Beware such energies || Acharya Prashant, at BITS Pilani, Goa (2022)

Acharya Prashant

6 min
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Beware such energies || Acharya Prashant, at BITS Pilani, Goa (2022)

Questioner (Q): My question is that I heard there are two cosmic energies that will take out all the sufferings of the people. We heard from Treta Yug of lord Shri Ram and Lakshman received the cosmic energies from Sage Vishvamitra. Those are called Sambala and Atibala . If he gets those cosmic energies, he will be out of hunger. The person cannot fight for the food and the person can live blissfully. This blissfulness cannot be seen in our education system, I feel because we are studying objects; materialistic lives. It is not possible for us to enjoy ourselves every time, but if those things were there, we would have enjoyed it.

Acharya Prashant (AP): How do you know any of that?

Q: How can these things be achieved? Is it possible in today’s world?

AP: I tell you to go and achieve A, B, C square D. How do you achieve that? Do you know what ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, or ‘D’ are or are we just dealing in imagination? Is ‘A’ greater than one? Please raise your hands. Is ‘A’ smaller than one? Please raise your hands.

How do you answer? How do I answer? I do not know what ‘A’ is. How do I say anything about it? And without knowing it, if I still insist on saying something, isn’t that superstition? Is that not the very definition of superstition? To not know yet believe . What do I know? How do I know?

Enlightenment is a fancy word, but actually, the thing is quite simple. Enlightenment simply means to know. There are areas of darkness in the mind. You throw light on them, that is enlightenment . That’s all. Enlightenment is no magical or fancy thing. So, right now, I can enlighten you a bit. You too can enlighten me a bit.

To really know something is to be enlightened about it. Kindly, do not associate metaphysical notions with it. Enlightenment is not some divine event in which flowers rain from the sky, and strange impossible meta-natural things start happening on the Earth. No, nothing. Enlightenment is a very simple thing and the other kind of enlightenment that you hear in which magical things happen, incredible stuff—people start flying and flowers start talking, animals transform into human beings,—all that is nice entertainment. Nothing beyond that.

Soul, you said, that the soul has to be enlightened. We talked of three words and we said that they are approximate synonyms. Which three words? ‘Consciousness’, ‘mind’, and ‘ego’. Take the soul as just the mind. Nothing more than that. When you say my soul is suffering, it’s actually nothing but the mind, because nothing apart from the mind ever suffers. So, that which has been in a very ornamental way called as ‘the soul’ is nothing but the mind.

Energies. Are really there two types of energies? I only know of one energy that is denoted in joules. How many do you know of? Is there another kind of energy denoted by something else? At least in SI, it is just joules. What other kind of energy can be there? There can be forms of energy, I understand. There can be forty forms of energy, but energy is just one.

That which can cause change in matter is called energy. Is that not the basic definition? That which can cause any kind of change in matter is defined as energy. Full stop. Energy causes change in matter and change in matter produces energy. The two are interlinked.

So, what is this paranormal kind of energy? The word “energy” used in a spiritual sense is mere superstition. You understand the word “ethereal?” What is ethereal? You know, ‘cosmic’, ‘blurred’, ‘hazy’, ‘beyond real’, ‘surreal’, ‘mystical’. If ever in any of these contacts, you hear the word “energy” being uttered, run away.

Somebody says, “You know, some energy is rising from my navel point, and it’s coming upwards. It has reached my lungs. Now it will hit my throat, and then the brain, and then there will be a great fountain of energy bursting from my skull.” Please watch out. Sheer nonsense! Energy is physical. Consciousness is not. When you talk of energy, you are talking of the material world. Full stop. Anything material has energy associated with it. Energy has no meaning in the spiritual sense. No meaning at all. If you hear someone saying, “You know, I can move this mug using my mental energy.” Nonsense. There is solar energy, there is tidal energy. There is nothing called mental energy.

And if you insist there is something called mental energy, it is just the food that you take in. And that food becomes the stuff of the brain, and obviously, in the brain, there are electronic processes going on. There are neurons that fire, so some energy is involved. There are very subtle electrical circuits all over in the brain, so obviously there is the movement of energy. Even with respect to the brain, you can just fully use the word “energy.” But with respect to the mind, the word “energy” is meaningless.

But there is a lot of spiritual haziness, so we start using words that belong to the objective universe in the subjective sense as well. Keep these two apart. That’s the fundamental thing. The objective world is one thing, and the inner world where you have dissatisfaction or love, or curiosity, or identification—that is another thing. These two are related to each other, yet very separate.

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant
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