem dry. Hard. Even thankless. But that is depth.

Silence goes removing layer by layer of the character we built to survive. Little by little, what was fantasy loses its power.

What is left?

What is.

And that is a blessing, even when it hurts.

The process

I didn’t arrive at this place all at once.

Much less through heroism.

I tried several times, in different ways. I failed. I started again. I interrupted. I returned.

Today I spend most of my day in silence. I live alone. I rarely turn on the television. Though I love music, I spend more than six hours a day without any sound, without any voice, not even my own.

But that didn’t happen overnight.

It was a process.

And it is important to say that because many people are enchanted by the ripe fruit and forget about the time of rooting. They want an hour of silence a day without having endured even ten minutes.

So, if I had to suggest a true doorway to you, it would be this one:

start with ten minutes.

It will not be light.
It will not be excessively easy.
But it will not be impossible either.

Ten minutes of real silence.

• No music.
• No cell phone.
• No stimulus.
• No conversation.
• No medicines.
• No rituals.
• No escape.

Just you, your breath, your body and reality.

After twenty-one days, add one minute per week.

In one year, you will have built the habit of remaining one hour a day in absolute silence.

And that, for me, is one of the keys to wisdom.

What silence returns

Silence returns axis.

And, more than that, it returns relationship with the real.

Because the person who cannot bear silence usually also cannot bear reality without makeup. They always need a fantasy, a distraction, an expectation, a background noise that keeps them from what they feel and what they see.

But when silence becomes a habit, something begins to change.

And a stable person doesn’t just help themselves.
They also help their brothers and sisters.

Because whoever has not learned to sustain their own center is easily swept away by the confusion of others.