Be Fully Tired
Questioner: Sir, if I give up myself and all that the world has taught me, all the layers of knowledge that I have gained, then how will I function in the world? Won’t it actually be a physical death than just a mental one?
Acharya Prashant: Why must you function in the world?
Questioner: That’s what I am saying, it would be mental death also.
Acharya Prashant: Question is, why must you continue to function in the world?
Because we are afraid of death.
So, the more you continue, the more you are continuing to be afraid of death. These things are not decisions. You do not decide to act tired. You are tired. And when you are tired, then dropping dead does not require a decision. You are asking as if you will deliberately decide to forego knowledge and drop this or that.
As long as you are deciding, you are still acting, so you still have got some energy left. You are not tired. One has to be so tired that he has no motivation left even to decide. Had you been totally tired, how could you have decided? How could you have thought and then escaped away?
Tiredness means seeing that you have given all that you could, and that hope is useless. Tiredness means seeing that you cannot do anything new that you have not done so far.
So you have already given it all that you have, and totally. So there is nothing left. This feeling that there is nothing more left to try out is called tiredness. As long as you feel that a paradise is waiting for you at some other new place, you are not tired. As long as you feel that redemption is possible using intellect and your ways, you are not yet tired.
Tiredness is a recognition, it is an admission, it is a surrender.
It is not something physical.
We all keep bearing hell in the hope for heaven, don’t we? There is nobody here, who is not chasing a heaven. The heavens have different names, different forms, and definitions. But we all are chasing heavens, thereby living in hell. Tiredness is to see that you have chased enough. Not only have you chased enough, factually too, you are repeating your old tricks. Tricks that never worked in the first place! If they didn’t work once, how will they work now?
