Liberation, confusion, cognitive dissonance || Acharya Prashant (2019)

Question: Acharya Ji, if Liberation is the ultimate destiny, why don’t we get it naturally?

Acharya Prashant Ji: Liberation is Freedom, right? Liberation is Freedom. So you are free to not to be free. You are already Liberated.

It is because you are Liberated, that you can choose to remain not Liberated.

Good! You will get what you order. Everything is there on the menu. And the system respects your choice. The day you will choose Liberation, Liberation is yours. Till then , keep feasting on the various delicacies of life, and keep paying the bill. On that menu, everything is very highly chargeable, except for Liberation.

We often judge things by the price, don’t we? Suffering comes at a very high price.

Questioner 1: And it’s very valuable also.

Acharya Prashant Ji: Liberation is there for the taking. So who wants it?

Question 2: Acharya Ji, how to remove confusion from life?

Acharya Prashant Ji: Were you totally confused, would you know that you were confused? Who is the one who knows confusion? Is he too confused? And if he too is confused, then how does he know that he is confused?

For you to strongly assert that you are confused, there must surely be some point in you, that is not confused.

So, why are you unnecessarily cheating us? We know everything, right? And still we just pretend as if ignorance is so deep, and wide, and overpowering.

Questioner 2: Acharya Ji, but there is something called ‘cognitive dissonance’. What role does it play?

Acharya Prashant Ji:

It is not even cognitive in nature. Had it been cognitive, it would have been a thing of the mind. All cognition is of the mind.

That which you really know is at a point, a little away from the cognising mind. The dissonance is not between cognition and cognition. It is between cognition, and pre-cognition – something that exists, prior to cognition. Something that is a-priory to cognition. Something that is foundation to all cognition.

Cognition has to be taught, Freedom doesn’t have to be taught. Cognition develops over experience. There is something that is already fully developed, even before all experience.

And that is the difference between Psychology and Spirituality.

Psychology limits itself to the mind.

Spirituality says that – even to know the mind, you have to go a little beyond the mind.

So Spirituality says that – even if you have to just study the psyche, you still have to go a little beyond the psyche.

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