Games ego plays || Acharya Prashant, on Vedanta (2021)
Questioner (Q): When I say, “I am small,” even in that ‘I’ is there, and ‘small’ too is a label, so how can I truthfully say, “I am small?”
Acharya Prashant (AP): Much better than saying, “I am big.” See, this is a very smart trap. Even if I say, “I bow down to the teacher,” ‘I’ remains, therefore I will not say, “I bow down to the teacher.” Sir, as a human being, as a mind, as a consciousness, you will have to do something; you will have to say something; you will have to accord yourself some identity. You cannot just jump to non-being; you cannot say, “I am no more” or “I do not exist anymore.” You cannot say, “I am choiceless,” all of a sudden; you cannot lose the ‘I’ all at once, therefore what do you do? You do the best that is possible for this ‘I’ and what is this ‘I’? It’s an entity that chooses, therefore the best that you can do is make the right choice, and that is discretion, that is vivek .
Do not fall into this trap. “Even if I make a bad choice, or even if I make a good choice, it’s the ‘I’ that has made a choice therefore the ‘I’ remains,” that’s the last thing you should say. Having made a hundred successive good choices, then, you say that, “Now I do not even need the chooser.” Even the chooser has to go, and then the chooser need not be dropped by virtue of the hundred successive good choices, the chooser drops on its own.
So, do not say, “If I eat good food, ’I’ remain; if I eat bad food, ‘I’ still remain, so what’s the point in distinguishing between good food and bad food, good words or bad words, good books or bad books, good company or bad company. Even if I have the greatest company, it’s still ‘I’ who has the company, so ‘I’ remains.” It’s a bad argument.
Because the only way you can get rid of ‘I’ is by doing the best that is possible to this ‘I’. If you say, “Irrespective of what I do ‘I’ remains,” then you are misrepresenting the reality. There are actions that fatten the ‘I’ and there are actions that diminish the ‘I’. Though at the centre of both these actions stands the ‘I’, still, these two types of actions are not comparable, not the same at all.
