Why Life Seems to Involve Pain?
Questioner: Hello, um, my question is, if the beginning and ending are, uh, not mine—when I was not involved in any of those—then why is this whole, business of existence, it's, uh... it contains suffering in it? And why is my nature, like you said, suffering? Which is... which I feel that it is. So what... what is the reason, I would say, or cause of my nature being of suffering?
Acharya Prashant: No, in Prakriti, the nature is not of suffering. The moment you say my nature, then there is suffering. Then there is suffering.
Rabindranath Tagore very beautifully said, "The butterfly lives not years, not months, but days, and still has time long enough." You can pull out the exact quote; it runs somewhat like this.
Suffering is because you have fanciful concepts; otherwise, there is just the flow of life. This is happening, that is happening. You do not take yourself as life in totality; you take yourself as an isolated segment with boundaries. I am only this much, I am only this much. You create yourself as a part of the whole, and then you want to consume the whole to become whole.
I am a part, then there is the whole, and I don't like not being the whole. It feels incomplete. So what is my relationship with the with the rest of creation? I want to eat it up.
We divide existence into two parts, don't we? I and the world, ‘Me and the universe. Don't we do that? This and that, this and that, this and that. And the moment you do this and that, suffering begins.
Questioner: So, this whole process is just to go back to our initial stage? Because I... I just remembered when, uh, I used to be young, when I used to see the whole, you know... when the whole market and everything... I used to feel that, there is something wrong, but I want it. And I used to feel that I'm more, uh... I'm—I'm good, I'm okay right now, but I still want to enter that domain of of excitement. So that feeling of boredom—so is that where, uh, we all are trying to go back to? Because when... when your mind is calm, and it's the... you don't want anything, but still, I remember I used to feel as bored. So I used to go searching for excitement. And now it feels like the excitement got so, so much that, you want to end... end the whole thing.
Acharya Prashant: You cannot go back. You can only be better than what you are today. And when I say you can be better than today, I mean lesser than today. Lesser is better. There's no way of going back, and there's no point in going back.
Questioner: I mean that nature, that way of being—yeah.
Acharya Prashant: You didn't have anything special in the past. Had we had anything special in the past, then we wouldn't have come to the state of suffering we find ourselves in today. So, the past is not the solution. You have to realize how things are with you today. You have to look at your interactions with human beings today. You have to see how you relate to your body, to your friends, to your workplace—all these things. How they are panning out today.
And from there, you—you develop an insight, and that insight offers, uh, some freedom. If the present is a problem, the past is not the solution. The solution lies in observation of the present, not in a fictitious return to the past.
Questioner: So, you said it's about, uh, decreasing, uh, the... reducing the present, uh... uh, the mental things?
Acharya Prashant: No, I'm not talking of doing something. I'm talking of observing whatever is happening.
We do not know what is going on. If I do not know what's going on, what do I reduce or increase? I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to drive—which pedal do I press? Which knob do I push? Which button? So, I must know.
It's not about action. It's about seeing and realizing what's going on.
