Acharya Prashant: If you live on the circumference of life, things will always be fragmented for you. Not that things are actually fragmented. It's just that what you experience is decided by your location. That's why I love to continuously ask, “Are you all experiencing the same thing here?” not possible. This experiment used to be my favorite. There would be large audiences, 100, 200 of them and I would be speaking and I could see that several of them are quite smug in the confidence that they are getting what I am saying.
So I would say, “Pull out a piece of paper and just summarize the session in 5 or 10 points. Do that.” And the people would gladly do that. Then I’ll say, “Now exchange your sheet with your neighbor.” And then there will be commotion because what you think I have said is not at all what even your neighbor thinks I have said, not a distant person, even your neighbor thinks that I have been saying something totally different from what you think I have been saying.
And you have no idea what your neighbor believes I am saying.
Sometimes people would be almost shell struck. “No, but sir never said this, what have you written?” And the neighbor would be equally insistent. “He said exactly this, what have you written rather?”
Each of us is very confident of our experiences. “It happened because I experienced it. It is true because I know it. It is a fact because I saw it!” Not true, sir. What you are saying could be true but only at the center of the wheel, you don't exist there. Had you existed at the center of the wheel, you could have trusted your perceptions completely. But where do you exist?
