Living Totally, Living Fully || AP Neem Candies
Acharya Prashant: It is not the action that matters. It is the point of origin of action that matters. Actions would always be dictated by situations, but your center cannot be dictated by situations.
So, you cannot be particular about action. If you really have eyes, you will not want to look at the action and judge the actor based on the action. But that is what we commonly do, right? We judge the actor based on the action, we judge the doer based on the deed. Do we do that or not?
But deeds can vary: what is right in one situation will not be right in another situation. You may remain thoroughly and consistently compassionate in situation A and situation B, but your action in situation A coming out of compassion can be diametrically opposite to your action in situation B coming again out of compassion. In both these places you are the same, you are the same compassionate one; yet your actions would be seemingly opposite.
So, if you are being judged only on your action, then the judgment would go haywire. Living totally, I repeat, does not mean that you need to have a flamboyant lifestyle, that you need to be lavishly spending or lavishly consuming. Living totally means: “I operate from a point within me that is not hungry, that is not thirsty, that lives, abides in its own internal satisfaction. Which means that even as I eat, as the body is being given food, a point within me does not need any food.”
Even to say that it does not need any food is not exact. There exists a point that neither needs food nor is in denial of food; it is beyond hunger and satisfaction. Neither can we say that it is desirous of food nor can we say that its desire for food has been satisfied, because it is something that is dimensionally different from all material, all food, all desires, and all fulfillment of desire.
Usually, what happens is that when a fellow comes to a teacher and the fellow appears to be living a lackluster life, the teacher says, “You know what, you are not yet living fully. You need to live fully, pura jio (live fully)! You must live totally.” And what the teacher implies is, or what the listener interprets is that “I need to have a more kingsize life. I need to go out, spend, dance, party, display, be loud, have all the pleasures, the thrills, the adventures.” Is that not what is implicitly implied in living totally? No, that is not at all what is meant by living totally. That is a very puerile definition of living totally, suitable for adolescents.
Living totally is something totally different. Which means you may go and eat in a restaurant, or you may eat in your small and humble kitchen; wherever you eat, you are all right. You may go and eat in the most expensive five-star property, or you may eat in a roadside Dhaba; there is something within you which is not a function of the place where you are eating. You might be talking to an old man, or you may have an infant in your arms; there is something within you that does not change even as your behavior towards these two entities must be different. You could not be behaving the same way in front of or in relation with an old man as you behave with an infant.
So, all that is external keeps changing according to situations, but something within you remains still.
Living totally means that you remain the same in the moment of your deepest fulfillment and in the moment of your deepest frustration.
You are very very fulfilled; your mind, your body, all are feeling the vibration of that fulfillment. It is an ecstasy, a rise, the whole organism is excited; yet something within you feels not excitement. Not that it is feeling bored or dull; it is just that it is not feeling excited. Even as the mind is excited, there is something that is not excited. And we are saying ‘not excited’ only to emphasize that it does not have the same quality as the mind. Otherwise, to even say that it is not excited is to stretch language beyond its limits.
And then there is a moment in which you are depressed, irritated, heavy; the mind is feeling the burden, the body is feeling the pain. The whole system appears to be overloaded with grief, with all kinds of neurotic energies; yet there is something within you that is not at all frustrated, not at all feeling low.
That does not mean that it is feeling high. I repeat that feeling low, the phrase ‘feeling low’, is relevant only in the context of the mind that is feeling low. To emphasize that there is something within you that does not have the same quality as the mind, we are saying that that something is not feeling low. That ‘not feeling low’ does not mean that it is feeling high. It is neither feeling high nor feeling low, it is simply remaining untouched. That is that point of totality.
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