So many books and gurus have created a very wonderful image of the enlightened one, and it is a totally unrealistic image. There is no scripture worth the name which gives any image of enlightenment. The realised one lives a very ordinary life, simply in the ‘facts.’ There is no spiritual or religious duty as such to become enlightened. No, not at all. You can be shamelessly unenlightened, and that is enlightenment.
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Questioner: My spiritual path is taking me very long and I sometimes feel stuck and I am a bit discouraged. If you can give me some inspiration at this point to, as they say, drop the false. How to actually drop it? It’s not happening, it seems so far.
Acharya Prashant: Let’s begin with the basics. When you say ‘spiritual path’ and when you say that it is taking too long, you surely have some idea of where you want to reach. And that is why you are able to say that you probably have not yet reached there and that it is taking too long a time. Now, let me say, I am standing at point A. I am standing at point A, and I imagine point B as a point of Peace or enlightenment. I imagine B, standing at A. I am not very satisfied with A, that is why I imagine some other point to be the point of Peace. But B is imagined by A. Are we together?
Questioner: Yes
Acharya Prashant: Point B is imagined by A. You know what A is? A is the state of mind one is in. So B is a function of A. One imagines B only because one is at A, which means that even though B, ostensibly, is a different point, a point of apparent satisfaction yet B is a point imagined from a state of dissatisfaction. The one who imagines B is a dissatisfied one, that is why he imagines B. So standing at A, I imagine some distant point B, I also imagine a path to B and my idea then is to reach B through that path. I can also dream up a few other alternative paths also. But the idea is to reach somewhere and that somewhere, where I want to reach is a function of where I am standing.
