If most of your waking time is spent in pursuit of physical sustenance or physical pleasure, then you are just surviving. Real life is when the body, the physicality are not the end but the means. Of what use is life, then, if all you have to look for is physical-mental security, and fulfilment of blind desire? You live when there is something beyond physicality to live for. That's the defining and exclusive characteristic of a truly alive human being - Freedom.
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Acharya Prashant: How to live and not just survive? Wow! What does it mean just to survive? It means to exist for the sake of the body. I am just trying to put in certain technical terms for the sake of clarity.
If most of your waking time is spent in pursuit of physical sustenance or physical pleasure, then you are just surviving. We sleep for six to eight hours, and another two hours are spent taking care of the body; that makes it eight to ten. You are left with fourteen and sixteen hours.
Of these fourteen-sixteen hours, three hours are spent commuting if you are in Bombay. So, you are left with what, ten-twelve something. Of these ten-twelve hours, if you are spending eighty-ninety percent just taking care of your livelihood or trying to maximize your physical pleasure, then you are just surviving.
What's common between just striving for livelihood and maximizing physical pleasures? Livelihood is the thing that you enter into so that you can maintain your physical sustenance. So, physicality is the common link.
