Question: How to be immortal?
Acharya Prashant: Why must that be a subject? Why must that be something you want to talk about? Whenever we pick up anything to talk about, why do we do that? What is that thing, what is that subject, what is that topic? I want to ask you, would we pick up anything to talk about it, if it is in some sense not bothersome? Do we want to discuss something that does not bother us? Impermanence bothers us. Now, why does impermanence bother us?
Nothing that is synchronized with our basic nature can ever bother us. Our basic nature does not come to ask for its own fulfillment. Our basic nature is already there, hence settled; hence contented.
Impermanence bothers us because it is not really our nature. Impermanence means to come and go away in time. Whatever arises, whatever falls is impermanent. We do not really like this business of arrival and departure, of birth and death. We do not like it because neither is birth our nature, nor is death our nature.
But our senses, our mind, our habits, our entire system тАУ the whole thing that we are тАУ it tries to convince us that we are impermanent. Everything in the world is designed on the basis of an assumption of impermanence and hence keeps reminding us that we may be impermanent. Whatever exists in time is bound to be impermanent and when we open our eyes, all that we find existing, is in time.
