In The Sphere of Silence Summary I Vijay Eswaran

Book – In the Sphere of Silence (Summary)

Author – Vijay Eswaran

Genre – Self-help Book

Published in – 2005

The sphere of silence is one of the shortest and yet immensely impactful books I have read on the significance of Silence and its benefits in all aspects of life, whether we are looking at advancing our career or elevating our personal life.

Vijay Eswaran claims that Silence when practiced diligently, can be a very powerful tool. It is not oriented to any one religion, it is accepted universally and practiced by almost all faiths on the planet.

Eventually, it helps in becoming better at understanding who we are, what we are, and in particular why we are here. This in turn will bring us to who we can be.

About the Book – 

In the Sphere of silence is more than just goal setting, a common practice. Goals are moving targets and it changes as our ability to analyze and the project grows.

In this silent 1 hour retreat every day we don’t only set goals, we start with reflecting on yesterday, before setting goals for the day so that we can amend our act to make sure we accomplish any undone goals today.

The author divides one hour into three parts, namely Duly, Knowledge, and Devotion, and claims that it is the combination of these three that makes the sphere of silence the most powerful tool to succeed in both business and in life.

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Few Key Points From Each Section

1)  DUTY –

The path of duty refers to our worldly goal and material goals and responsibility towards career, family, society, and country.

Here we spend the first 30 minutes, dividing further into 3 blocks of10 minutes.

• First 10 minutes to retrospect yesterday or last 24 hours, contemplating what was done, what wasn’t. How could have been better. As mentioned in the book – Retrospection, when done diligently, will reveal that we generally don’t make new mistakes. We merely repeat old ones.

• Next 10 minutes we allocated to decide goals for the day. Don’t confuse this with to-do list, but this is crucial activity that aligns with our long terms goals.

• Last 10 minutes are given for noting our long term goals further dividing in three parts.
  • Goals for next seven days
  • Goals for next 1 year.
  • Goals for next 5 years.

• The author insists on writing this every day to cement it in our minds and keep our actions aligned with our goals. This serves as a daily reminder and inspires us to wake up and face the day and thrive for becoming better.

• Goals may change from time to time as we experience life and our perspective broadens as we move along. Each part of this exercise and its significance is nicely explained in the book.

2)  KNOWLEDGE –

In part two of this one hour, Vijay Eswaran suggests spending 20 minutes for acquiring knowledge.

Pick a book for the sake of pursuit of knowledge read for 15 minutes try to remember key points and note them down in the book in the next 5 minutes.

There are numerous benefits of this activity to name a few –

• It increases our short term memory, which is significant component in holding meaningful conversation at work or outside work.

• As you finish the book, at the end you will have summary of book written by yourself for future reference.

• Reading is one of most common habit of highly successful people in all aspect of life and it allows an access of great minds to anyone who wants to learn from the best.

• When we read from a perspective of making notes, our focus and comprehension improves drastically.

3) DEVOTION –

These last ten minutes have to be utilized in commune with God without speech. Though it also needs to be written down. One may put down all the questions that concern him or it can be used as a confession. It needs to be heart to heart conversation.

As mentioned in the book – The best way to understand God is to understand yourself.

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Benefits of Practicing Sphere of Silence

1) As we start practice reflecting yesterday, we can see we repeat the same mistakes mostly. It can be a huge hit to the ego, however once understood it can help in advancing our life.

2)There is numerous research on writing goals. One who has written goals has 90% higher chances of achieving them.

3) It helps us keep going when going gets tough. It reminds us why our goals matter to us and we need to pay the price.

4) As we write our goals every day, eventually we will realize and might change goals, which don’t make sense and it does happen when priority changes and perspective broaden in life.

5) Writing this Goal, enhancing knowledge, and taking commune with our higher self in this 1 hour can make thoughts much clearer and speech & action much better.

6) Vijay Eswaran has explained Anger, Ego, attachment in a really simple way and suggests that as we go deep in the practice of Sphere of silence these things lose grip on us.

Few Great Quotes from the book – 

1) If your thought is what it should be, you will have little trouble with your action. Yet remember that to be useful to mankind, thought must result in action. There must be no laziness, but constant activity in good work.

2) Committing is not about undertaking a new responsibility. It is about recognizing one that you have. It is a measure of your respect for yourself.

3) One should see twice as much as one speaks. One should think & hear twice as much as one speaks. One should breathe twice as much as one speaks.

4) Saying the right words only sells your intentions. While showing that you mean what you say can buy trust; however, doing what you say, seals it.

5) When you are too busy listening to yourself talk, you don’t listen to others. There is too much noise outside and within.

6) We must ask ourselves again and again: does our anger matter? For what we do in anger, seldom does.

7) You are master of every word that you are yet to utter, but a slave to every word you have uttered.

I have also created a video of a few quotes from the book – Hope you like it. Please do subscribe to my YouTube channel – Myread4change 

Conclusion –

There are many practices out there of setting goals, however, this one differs in a major way, as it not only helps in setting goals but also why we set them and confirms the growth with a daily postmortem of yesterday and reiterate goals in writing.

I highly recommend this book and urge you to put Sphere of silence into practice. Give it a go. You will be glad you did. You may follow the author Vijay Eswaran and his work on his website.

If you like this book, you may also like Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday.

See you in the zone.

Muzammil