Observing the world, one comes to the ego. Observing ego, one comes to the Self || Acharya Prashant

Questioner: If love is death of ego, then loving man will be just soul. So, is love Moksha (Salvation)?

Acharya Prashant: Everything that you just said, is a concept in your mind. Ego lives on concepts; ego lives on thoughts—concepts are thoughts.

What is the definition of a concept? Where you define A in terms of B, A is equal to B, and you define B in terms of C, and you define C in terms of D, and ultimately everything is defined in terms of everything else, and nothing has any independent definition of its own—that's a concept.

So, what is love? Death of the ego. What is ego? Lovelessness. So, love is defined in terms of ego, ego is defined in terms of love, and what are both defined in terms of? That you have no idea of. Because there is nothing independent in your life, and hence there is no independent definition either in your life. Then you said, "Moksha, enlightenment, emancipation," whatever that means. Now what does that mean to you? Again, ego-lessness.

Whatever you are saying is just ego. What do you mean by death? What do you mean by love? Don't start with all that. Don't go into fancy words like enlightenment. The only thing that is close to you, as you are, is your daily self. Just observe it. Sitting on that chair, continuing with your daily life, you will neither know ego, nor love, nor enlightenment.

You will have to observe your daily life. You will have to first of all come to the fact of the ego, not the concept of the ego. Coming to the concept is something that the ego really likes, because concepts are the diet of ego—it flourishes upon them. Keep feeding concepts to ego, and the ego says, “Yes, yes, yes. I know more. I know about love also, I know about enlightenment also."