Most of us have a reflex when the house goes quiet. We reach for the phone, the radio, the television, anything to fill the gap. In a short excerpt from his Wisdom Series talk on solitude, the teacher Sri M argues that the discomfort we feel in silence is not really a fact about being alone. It is a conditioned response, built up over a lifetime of sound, images and words, and it can be loosened. He separates loneliness, which he treats as a feeling triggered by the absence of people and stimulation, from solitude, a state of inner freedom that can exist even in the middle of a crowd or a forest. The path he sketches runs through a reframing of aloneness, a frank look at the noise the mind makes once the outside world falls away, and a practical technique: give the mind something it loves to absorb itself in until the chatter quiets on its own.
Sri M starts with a distinction most of us never make. "First, I want to distinguish between loneliness and solitude," he says in the clip. Loneliness, in his account, shows up whenever the people, noise and input we are used to disappear. He lists examples that span the emotional range: a prisoner in solitary confinement, a mother who has lost her children in an accident, a person whose beloved has died. He also includes the more ordinary case of someone who has grown used to constant music and suddenly finds everything stopped.
His explanation for why this happens is the core of the teaching. From birth, he says, the mind becomes accustomed to being surrounded by people, images, words and sound. When those supports are removed, the mind registers the absence as a lack. For that reason he prefers a different word for the state itself:
"I would prefer to call this not loneliness, but aloneness. Now, alone meaning only me, nothing else." (Sri M, Wisdom Series on Solitude)
Aloneness, as he frames it, is simply a situation: you are by yourself. Loneliness is the mind's reaction to that situation. The problem, he warns, is that if we never learn to tell the two apart, we will keep running into the same discomfort. "Nobody loves aloneness," he notes. "Everybody likes to have people around." He is careful not to say people should be avoided. The point is that the inner state should not depend on who is in the room.
That inner state is what he calls solitude: "Aloneness is a situation where the mind remains even in the midst of all the crowd and still isolated it. In solitude. This is called solitude." The phrasing in the transcript is compressed, but the meaning is clear. Solitude is a mind that is inwardly apart, unbothered by the crowd around it.
To make the idea concrete, Sri M tells a story from his years as a wandering renunciate, when he often preferred to walk alone. Walkers in the Himalayas, he recalls, tend to attach themselves to you: other swamis, sannyasins, pilgrims and tourists who "keep telling you only about themselves" whether you want to hear it or not. He describes meeting a swami in Chambal who announced he had been a judge before becoming a swami, and his blunt response is part of the charm: "Who cares if he was a judge before he became a swami? Who cares?"
He eventually put his hands together and asked the man to be quiet or let him go on alone, then simply walked off on another path when the talking would not stop. What happened next is the real lesson. Once he was out on his own, with snow still on the peaks, a river running below, and birds chirping through the forest, he asked himself whether he was actually alone at all.
"You are actually full of everything that is around you. So, then that aloneness which you have then is not interfered by any of the outer things like the birds or the trees or any of these things because they have no vested interest in you." (Sri M, Wisdom Series on Solitude)
The distinction is subtle and useful. Human company often carries an agenda, whether it is the need to be heard, to be impressed, or to be given advice. The river and the mountains make no such demands. They are simply there, and their presence does not disturb the inner quiet of someone who is open to them. He adds a note he attributes to an earlier source: "somebody said alone comes from the word all one." Seen this way, aloneness becomes "an enjoyable experience rather than a terrible thing to be afraid of," in his words, once you have the vision of everything being one. That etymology is his citation, not a linguistic claim he makes on his own authority, but it captures the spirit of the teaching.
If the outside world is not the obstacle, what is? Sri M is direct: the distractions that keep us from our own inner quiet are often other human beings, but they are also our conditioning, the experiences we have had, and the memories that will not let go. He breaks those memories into two kinds. Pleasant ones pull us because we miss them. Unpleasant ones keep hurting because they still pain us. Either way, the mind stays busy with the past.
He then turns to the shutdown that many people lived through in 2020, the period he refers to when he says "people say, oh, we have 20 days of shutdown." Even when the external rules closed doors, gatherings and congregations, he suggests, the inner situation did not change. Ask whether there is any silence or solitude in that enforced stillness, he says, and the answer is no. The reason is internal: "Your mind is enough. It can match a thousand people creating problems for you."
"Your mind is your own enemy. It can also be your friend. So, develop the friendly part of your mind which says, 'Can I stop making these noises?'" (Sri M, Wisdom Series on Solitude)
His own example is almost comically ordinary, and that is why it lands. He is sitting quietly, the room is calm, and he decides music would be nice. He turns it on, and the electricity goes off. There is no generator and no music, and his mind is suddenly in a terrible state. The noise did not come from the outside. It came from the mind's restlessness, its habit of wanting something and then reacting when it cannot have it.
He also points out that physical isolation is not a guarantee of inner stillness. He has seen people sitting alone in hermitages who are still talking to themselves in their minds, tortured by thought. Solitude, in other words, is not a location. It is a quality of attention.
The next step in his argument sounds radical, but he is careful to qualify it. The ego, he says, is built up from so many experiences that it has become a kind of accumulated rubbish. "This rubbish has to be thrown away. It has to be wiped clean." The first move is simply to recognize that this clearing needs to happen. Only then does the practice have a chance.
To illustrate what he means, he asks us to consider the infant. A baby has not yet accumulated impressions and yet survives, because someone looks after it. "I'm not saying you should lie down in a cradle and say ah," he clarifies. "That's not what I mean." What he wants is an inner orientation, a mindset in which the mind is not constantly grasping at its own history. He also reminds listeners of the other end of life, when the strong and accomplished can no longer stand or walk and must simply be cared for. "This is the state we actually are," he says. "In between, all the circus is going on."
The circus is his word for the restless activity that fills the time between those two states. Behind the metaphor is a claim that is easy to miss: the joy he describes is not something to be manufactured. "When the mind has stopped making noises, when the mind has become quiet, there's a joy that comes from within. What prevents the joy from coming is the noise of the mind."
Sri M admits that telling the mind to stop is not easy. He is candid about this: you cannot simply decide, in the middle of your thinking, that you are going to be silent. So he offers a technique. Let the mind become absorbed in something you truly love. He gives several examples: music, painting, reading. For himself, he says, if he had free time he would be reading about the birds of the Indian subcontinent, or wildlife writing, naming Salim Ali and the work of Ranjitsinh among the authors he would turn to.
The logic is practical. A mind that is fully occupied with something it enjoys is not generating the constant commentary that makes solitude feel unbearable. The attention is given to the object of love, and the inner noise has less room to run. Over time, that absorption can give way to the quiet he describes, the state in which, as he puts it, being alone is no longer something to fear.
This excerpt is short, and it is worth treating as a starting point rather than a complete method. A few practical questions follow directly from what Sri M says:
- When you feel lonely, can you name whether the feeling comes from the absence of people, or from the mind's reaction to silence?
- When you are alone in nature, does the company of birds, trees or water feel different from company that wants something from you?
- Which memories, pleasant or painful, does your mind return to when nothing is happening outside?
- What activity do you love enough that your mind would stop talking while you do it?
The clip is an excerpt from the Wisdom Series on solitude, which the video description says was released in March 2020. Watching the full series will give more of Sri M's reasoning and his other examples. For a reader, the most useful takeaway may be his simplest one: aloneness is a situation, the noise is a habit, and the habit can be changed.
