Ramana Maharshi famously wrote a note to his mother, saying, “The Ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their past deeds. Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try how hard you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to stop it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent.”
While it might be easy for quite a few seekers on the spiritual path to understand or accept that “everything is predetermined” as the above note is saying, what is difficult to understand is what is being conveyed by the instruction in it, “remain silent”.
Now, obviously, if something has to happen in our lives as per destiny, then that destiny does NOT happen “magically” but through some choices we make, which in turn are driven by some deliberation in thinking and willing to not only make that choice but also act to bring that choice to life.
But, does such “thinking and willing” mean we are NOT being silent? Obviously NOT because such “silence” cannot lead to the destiny that the Maharshi is asking us to be “silent” about, because as we said above that we need to “think and will” if the destiny has to come about.
There are of course many logical threads one can follow in unravelling this, but that would only get our “knickers in a twist” (to borrow a phrase from my cousin’s husband).
What is the simplest logic that can be deployed in this case, keeping in spirit with Occam’s razor, to make sense of what that “silence” is that is being referred to?
- It could be the silence of non-feverish planning and acting that is NOT accompanied by fear, anxiety, obsession about what the “result” of any of our actions might be, a bit like what that Bhagavad Gita’s verse is indicating (https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/47/).
- It could be the silence of accepting the fruits of one’s action without any complaint, without any crestfallen feeling that what we expected has not happened.
- It could be the silence of wathcing the mind in operation from a distance as it were as a detached witness whether one is planning or acting, which speaks to Ramesh Balsekar’s distinction between the “working mind” and “thinking mind” (Pointers From Ramesh Balsekar – Working Mind and Thinking Mind — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW0uIeowGN0).
- It could be the silence of “staying with what is”, like Krishnamurti advocates, and not setting up a conflict in oneself to move from “what is” to “what should be” (What Is and What Should Be — from Krishnamurti’s Book COMMENTARIES ON LIVING 1 — https://kfoundation.org/krishnamurti-commentaries-on-living-series-i-what-is-and-what-should-be/).
