Acharya Prashant: A quiver full of the best of arrows but no bow, how do you fight the battle of life? Can you imagine the amusing as well as tragic situation of the person who has a great arrow without a bow? He will be sharpening and sharpening his weapon, and the sharper the weapon is, the greater is his frustration. So much could have happened, nothing happened. So much was possible, nothing materialized. This is often the predicament of those, who under the influence of some fancy notions, refused to take the help of the scriptures or the Guru. Their principle is that we will make it on our own, after all we have a very sharp arrow. We will make it on our own, look at our arrow, how sharp it is, and it indeed is sharp. You require both, inner one pointedness and external support.
You getting it?
Which of these two comes first? First comes Grace. When that is there, because that is there, that’s why both of these can happen. So, not much merit in discussing which of these come first, or is more important. Your openness to grace, your receptivity, your honesty in acknowledging your suffering, that’s the first thing. And when that happens, then both happens. Inwardly you start losing all attraction and affiliation to nonsense, which means you become one pointed, and outwardly you start feeling drawn towards places and sources that would illuminate you. So, the Upanishads come to you and you become available to them.
But for any of these to happen, first of all there has to inner honesty that says, “I need to be better, I need to be somewhere else, I am not at my destined place, I am not realizing, not meeting my destiny, the target is there, I don’t need to penetrate so much into the trivia, that engulfs me from all sides, I rather need to penetrate the target.” That honest admission, that desire to give up and be away, is the first thing. And when that desire arises, then you find means to get what you desire, that is one pointedness. I want that and I want only that. And then you search for the sources that can power your journey, illumine your path. And that when you say, “Wah! The Upanishads are fantastic, they have both power and light.” They energize me and they illuminate me, both. If something only energizes you then the energy can just be a blind force and if something illuminates you without energizing you then it’s a very phony kind of illumination that leads to nothing, that remains divorced from action. Means nothing, doesn’t help.
