Our two deepest tendencies || Acharya Prashant, on Vedanta (2020)

Acharya Prashant (AP): Two favorite tendencies of the ego are being called out, discounted, exposed as false. What are those two tendencies or inclinations?

The first one is ‘sambhūti’ – and remember that while the ego is being addressed, the aim is the Immeasurable as we said – so the ego is being told that if you want to get rid of the suffering that comes with all the finiteness and the limits that you have, then you have to proceed towards that which is something totally different from you, beyond you and unless it is totally different from you, obviously there can be no freedom from suffering because in your current state even in an expanse of your current state, even in each and every state that is related to your current state, there is bound to be finiteness and measurability.

All the states that you can think of or experience are in your own domain and expressible therefore in words. Which means that every state that you can talk of or experience will involve suffering for you because it will be in your own domain and in your own domain lies your suffering. Therefore the beyond has to be expressed as ‘That’ or ‘It’. No name has been given. No name has been given simply – “It is different, they say, from becoming, it is different, they say, from non-becoming.”

You have to understand why the Upanishads so respectfully desist from pulling that infinite Truth within the little maze of their verbal expanse; very respectfully they keep away. They say: we may not know the Infinite but for sure we know that it is beyond us. And we know how little we are; of that we have become quite certain. Knowing our littleness we do not feel entitled at all to even call You by a name; let alone touch You.