Awakening begins with suffering || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Speaker: The question is that why good people have to suffer the most? How many of you think that it is so or how many of you have seen this happening in your surroundings that good people suffer?

(Few in the audience raise their hands)

Alright, so there are few others besides her.

Kirti, man can exist, all of us can exist in three distinct states. The first state, the lowest state is that of a stone that has zero consciousness; absolutely no understanding of what is going on. It understands nothing, none at all. And it does not suffer at all. Are you getting it?

For a stone, for a wall, for an inanimate thing, there obviously cannot be anything called suffering. If you that find most people are not suffering then the reason is not that they are joyful, the reason is that they are so deeply unconscious that they do not know that they are suffering. It’s like a part of your body has gone numb. What happens before a surgeon operates on you? Assume he has to give you local anesthesia, he has to operate your hand. Now your hand has gone numb, it has gone senseless. Whatsoever may be done to it, there would be no suffering, no pain. Now does that mean actually there is nothing wrong in the hand? A lot is being done to the hand, it is being torn open. But then you don’t feel the suffering because your sensitivity has been taken away. That is the state at which the stone exists, at a level of deep insensitivity.