Pay the price of living by the Heart || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2015)
Question: What are memories? We are happy, we get sad, we get flashbacks. What are they? What do they mean?
Speaker: Memories are residues.
I would like to put it this way. There are two kinds of memories. Capacitor memories and current memories. What are capacitor memories?
Listeners: The memories are stored. There is no circulation of current. There is no resistance.
Speaker: What if the circulation is happening due to resistance? This is current memory.
Seeing is not resisting. To see something is to just observe what is happening. It is not about adding to the resistance. What if the circulation is happening precisely because you are resisting something?
If something is continuously there in the mind, it is circulating in the form of the thought, then rest assured that there is something that you are resisting. Either you are doing something per force or there is something that needs to be done, but you are not doing it per force.
Only these two options are there, nothing else. You have the solutions. Just do not resist the solutions. It is that simple.
Listener 1: What if there are side-effects?
Speaker: There will be side-effects. Take them, nothing will happen. It is guaranteed that there will be side-effects. Somebody will say something, somebody will take away something, you may lose some money, somebody may get upset. These things will happen but take the side-effects. It is worth it.
Living by the Heart is always worth it, whatever be the side-effects, whatever be the price you have to pay.
Listener 2: Is it right to say, “The life of an average human is the result of the force between the Heart and the mind”?
Speaker: Well said! Beautifully said! And that is why there is always some tension. One thing pulls you in one direction; another thing pulls you in another direction. The result is tension. Now do you know that why our lives are infested with stress? Now do you understand what is ‘stress’?
Stress is – mind versus mind, mind versus Heart.
Listener 2: Sir, you often tell us to pursue that thing as our profession that comes from the Heart. How to know that a particular thing is coming from the Heart?
Speaker: It is the result of the kind of life you are living. One does not choose a profession in isolation. Just the way you choose your T-shirt, just the way you choose your girlfriend, just the way you choose the model of your bike, just the way you choose your wrist watch, is also the way you choose your profession.
When you go to an eatery and order something to eat, you have made a choice. Have you not? There is a basis to that choice; there is a foundation of that choice. You always have choices, right? You always have a choice to do this, to do that, to watch TV, or to meditate, or to watch a movie, or to go to friends or to play cricket or whatever. There is always a choice involved. There is always a reason behind that choice; there is always a basis to that choice. That same basis will be applicable when you make your job choice as well.
The man who cannot choose his T-shirt wisely, would also surely not choose his girlfriend wisely; neither would he choose a job wisely because the choice-maker is the same. The entity that is deciding is the same. If you do not know what to eat, you will also not know where to work. If all my other choices are misplaced, then is it possible that my one particular choice will be right? Is it possible? A program that always gives faulty output, can it give a right output in one isolated case? It cannot.
So you have to look at the entirety of life. You have to be careful of every single, small decision that you are making. When these small, small decisions will be alright, then your so-called big decisions will also fall into place. But what do we want? We say, “The small decisions can continue as they are but I want the big decisions to be taken care of”. This is impossible.
Make small decisions correctly. For example when you enter this room, decide rightly where to sit. If you keep making these small decisions rightly, you will also know how to choose your partner and how to choose a job. It is such a small thing.
Listener 1: Sir, this means that right decisions can be made only if you are living in the present.
Speaker: Yes. Do not ignore the small things because everything is a small thing. Do not ignore. Do not say, “Placement matters, but small unit tests do not matter.” They matter. The one who will sit in the placement is the same one who is not writing the unit test. Or is he a different fellow?
Listener 2: We have been taught that whatever comes from the mind has characteristics as ambition, greed and fear. But whatever we see around us, whatever we do always has a motive, or an objective of profit, the first kind of negotiation which we call. So this means that all of us mostly act from the mind then?
Speaker: Yes. But why does that surprise you? That is the way the world is. My question to you is: even if the world is that rotten, do you want to live that way? The world may be that rotten, but do you want to live that way? That is the question.
Do you want to live that way? If everybody around you is diseased, would you say, “Because everybody is diseased so I should also fall sick”? Or would you say, “Now the onus is on me to not to allow the disease to hit me. I will let Health flow through me”? What would you say?
It is extremely important to realize that we live in an extremely sick world. What you read in the newspaper is sick. What you see around yourself is sick. The markets are sick. The shopping malls are sick. The streets are bustling with sickness. Educational institutions, political social and economic institutions, they are all brimming with sickness. That is disappointing. But one cannot evade the fact.
When one is Healthy, only then one can help others be Healthy. See that others are sick. And see that their sickness has affected you as well. And see that you do not want to be anymore sick. That will be the beginning of your recovery. And when you recover, you will be able to help others recover.
(Silence)
Don’t you want to recover? When you open the television, do you see Health? Or you see the same game of ambition, loot, fear, insecurity, competitiveness, greed, jealousy, possessiveness? What do you see? And do you want to participate in all that? Do you want to spend your life in all that? But if you are surrounded with that all the time, it is bound to affect you.
When life gives you opportunities, take them. If you come to a small oasis of Health, take shelter there. It is a barren desert of sickness. A small oasis is a very-very fortunate place. If you by-chance come to it, thank God for it, and stay put. Such a chance may not come again to you. Remain associated.
Listener 2: Who is God? What if I do not believe that there is one almighty who is controlling everything?
Speaker: But you believe that there is a totality of things? That is something you do not need to believe it. That is a fact. Some people call this totality, ‘God’. ‘God’ is obviously not a figure or a person, or a unit, or an entity. This entire, overwhelming, immense, infinite totality is sometimes named as ‘God’. That is it. Some people call it as ‘God’. Which is there , obviously.
~Excerpts from a Samvaad session.
