Are you Crazy? || Acharya Prashant

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, in my experience, only a crazy person can understand true love. So, are you crazy?

Acharya Prashant (AP): You are asking this question while assuming that what you have experienced and what you have concluded based on your experience is already true. Isn't it important that first of all, we investigate the premise itself? Or do you propose that we proceed on the assumption?

Q: No, sir. If you look at the mind and if you look at the mind's perception of its own dissolution and then enjoying its own dissolution—a normal person with an ego mind will call him a crazy person. But for him, that is true love; in that sense are you also that crazy?

AP: I could say ‘yes’, I could also say ‘no’, but I'm not really sure whether that would be useful. Because these are words that are recycled so much in the spiritual literature that just because one is habituated to reading them, one starts feeling one knows them. Now, just because one is habituated to something does not mean that one knows that thing. For example, you could be habituated to passing by an electric pole or a slaughterhouse or a hospital or a funeral ground or something everyday. Because you are very habituated to it, it arouses no curiosity when you encounter it again and again daily. But that does not really mean that we fully understand this object we are perceiving.

I'm just trying to play the devil’s advocate—you asked a beautiful question. I just want to add some value because what you are saying, you are already at a certain level of thought. And if we are here, we better attempt something higher. So, that's where I'm coming from.

You read Kabir Sahab, you read Rumi and you read the words of the saints and you come across such phrases like ‘divine craziness’ and ‘seeking joy in one's own inner death’ and they say it with such conviction, such simplicity and such obviousness that we start feeling that it's something very straightforward because they are putting it as an obvious fact of life. They are looking at it as directly, as simply and as clearly as one looks at a tea-cup on the table. But we must also remember that just because they are able to articulate it in such simple terms, it does not mean the matter itself is very simple. This is where we can often be deceived.

Let's say, there is the Rishi from the Upanishads, and he, very simply and succinctly says, “Aham Brahāshmi” (I am Brahman). Now, that is something spontaneously arising from his life. He has paid the price, he knows a few things and from there, it is something very ordinary for him to say, “Aham Brahāshmi” . And if he looks at you, even to you, he will say, “Tat-Tvam Asi” (thou art that). But that is his prerogative to say. He is the one authorised to say that. He is not stating an objective fact. If I say, here, to my right, is a wall and if the two of us are standing next to each other, then this statement as an objective fact would apply to you as well. If there is a wall to my right, then there has to be a wall to your right as well. This—what I say—then can be repeated by you without any risk of going wrong. But if I say, “Aham Brahāshmi” and you too say, “Aham Brahāshmi” , then there is a problem.

There is a huge difference because it is an objective fact we are articulating here. One has to earn the right to use these words.

Q: Because the reality is subjective

AP: Yes, because the ego has to be at its minimum before it can utter absolute Truth. Now if the ego stands where it is and yet it picks up words and starts repeating them and owning them, then there might be a bit of a problem. So, the craziness of love, well, you know, we have to be very cautious of it because love gives you an experience of craziness, even if it is the very common, ordinary, vulgar, egoistic love, even in that, people experience a certain craziness.

Look at a 15-year-old going crazy in love. He is looking at his classmate or somebody and he is saying, ‘This is the purest and truest kind of love possible.’ And in the age of social media, that's happening all the more. You go to Instagram or somewhere and you will have all 12-years-olds, 14-years-olds, 16 years olds going crazy in true love. So, when that is the situation of the words, ‘crazy’ and ‘love’ and ‘truth’, how do I say that I am crazy in love? If I say that, then I run the risk of being misinterpreted, I also run the risk of being misclassified.

So, what does the word ‘crazy’ mean for you? What does the dissolution of ego mean to you? I think these are more useful queries. This is what one should go into. What is the real lived meaning of dissolution? Otherwise, the spelling, ‘d, i, s, s, o, l, u, t, i, o, n’ makes no difference. We may keep saying ‘e, g, o; e, g, o’ all our life and yet have no awareness of ‘e, g, o’—Is it there in your breath? Is the dissolution something that you are living every moment? That's what one has to honestly investigate and that's what spirituality is really all about. To go into the facts, bare facts of one's life. Bare facts—how is it with ‘me’? It does not matter much, how it was with the Rishis and the Rumis and the Kabirs. That won't help you because you have your own life to live. A beautiful verse from a seer-poet is obviously a thing of delight, but by itself, it cannot change your life.

Q: But you can always relate to those words…

AP: No, no, don't try to relate to them. Because the relationship is very, very dimension specific. How can a thing on the earth relate to something in the sky? That is beyond, but that's the ego's aspiration: to remain where it is and yet strike a relationship with the highest. And that is a great problem. If you want to relate to the sky, then rise to the sky. That is the only honest way of relating. If you remain where you are and the ego does not want to change itself because there is comfort in where it is and there is security in where it is and remaining where it is, if it wants to have a relationship with something of the beyond, then this may not be very honest.

So, do not just try to relate, try to rise. That's more important.

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