Forget yourself, Find Yourself || AP Neem Candies

Acharya Prashant

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Forget yourself, Find Yourself || AP Neem Candies

Acharya Prashant: Service will not probably fulfill this restless ‘I’, but service will enable you to forget this restless ‘I’. That is beyondness—not quite the fulfillment of the little ‘I’, but a certain forgetfulness towards the little ‘I’. You say that you are serving a cause bigger than yourself or you are serving others; therefore, there is no time nor opportunity to keep wondering whether your own demands have been met.

One is restless, one is restless, and then one starts dedicating oneself to something bigger, something larger. And the bigger cause consumes so much attention, time, energy that one is left with no space to complain or wonder whether one is internally unfulfilled. You say, “Even if I remain unfulfilled, it is a small matter. I might be happy, I might be sad—the work that I have taken up is bigger than my happiness and sadness. It does not quite matter how I am feeling.”

“I am unfulfilled—oh, probably I am, but I just forgot that.” This is beyondness.

“Am I unfulfilled? Probably I still am. But who cares? I have better things to take care of.” This is fulfillment.

When thoughts of your personal success stop mattering to you, when you say, “There is something more important than my personal success,” then you have really succeeded.

Questioner: It has to be something big, right?

Acharya Prashant: It has to be so big that you forget about your failures, your happiness, your sadness.

Somebody comes and tells you, “But you are sad!”

And you say, “Am I sad? I just forgot that.”

Somebody comes and tells you, “You have not had meals since the last thirty-six hours!”

You say, “Oh? Am I hungry? I just forgot that. I was so engrossed in something large, something meaningful that I totally forgot my personal appetite. It just vanished. Not that it does not exist; now that you are reminding me that I have not had food, I see that I have not had food. Now, in fact, I am also feeling hungry. Now that you have reminded me, I have also felt hungry. But for the last thirty-six hours, hunger didn’t matter; I didn’t even know that I was hungry. All my attention was dedicated towards something broader, larger.”

That has to be there. And this is the only way out especially for people who have achieved a certain level of worldly attainment. You know, people who have no worldly attainment at all, they keep saying, “We need to prove ourselves in the world. We need to get a job; we need to earn some money; we need to have a wife; we need to have a decent family.” And they keep insisting that this is what would fulfill them. But then there are those who already have all those things, who already have a certain level of financial attainment, social attainment, intellectual attainment, familial attainment, and they are still not satisfied. Then the only thing that can fulfill them is forgetfulness.

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