How to gain liberation from duality? || Acharya Prashant (2019)

Questioner: How to gain liberation from duality?

Acharya Prashant: By knowing that it is duality. Right now, you are calling the self-world relationship as dual, but only right now. Ordinarily, you do not see it as a dual relationship. Ordinarily, when you are walking through the street, when you look at the hill, do you realize that it is not the hill but you and the hill together? Then you totally forget that it is nothing but duality dancing within and around.

Right now you are saying, “How do I approach the duality?” But you have not probably yet come to the situation where you see duality as duality. You do not need to approach duality. Once duality is seen as duality, there is no need to approach. You approach duality with interest and temptation and identification only when you do not see duality as duality. Once duality is realized as duality, then who is left to approach it? North Pole has a fascination for South Pole. Gold has no fascination for North Pole or South Pole. You have a magnet, and the magnetic field runs from one pole to the other. Keep gold beside the magnet—does the gold piece bother for the magnetic field?

The practice, the sādhanā lies in continuously seeing and remembering that duality is duality, and then there is no need to have any method to approach.

You walk through the market; you look at something that appears tempting, a piece of cake or a samosa. At that very moment, do you realize that it’s not the samosa that is attracting you, that it is an entire mind-object, subject-object system operating to which you are an unnecessary addition? At that moment, does that realization hit you? If it doesn’t, then you aren’t seeing duality at all. At that moment when the piece of cake appeals to you, you say, “The cake is outside of me, and the cake will come to me and satisfy me.” Now, that is no appreciation of duality; that is not at all a realization of duality.

Catch the thing red-handed when it is there, right then, and after that nothing else is needed. It’s like saying, “Once we catch the thief, how do we prevent the theft?” The thing is, you never catch the thief at all. And if the thief is ever caught, after that is there a need to prevent the theft? Look at the incongruency. The question says, “Once we catch the thief, how do we prevent the theft?” First of all, you never catch the thief; you only shout and yell two hours after the theft has taken place. The thief has coolly made away with your new bike, and then you wake up in the morning, and you go to the place yawning, “Where is the bike?” and you go look for the bike on the terrace and all other places, and then you start yelling, “Bike! Bike! Bike!”

If somehow you happen to have the practice of staying awake when the thief is awake and you catch the thief red-handed, would you still need to ask, “How do I prevent the theft?” The theft has already been prevented. All that was needed was your awakening when sleep was luring you.

Yā niśā sarva-bhūtānāṃ tasyāṃ jāgarti saṃyamī . Remember that one? When the entire world is asleep, then Krishna says that wise is the one who stays awake— tasyāṃ jāgarti saṃyamī . When it is night for the world and the thief is busy doing away with your bikes, it is then that you must stay awake.

Kabir Sahib sings: Raat me chor aawega . The thief will come at night. You better stay awake.

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