How to Achieve Your Highest Potential?

Questioner: Acharya ji, in Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna says, “I am the highest in all the vidyas.” He says, “I am the Everest in mountains”; that way he denotes all the powers. He says, “I am Atman , the highest thing, absolutely”.

There he does not say the potential but the absolute. So, if I say, “I have to be Atman , does that mean the highest potential I have as this body or the absolute possible.

Acharya Prashant : When you exhibit your highest potential, you find that the absolutely highest becomes possible to you on its own.

So, you don’t have to worry about the absolutely highest. You worry about the highest that you can be, and keep reaching there continuously. The Absolute will then pick you up on its own. You can only be relatively better; you keep becoming relatively better day after day.

You remember ‘The ninety-nine floors of consciousness’ (referring to a particular lecture)? You keep climbing up. You have to reach the ninety-ninth floor and from there the sky picks you up. Beyond that, you cannot do much. You keep doing the utmost possible to yourself. And remember that you being small, tiny, even the maximum you can do would always be insufficient. Still, that display of the maximum you can do is needed.

You display the maximum you can do and do a little more because you can always do more than what you can think you can do, and then strange things start happening. You find much more is happening. More than you hadn’t planned or even asked for. But all that happens only when you are doing your utmost. You first show your desire and your preparedness to pay the maximum price. And then something beyond the price you can pay is gifted to you.

Gullak , you know, piggybank. Now kids don’t keep that but my sister used to maintain one. Obviously, all the coins had been stolen from me, but where ever she would find change, it goes into the piggybank, very quickly it would disappear. So, if the vegetable vendor gave her some money, “Go and give this to your mother” — ten rupees was given and the stuff bought was worth seven and a half rupees. Two and a half rupees he returned in coins and the coins never reach anywhere but they go to the tummy of that pig.

So, it was there. And there was this electric car she wanted for my brother, if I remember rightly. Those days electric cars use to be expensive things. I was in class three, she would have been in kindergarten. My younger brother was one or one and a half and this car was to be bought for him. So, she made the ultimate sacrifice. One day the pig was slaughtered. All that came out of its stomach was probably not even hundred rupees but the car came. It wouldn’t have come had she not taken that extreme step, though in itself that extreme step was totally insufficient. The car was ten times as expensive. A little toy car, battery operated.

Do you understand this?

You cannot get that Ultimate by your own effort. But you will also not get that Ultimate without your own effort. So, do not have the conceit or vanity that you will work hard and attain the True Self. No, that won’t happen. All that you have is fifty or sixty rupees in your little piggy bank. That’s just too little to buy the Absolute. But without sacrificing all that you have, you will not get the Absolute. Do you get this delicate equation?

You do the maximum you can. Your maximum will not suffice, but probably the Absolute is looking for your maximum. You do the maximum you can and the Absolute gifts itself to you then.

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