Learnings to Practice
Questioner: Sir, from your experience, what can you tell a student that he should do so that there can be some incremental improvement in him or her? What can be the practical takeaways from this session?
Acharya Prashant: Just as you keep looking outward all the time, try making it a practice to have an internal sense also. Do not just leave this field unattended. Anything that bothers you, attend to it. Ask yourself some pointed questions. Anything you are putting your time into, be clear, why that activity merits your time. Very importantly, if you are committing yourself to something or somebody, ask yourself what is that the commitment really entails.
When you say, you want advice from me as a student, you are a student later, you are a person first. Each of us are person first, no? And to be a person, is to be active within. Even we are sitting still apparently, we are active within. You should know the nature of this inner activity.
You see, if we are using this camera here and it is recording our bodies, then probably it’s recording bodies that are sitting reasonably still. Could that camera record our minds, then it would have recorded probably utter chaos, a lot of disorder. Or, it could have also recorded a total absence. A lot of people might not have appeared in the camera at all because the minds are elsewhere. That’s the field, that you should not leave unaddressed, I said.
Keep seeing what’s going on there. It’s not unimportant, please, but because we are educated in everything that is external- Science deals with objects, Humanities deal with societies and systems and then there are languages and there is Management of things, then there is Mathematics that deals with numbers, figures here and there. These are the things, we taught to deal with. We are not taught to deal with ourselves.
Learn to deal with yourself, not only in moments when you are down or depressed, even more so in moments, when you are happy or aesthetic. Ask yourself what is this happiness about, what’s going on. It’s a very important question to keep asking yourself, ‘What is going on?’
