Consciousness versus Awareness || Acharya Prashant, on Nitnem Sahib (2019)

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, my hormonal imbalance overpowers my ability to continue with conscious behaviour and forces me to continue with compulsive behaviour. How to be more conscious of my actions?

Acharya Prashant (AP): So, there is the type of behaviour that we call as ‘compulsive behaviour’, and she’s rightly relating it to bodily secretions, hormonal chemistry, latent tendencies, and such things. Something very visceral and overpowering just arises without notice and takes control of the being. That’s what we call as ‘compulsive behaviour’, right? And then, she has already thought of a remedy, and the remedy according to her is conscious behaviour.

In conscious behavior, the ‘I’ sense knows, knows in the sense of cognizing, knows in the sense of rather, ‘recognizing’, recognizing by pattern matching— detecting that it is the same pattern that arose at some point in the past, and at that point it was called by this name, so this being the same thing, I would again call it by the same name. In conscious behaviour, you recognize the pattern, and having already known that the pattern is dislikable or harmful, you take active and conscious measures to disrupt the pattern, right? The whole framework needs to be revisited a little.

That which we call as compulsive behaviour, even that is determined by the ‘I’ tendency. It is just that compulsive behaviour comes from a part of ‘I’ tendency that is not available to thought, and, therefore, knowledge. We very well know that what we call as knowledge is totally dependent on thought and words. No thought—No knowledge. No words—No knowledge. Compulsive behaviour arises from the deep, deep ‘I’ tendency where language does not exist. That part of our being that is common with trees, and animals, and with little kids. No language—just instincts. No thoughts—just surges.