How to get rid of insecurity? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Acharya Prashant: Anuj is asking, ‘*What is insecurity? Why do we experience it? And essentially how to get rid of it?*’

Insecurity is fear. Go into the word ‘secure’. ‘Secure’ means that which cannot go away, which cannot be taken way. It is secure; it cannot go; it cannot be stolen; It cannot be taken way from you and that is ‘security’.

The thing with us is, that whatever we have has come from outside and what is really ours, of that we have no understanding.

Whatever we identify with, has come from the ‘external’. Somebody comes to you and says, ‘Anuj, you are brilliant’, somebody else has come and it says that you are brilliant; because the mind is not fully alert, what does it do? It does not want to know on its own. It says, ‘he is saying that ‘I am brilliant’ so I internalize it as, ‘I am brilliant’. So look at the process, somebody says that you are brilliant and that statement changes to, ‘I am brilliant’.

Now, my sense of myself that ‘I am brilliant’ is not coming from within me, it is coming from somebody else. It is dependent on somebody else, because it is dependent on somebody else, I will now be insecure.

Somebody told me that I am brilliant and I said that I am brilliant. Now if somebody else or the same person tells me that I am stupid then I have to accept that as well. So, there will always be a great danger; I will always be afraid; I will be afraid that somebody else will come and declare me to be stupid. Getting it?

Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.

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