One need not have any special qualification to be in the Mouna room. All types of persons have been therein, from highly educated intellectuals to illeterate peasants, from sophisticated millionaires to simple workers, from old men of 88 to children of 7, from young girls to mothers with babies in arms, from patients with actute heart disease attack to those with temperature of 103 degrees.
At the end of your stay, the ashram requests for an account called ‘Nivedan’ of your experiences during the Mauna. This is quite voluntary. These accounts describe a wide range of variations in experience of different individuals. Most inmates have observed that their appetite and sleep were considerably reduced and a few of them could live for days together with hardly any sleep or food.
Some inmates felt great creative urge and wrote poems or drew pictures or solved intricate problems of business. Cases are recorded where persons got clear forewarnings of good and bad events, which later on cam out to be true. The space here is too limited to give any thing more than a mere glimpse of what happens inside. But one thins is certain (not considering rare exceptions) that everyone who enters and remain in the room, completes one’s allotted period and comes out richer and happier.
Psychology and science may explain some of the experiences that happen inside. It can be said that the semi dark environment, the effortless availability of all the body needs, the peace and quietness of the place and the sense of security all point to the happiest period of one’s life, viz, the foetal state in a mother’s womb. Hence, the person is per se thrown back to that state, feels free, released and happy.
Similarly, a few other things can also be explained but those who had personal experience of both the Mouna mandir and the psychologist’s couch have stated that there is a vast difference between the two processes. Whereas the results obtained through psychological process are limited and conditional, the effects of Mouna Mandir are much deeper, wider much more intense and certainly far more permanent. The release experienced in the Mouna period is of a dimension beyond the body and the mind. It has a quality of Divine.
Thus today, in the midst of his multifatious duties and social obligations, an earnest Sadhaka has opportunity to pursue his path and seek his solution on the way to that which transcends the humdrum and leads one to the end of all ends, the goal of all goals- hi freedom, eternal and everlasting.