Meet the Most Deceptive Person Ever. Surprise!
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?
You exist somewhere along the radius. The nerve that connects the center to the periphery. You exist somewhere on that. And it's a very, very long nerve, extremely long nerve. They say the length of the nerves, the cumulative length of the nerves in the human body is probably sufficient to cover the distance between the earth and the sun or something like that. Don't quote me on this. Because the nerves are extremely delicate. So they cover long distances and there can be a lot of them in a small cross section. They are so delicate.
So many people say, “You know, but I experienced it, but I perceived it.” Doesn't matter. To you it might be the truth, but it is not the Truth. You felt it as the truth but it is not the Truth. And that is what separates a high consciousness from a low consciousness.
The standard mark of the low consciousness is: it lives in its own world, which is by the way also a sign of classical sign of insanity. You live in your own personal world, you have your thoughts, feelings. The higher consciousness is marked by a disbelief and indifference in perceptions. And when you are not prepared to trust your perceptions or experiences, something very wonderful happens: your perceptions and experiences become trustworthy.
When you are prepared to trust your thoughts, feelings, experiences; they keep becoming more and more untrustworthy. And the more you are skeptical towards them which means essentially being skeptical towards oneself, the more skeptical you are towards your entire body of beliefs, even the thing that you just saw or heard, even the stuff you have been deeply believing in since the last 20 years, the more skeptical you are towards it, I said, “Something magical happens.”
What? When you don't rely on them, they become reliable. When you don't trust them so much, they become trustworthy. As if they have a life of their own, as if they know that our bluff would be called out, so no point bluffing.
You are known to be someone who won't take crap lying down, right? That's how you are known in your circles. Now how would people approach you? With all their nonsense? Would they lie to you on your face? Your brand is known for being skeptical and straightforward, very resistant towards lies.
Now how would be your experiences with people? Would people come to you and lie to you on your face? They won't. So you will find that now more and more truth is coming to you. Why? Because, first of all, you were unprepared to accept the false. You said, “I don't want to take crap, full stop.” Now, crap doesn't come to you.
Corollary, you take crap and only crap comes to you in larger portions. Now don't wonder why life keeps dishing you crap. Because first of all, you made it known to everybody that you will tolerate crap. You tolerate crap and all you get is crap. Are you getting it?
In an analogous way, here, you have to start rejecting that which is subjective; which essentially means you have to start rejecting that which your system wants you to believe in.
You'll say but what else do I have to believe in? Don’t believe in anything. Don't believe in anything. Then that which is believable comes to you on its own. When I say, “Don't believe in anything.” The first step is: don't believe in yourself. Kindly, don't skip step one. It would be very dishonest. Mostly you want to skip step one and go to step two. Step two is: don't believe in others. When I say don't believe in stuff. Raghav will say, “Fine, that means don't believe in stuff but believe more and more in yourself. So keep believing in yourself; I am right, I’ll debate, I’ll resist.” Nothing purifies you more rigorously than the continuous remembrance that you are born impure. Nothing purifies you more than this and nothing is more difficult to remember and accept than this. It is a very strange method but this is the only method. All other methods are just humbug. What is the method towards purity?
Always know how impure you are. Never let your mind hoodwink you into a feeling of its honesty or cleanliness. We are born unclean, dishonest, impure. At any moment, this is the method: ask yourself, “Am I in my personal world? Am I in any world?” Because any world you are in, is bound to be a personal world. You could phrase this question in many ways depending on your own inner stuff. Is something happening in my consciousness right now? If something is happening in your consciousness right now, you are in a trap. This is what simplicity means you know: to have a still consciousness in which nothing at all is happening. And when nothing at all is happening in the consciousness, then all that which needs to happen just happens.
You must develop with practice some kind of an allergy to certain words: I felt, I thought, this is the way I am, this is how I do it. The moment you utter these words or phrases or they come in your thoughts, you should immediately just reject them. An alarm should go off, a resistance should be triggered, something bad just happened. With practice you must allow this to be deeply memorized. You see, even if somebody shouts ‘fire’, do you take time to react? You have let the word sink deep into your memory. The moment you hear that word, you know something improper is happening. Somebody just shouted ‘fire’.
You cannot say, “I’m so tolerant of the word that when the word came to me, I said, “Fine, I’ll consider it 15 minutes later.””, right? Similarly the moment you hear, “I felt.” there must be an inner resistance just as you resist fire or snake. Somebody shouts ‘snake’. Somebody doesn't even have to shout ‘snake’, somebody just whispers ‘snake’. In fact a whisper is even more scary, right? You know ‘snake’, right? And you know it's an emergency.
Similarly, the moment your thoughts say, “But I am feeling this way.” or you feel like defending yourself arguing to somebody else. But I think: ‘snake’, what? ‘snake’. There's something that you have to linguistically train in. It's a thing of language, so might not be very difficult to do.
