Relationships: Trust & Broken expectations ||Acharya Prashant, International Psychology Summit(2023)

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, we have talked about friends and how we have the freedom to choose our friends, and elaborating on that thought we don’t have the freedom to choose our family members, our relatives. And the way we are brought up, the way we are socialized, there is an implicit trust that we take for granted that we can trust these people, and we never question that thing and years pass by but then external conditions bring challenges and problems, then those relationships are put to the real test. We are tested and so do the rest, and in that sometimes some betray us or they face betrayal from us. It’s ok they were having some expectations from us that we couldn’t fulfill and we have some expectations which they couldn’t fulfill. I understand all that.

I have gone through this pain also post-Covid. A lot of emotions, a lot of pain, and a lot of trauma, I have risen above it now. I am functioning well, in fact, I am flourishing, but what keeps coming back to me is the Karmic account. First, is that a concept? Do you believe in that? I feel that so much of Karmic account has build-up over so many years, lived in a particular manner for twenty, years never thought anything, nor did anything negative happened. Neither we did nor they. Now, it bothers me that there is a lot of Karmic account and will I ever be able to liberate from that? I don’t have any vengeful feelings for them, nothing like that, I don’t know about them but how do I try to liberate myself from that? Is there a possibility?

Acharya Prashant (AP:) What is a Karmic account?

Q: Yes, that, first of all, I don’t have much clarity on, what exactly Karmic account is. A lot of things between us are common, entangled.

AP: All that is mind stuff.

Q: Yes.

AP: Simply mind stuff. There is no account anywhere, it’s just mind stuff. Nothing.

Q: Then how do we free our mind from that and move on and then again trust people?

AP: The mind is dictated by the ego, ‘I’. If there is something in the mind, it is only because the ego thinks that is profitable to keep it in the mind. The mind is the house, the ego is the owner of that house. The mind is the house of which the ego is the owner. So, if you find stuff in that house, it is because somebody thinks that it is of use to keep that stuff there, otherwise, why would the stuff remain there? So, if there are memories, entanglements and such things then please observe the benefit that you think you are deriving from them. There has to be a certain pleasure that you are taking from them, otherwise, they cannot stay there. I will ask you a question.

Q: More of a pain rather than a pleasure.

AP: Even in that pain, there is security for identity. Think of it, do you remember everything over the last twenty-three years? None of us probably remember what we had for breakfast the day before yesterday. Do you remember that? We don’t remember that. So, the mind selectively stores stuff and it precisely follows the dictates of the ego. It remembers only that which it considers important from the point of view of pleasure or identity, otherwise, you won't remember it. There is an auto-deletion process inside. Things get auto-deleted. You must be wondering why there is stuff that did not auto-delete — it does not delete because we derive pleasure from it.

We go back to it and we want to virtually repeat the experience to again have the experience that we once had. If that experience gave you pleasure, then you want to revisit it, don’t you? In fact you want to model your future experiences on the past experience. So, to have a future, in some sense, remembering the past becomes important.

Once you have your source of joy firmly within you in the present, there will be no need to, time and again, go back to the past. In that sense, it is the insufficiency of the present that shows up in constant almost ritualistic hankering for the past. If the present is healthy, well-nourished and demanding, full of the right kind of challenges, how will you have an opportunity to remain or be nostalgic? And we all know that, right? When life is full of the right kind of activity or occupation then there is no space for the past or even the future. And if there is a certain hollowness or vacuum in the present then the mind fills it up by streaming into the past and projecting a future. So, the solution lies in living — forcing yourself, almost forcing yourself to live a fulfilling life. And then those things will become too small to be remembered.

Q: So, you mentioned the first answer right at the beginning of the session. You said, “We are living a hollow life,” then as a part of the answer to another question you mentioned that we need to have friends who take us from the lower pleasures to the higher pleasures, and just now you mentioned that we need to live a fulfilling life, and there is nothing like a Karmic balance. So, I would like you to elaborate on what is the purpose of life. And what actually Karma stand for?

AP: See, right since the moment of our birth we are crying, so that’s the purpose of life — ‘to stop crying’. And it’s just that we become nuanced and sophisticated enough to not shed tears, and that would be quite upsetting also and irritating to be always seen wiping one’s face. But internally there is always a certain gloom that shows up in various mental states of hope, ambition, fear, even happiness and pleasure, attraction, attachment. Why is the mind so vulnerable to these things? It is because we are unfulfilled since birth. The one we are within, the ‘I’, keeps saying: “Hello, me!” It is constantly saying, “I am still not complete, something is missing.” Don’t you see we all remain desirous our entire lives? And the fulfilment of any particular desire never succeeds in fulfilling us.

A particular desire might get fulfilled, that does happen sometimes, but we never get fulfilled. So, that points to the purpose of life. — To seek what that lack of fulfillment is about, to understand this self, this internal self that is always clamouring, always complaining and never complete. What is that thing within? And that understanding makes it then easy to be liberated from suffering. So, Mukti — that’s the purpose of life. And it’s easy if we can just see where all our desires come from. The game of desires in itself is sufficient to point at anything, but we rush behind our desires or we sometimes suppress our desires, but rarely do we understand our desires. If we can understand the process within by just looking at it through our daily actions, relationships, thoughts, feelings and instincts, then that proves to be very liberating.

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