You will have to live with the consequences of what you are and pay the price. You cannot be selective about pain and pleasure. Your patterns give you pleasure, and you don’t complain. But when those same patterns bring pain, you say, 'I want to get rid of my pain.' Teachers offering miraculous solutions only numb the pain. True change in behaviour comes from bearing the pain, not resisting it. Your entire training is to resist it. Don’t resist it. Take it. Let it come.
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Questioner: I am distracted, both mentally and physically.The world pulls me in different directions. I chase this and that. I chase respect. I chase accomplishments. I chase women and sex as well. All this is a problem, because it interferes with my day-to-day comfort. The urge is so over-powering that it disrupts my daily patterns. How to deal with this?
Acharya Prashant: You have a particular way of living and you want to talk about it. You have selectively picked up one aspect of your living for discussion, because you want to get rid of it.
We do not see that it is impossible to change just one aspect of one’s behavior. There are many ways in which the pattern of our mind finds expression, a thousand ways. Of these thousand ways, a few pertain to academics, a few pertain to your job, and a few pertain to your beliefs about the world, about religion, about politics. But of all these thousand ways in which the mind finds expression, you pick up only two or three for discussion.Which are these two or three ways? The ones that are the most conspicuous, right? You do not talk of the others ways because they are either hidden, or are pleasurable so far, or at least they don’t pose any problem of any kind. Even a moral dilemma is not being posed by them. They are either socially sanctioned, or they are below the radar of your consciousness. You do not even know that these patterns exist and they come from this source. So, you are alright with them. You never talk about them.
