Acharya Prashant: You are not identified with it. You know you’re just holding it and can drop it any moment. But if mistakenly, you forget that it is possible to drop the rat and that rat becomes a part of your identity, personality, then you will be in trouble.
Then you’ll keep holding the rat because it is now a part of your being. That’s what you have told yourself. Now you’ll keep holding the rat and make efforts to get rid of all that which comes with being associated with the dead rat.
Your efforts are fundamentally misplaced. You should have not proceeded with the efforts at all. In fact, by proceeding with your efforts you are only assuring yourself that your assumption about yourself had some substance.
You are trying so hard to cleanse yourself, to wash your face. You are scrubbing yourself all over the body. At this moment if someone comes and tells you that you are already neat and clean, you will feel like an idiot. It is now necessary to convince yourself that there’s something terribly filthy about you. That is how all your efforts would be justified.
You look at this stupid and dangerous loop. Some people take bathe because they are feeling dirty, others convince themselves that they are dirty because they are compulsive bath takers. Because, it is a habit for me to take a bath because I have made it mandatory for myself that I must keep rubbing and polishing myself every few hours, so to justify my habit, I convince myself that I am indeed filthy and stinking. That is how most wrong battles are fought. Because you must fight, because fighting and conflict has become a necessity for one’s mind, one justifies himself by saying that the war is needed.
The mind is like a weapon’s factory. To continue with its output, it needs wars. Why else are you producing all the fighter jets, cannons and aircraft carriers? There must be war. So, there are weapons that are produced to fight wars and there are wars that are fought because too many weapons have been produced. Now something must be done with those weapons, otherwise how do you justify the factory? Unfortunately, most of our wars are production led. Because the mind is habituated that it must fight, so it picks up some war or the other. The entire life has been built around wrong assumptions and all wrong assumptions are, in some sense, cunning. They are there to hide something else.
One might be in the business of weapons just because one is too lazy to learn something else. You won’t accept that you are too lazy to move and learn. You would rather keep asserting that war is necessary. Are you getting it?
If your self-image is that of a warrior, who am I? Someone who conquers the enemy. Then you need wars. The enemy might not be a person necessarily; the enemy might be a situation. Any challenge is tantamount to a war. Now if you must uphold your image, you must seek war. Rather, build wars. Are you getting it?
Defeat is not the end of war; defeat is not in the end of the war. Mostly defeat lies in the beginning of war. A needless war, the moment it begins, the point from where it begins is already a defeat. Now it doesn’t matter whether, after a time the formal result, the apparent result looks like a victory or a defeat. We are great losers in life not because we meet with regular defeats but because we are fighting the wrong battles. Most of our effort or conflict, our strife is simply unnecessary. We need not have entered it. Are you getting it?
Man has only two options, either see who you are and what you have and delight in it, simply feel grateful; or do not see who you are and what you have and keep wallowing in self pity and incompleteness and therefore keep picking unnecessary battles. The more you pick unnecessary battles, the more you’ll feel defeated. The more you’ll feel defeated, the more will be the urge to fight another unnecessary battle. It’s a downward spiral. Once caught, you remain caught.
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