Develop a linguistic allergy to certain words and phrases. Just the word should mean danger. Danger. Feeling, danger! Now what does this do? Does this make you dead and insensitive to feeling? That's how it sounds. No, that does not happen. Something else happens. We’ve already talked of it.
Now your feelings are not worth throwing away. When feelings start meaning danger to you, then what you feel starts having a certain purity. Are you getting it? It’s as if feelings were not a danger on their own, it's as if the feelings were carrying a pathogen on their back.
And when you started distrusting your feelings, it's the pathogen that got blocked. It's as if the vehicle is not evil in itself, but the vehicle was being used to carry a lot of mischief makers. But what do you do? How do you stop the mischief makers? The mischief makers are all coming to you in a vehicle, how do you stop them? You stop the damn vehicle. Thoughts and feelings and your personal self and experiences and perceptions are the vehicle that carry the mischief makers. Stop the vehicle.
Think of this: you have these barricades on road. Are the barricades meant to stop vehicles or people? Actually they want to stop people but the thing is: if only the people were to be stopped, no barricade can stop a person. You know how a barricade is. If you were just walking, would the barricade be able to stop you? It’s a strange thing.
You very well know that the person has no power to travel so far without the vehicle. So, if the person is to be stopped, the vehicle is to be stopped. So you make an arrangement that stops the vehicle. Similarly, all rubbish comes to you in forms of your personal impulses of consciousness, this is me, this is my life, this is this, this is that, this is that, stop it, barricade it.
What’s written on the barricade? ‘Stop’ and you have a guard patrolling it, preferably with a gun. It's needed. Some dude might just decide to blast with a barricade. So, then you require something to puncture his tires. Getting it? The same vehicle can carry something extremely pious, very holy. Bhāva can be the purest thing in the world. You understand Bhāva , feeling. But not the Bhāva that you experience. Somebody would come and say, “But you know uski feeling holy, meri feeling pe goli . (his feelings are holy, but two hoots to my feelings?) That's what you just said sir.
If Meera sings a song for Krishna, then she is to be respected. Song becomes a holy composition. And when I am expressing my feelings, then you are saying, there has to be a guard and the guard has to have a gun and you puncture the tire and all kinds of violence you are talking of. What is this?
This is life. This is the fact of consciousness. Some deserve to be worshiped. The others deserve to be shot at. The equality that you talk of is just a juvenile concept. Are you getting it? The good news is: even if right now you are someone whose personal self deserves to be just, just shredded apart; yet you can grow up into someone whose personal self becomes so pure that he or she need not reject himself or herself. Now life can become a song of self-expression. But only now, not before that. Please!
People talk of being expressive, right? As a great virtue. They say but I want to express myself. What do you have to express? The gutter says, “I want to express myself.” So that we die of stink? But the gutters of the world are the ones most eager to express themselves. Have you noticed? You know, I want to speak I, want to sing, I want to say this, I want to say that, I am so vocal about everything. Stink, stink and stink.
Ever seen a bottle of perfume or itra , how big is it? And what is the size of the gutter? That's what. The media news, they are all full of gutters expressing themselves, editorial pages, opinion pieces, gutters. And somewhere in the corner the bottle of perfume is lying, lying all closed and even if it were to express itself, the fragrance would be lost in the stink.
Reject, deny, negate and then you come to a point when you do not need to reject, deny and negate. Because you do not now exist to reject, deny or negate. Because in the first place, what is it that you needed to reject, deny, negate? Yourself, when you are no more, that's only when you really are. Now who's there to reject and what is there to be rejected? But before you are gone, do not behave and believe as if you are gone.
Until you are not gone; your being, I said, is a big stink. And when you stink, you are trouble to yourself and torture to others, are you not? In fact to yourself, you are a lesser trouble because you become so conditioned to, so used to your stink that you do not even realize that you are one big manhole. It is the others that suffer.
The entire world suffers because of you. Of course you, too, do that right? All the pathogens are having a gala picnic on your existence. Bacteria, fungi where else is the stink coming from? And what are you busy doing? You know, “I’m creating, I’m writing a new song about it. It expresses my health. It's a song of good health.”
Of course, all the pathogens are in good health. All the bacteria on your body are on your existence, are overweight. Imagine, fat fungus. It's the worst thing to behold. A man terribly confident of his nonsense, this is mayā. To believe in that which is not.
No? Otherwise, facts are really available for all to see. There would have been no mayā. We deny facts, even our memory becomes selective. A conversation involved eight dialogues. We remember seven, forget the eighth and the crucial one. Disgusting.
Has it not happened? The memory becomes infected. The seven pieces that you remember are distorted pieces. Eighth one, you have conveniently chosen to forget. And the seven that you remember are distorted. getting it? Be at the center. The wheel moves, but it is the center that holds it.
