If you don’t know who you are, then who is asking? || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Questioner (Q): Sir, how to remember that remembrance—that which you are?

Acharya Prashant (AP): You don’t need to remember. Because when you remember, you are also prone to forgetting.

Do you remember your driving license number? We don’t even remember the phone number of the first sim card we had. How many of you remember that? But we say we want to remember the Truth. If you remember the Truth, you will also forget it. So, don’t try to remember, don’t even remember. Conveniently, rid yourself of the responsibility to remember anything.

Why do you want to remember that which you anyway are?

Why do you want to think about that which is outside the province of the thought?

Why do you want all that?

Q: Because we want to know that.

AP: You cannot know that; you can only surrender to that.

Knowing is violence, knowing is arrogance. You want to know the Truth as one knows a zebra in a zoo! You have confined a zebra in a zoo and you are saying, "That is Zebra".

(Laughs)

That is our attitude towards the Truth. We think that Truth is some exotic thing brought down from the Himalayas. "It is there in that cage, pay the price, enter it, have a look at it, now you know it". The price could be anything – yoga, tantra, mantra, japa, tapa. Pay the price and have a look at that zebra! Fluorescent stripes.

You never know the Truth; you dissolve in the Truth.

You are gone. Now, who will know?

When you are so disappeared that there is nobody left to even know, then it is there. Unfortunately, when it is there, then you will not be there to know. The one who surrenders to this situation is the one who has known. And the one who continues with this desire ‘to know the Truth’, is someone who will never know.

The Upanishads say, “Those who say they know, they don’t know. And those who do not know, they are the ones who really know.”

Q: Then, how to realize that we don’t know?

AP: There is nothing called realization. Who gave you this word called ‘realization’?

There are only two things—experience and surrender.

‘You do not know’ is a matter of experience. Obviously, every day, when you are stumbling, falling, getting deceived, your expectations are getting betrayed. So, you know that you do not know.

And the other thing is surrender and it is not about knowing; it is about dropping the desire to know. When my desire, even for the small cannot really fructify, what business do I have in desiring the sky with my open palms? These palms cannot even hold three big mangoes! But I want the entire sky to be confined in these.

‘I want to know the Truth’, hold these mangoes first.

(Laughter)

And if you can, then I have pumpkins.

This is only about your limitations; it is not about the limitless. So, know your limitations, and that is sufficient.

To be at peace with your limitation is the same as being limitless. Only when you are limitless can you be at peace with your limitations.

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