It is impossible to understand || Acharya Prashant, on Vedanta (2022)

Questioner (Q): My question is on understanding, and I know you have talked about this a lot in many different videos. Somewhere in the past, you have said that understanding is not something personal, it is universal. And my question about this is: how an individual can, for sure, know that he has understood something? Or it is just not an illusion like a cerebral illusion in his mind that he got something and, in fact, he has not understood anything? Because you have seen it and we see that, very often in the sessions also, that you explain something, people say that they get it. But do they really get it?

I mean personally, I think that unless the response has really touched you to the core or it has transformed you on some level internally, you are not really understood anything. It is just a cerebral thing. So, can we say that the elimination or disappearance of suffering, in some way, is the understanding?

Acharya Prashant (AP): There is nothing called ‘understanding’ actually. There is just the process of understanding.

Q: It is not a destination.

AP: It is not a destination, and you continue to understand as you see that it is impossible to understand. Understand a thing.

You see, anything that you look at is nothing in isolation, it is linked to 40 other things. So, the first step in understanding is, you want to understand something in particular, and you discover that the thing is nothing in particular. You want to understand, why you are annoyed with your son, let’s say. The first step is to discover that the annoyance is not really a thing, particularly between you and your son, the scope is wider. So, you have discovered that you cannot understand that thing.