How to Know When to Stop?
Questioner: How to know when I am done and there’s no desire left. Our dissatisfaction can lead us to a different and new desire. So, what’s the correct time? How can we know when to stop?
Acharya Prashant: No, no, you can never stop. As long as you are alive, the flow of action will continue. So, there’s no stopping as far as the limbs are concerned, as far as the mind is concerned. Till the last moment your body will be functional, your mind will be functional. Stopping can occur only in an inner sense. Your inner self is continuously moving to attain a certain contentment.
When you go to the root of your inner discontentment, you find something. That which you find is called contentment. But that contentment is found only when you are courageous enough to not only face your discontentment but actually penetrate it. Penetrate your discontentment and see what you get. It’ll not be as per your definitions but what you get, that you can call contentment. Not the contentment of your dreams, not the contentment that you have so far experienced in life. It will be something different. Whatever it is, call it contentment, provided you have honestly penetrated your discontentment.
Are you getting it?
So, there will be that inward cessation of movement. That inward cessation of knocking from door to door, that wandering across the landscape of misery will stop. And once that stops, journeying in the usual flow of life is called joy.
Now you can journey, having stopped. You get into things, you commit to things, you fight hard, you win, you lose, there are so many things that happen. But inwardly you are unperturbed, inwardly you have arrived, inwardly you have stopped. No thing means the inner self to you anymore.
It’s not that things have lost their meaning. Things retain their meaning. But no thing now means the Truth to you, no thing now means the self to you. Things mean what things must.
You lost a laptop, you didn’t lose your heart. It seems obvious when I put it this way. But then, go meet someone who has just lost his laptop and you will know that the fellow feels that he has indeed lost his heart.
Or if laptop appears too material to you then go meet someone who has lost a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse or a lot of money. And you will know what is meant by a person's feeling as if he has lost his or her heart.
Once you have arrived in the inner sense, then things remain things, nothing becomes the heart to you. You lose a thing, you feel sad. You feel sad because you lost a thing and you feel only as sad as the loss of a thing deserves.
You win a thing you feel happy, but you feel only as happy as the achievement of a thing deserves. Nothing gets added or reduced within, be it an achievement or a loss.
Are you getting it?
So, keep doing the right things. There’s no question of asking where to stop. You should stop when it comes to things that you must not do. And if there are things that you must do, why ask where to stop? Continue. All that requires, that you first of all observe life and do not continue with an unnecessary thing within. Find it, face it, drop it.
