We can’t even think without the words, so essential they have become in our lives. The one who can think deeply, conceptualize and imagine more than the many others learns much more about many words as compared to others. Those who have made many efforts to know about the realities of life and truth of the things are known to have become men of a few words, each word conveying the true and uniform meaning with no variations.
While the words help us to think, communicate, imagine, understand and conceptualize; they also influence our feelings, thoughts and the concepts we form to understand things that are a little beyond our usual understanding and thinking.
Swadhyaya (English translation; ‘self-studies’) has been popularly known as studies of great scriptures and books containing useful knowledge. However, the word Swadhyaya is also accepted to mean a close and careful study of one’s own nature, behavior, conduct and thoughts. Swadhyaya, therefore, is a very useful tool for making sincere efforts for developing one’s character in the right way. Carefully watching our own words and language as to how we use them for expressing ourselves, understanding things, gathering the right knowledge, initiating the right actions, reacting to the external world and listening to our inner voice, etc. therefore, becomes very important for us.
To start with, a great importance must be given to completely get rid of the words that do not mean anything to us. The words that we have nothing to do with, hover around us and influence our thoughts and conduct adversely. For example, it has been observed that if one allows some word that describes a shady element of character or some undesirable behavioural trait, circulate around him, which might not ever have been even in his vocabulary, the word gradually starts influencing him adversely. We all know that all the languages make use of very positive expressions of greetings, follow the practice of naming children with the names of some God figures or using phrases in praise of the God even in ordinary conversation. These practices have been evolved to maintain good and positive impact on languages. However, we are rather careless about the use of words that carry negative influence, even if we have no intention of conveying anything negative in our communication. Use of positive words, irrespective of whether they convey it or not, do not cause any harm; but, the use of meaningless words or the words that are negative in their impact must be avoided.
The second step has to be to identify all such words that are superfluous in our expressions and to eliminate them from all our conversation. If we practice this thoroughly, we will find that our expressions will convey what we actually want to convey. To our surprise, we will also find that in our enthusiasm of eliminating negative words, we will also get rid of many of the negative feeling that we carry with us without any reason. Our target has to be to express ourselves meaningfully only.
PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA
[The writer of this blog is also the author of “Mahatma A Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious” and “In Search of Our Wonderful Words”.]
MAHATMA 