Ditch the Trauma: Embrace Your New Self!
Questioner: Namaste, Sir. My question is about seeing and perceiving, that helps make things appear simple. Everyone on the battlefield faced trauma of some kind. The same eyes that help us see are also the same eyes that help us sleep, bring peace. Considering Arjuna, his plate is full of trauma. So, how does a wise person emerge out of that past trauma, if they do not close their eyes, if they do not look away?
Acharya Prashant: No, the same answer—the same, same thing. Trauma is to you, and trauma is big to you. By itself, in itself, trauma is just a fact, an event; it carries no meaning.
A person dies, it's a fact, it's an event. Does it have the same meaning for everybody? No. So, whatever has happened has a certain meaning only in your own personal context. So, the meaning is to you. Why is that meaningful to you? Because you're attending to the trauma. You do not need to heal. You need to forget. How to forget?
Look towards the right direction. Let your mind be full of the right thing; only then the trauma and such things will be crowded out, ejected out. If you remain the same person to whom the trauma happened, the trauma will remain a continuous happening because you are still continuous.
Nobody is ever able to attend to the past, resolve it, and come out of it. The only way is to outgrow the past. Walk past the past. Has the past been resolved? No, it's been transcended, it's been forgotten. Why? Because I have a place to reach. I just can't keep hanging there.
Questioner: But, is that not changing your song?
Acharya Prashant: If your song was indeed beautiful, why did it give you the trauma? The song is supposed to be a delight, not a trauma. If it results in trauma, it's some kind of a—I don't know, what genre of song it is.
There is nobody who has not been through pain in life. That pain is not an event; that pain is a compulsory reflection of who you are at that point. Given who you are at that point, that pain had to come, in one form or the other. We think of the pain or the trauma, the sorrow, the suffering, as an accident. It is not an accident. It is a necessity; it is an inevitability. It had to happen because you were the way you were, and I was the way I was.
The only way to come out of it is to come out of yourself. Do not remain the one who got the trauma, and the trauma will be no more.
Otherwise, new traumatic experiences will be new only in name and face. That's why, for most people, life is a series of unpleasant happenings. Just that, the unpleasantness occurs each time in a new shape and form; nothing is new. The unpleasantness is very old because one has managed to remain the same old self. If I am the same, my experiences will remain the same. Obviously, No?
That's a mark of inner growth—you feel unable to relate to your past. You start looking at your younger self, your previous self, as somebody else. That's a mark, a characteristic, of maturity, and you're able to actually smile in dissociation. You say, ‘Oh, you know, I was just 25, I was so stupid.’ If you can look at your 25-year-old self and say, ‘Oh, she was so stupid,’ then you have left behind all the trauma you faced till, or at, 25.
Outgrow. Outgrow your past. Look at your past and say, ‘Oh, she's a different girl. She's not me. And, I find no pleasure even looking at her. I mean, all right, she's a younger self, some kind of a younger sister— cute, all right, but nothing of much interest to me now. I have better things to look at. I have more important stuff to attend to.’
‘She lost her doll at the age of 8, and I'm 28 and still crying.’— ‘Surely, I've not grown.’
Questioner: I agree, that's very helpful. Thank you.
Acharya Prashant: Thank you.
