The self is a hollow, incomplete thing by its own admission. It has no free existence of its own; it is nothing but associations with the objects around it, absorbing its worth from the environment. To hide this absence of self-worth, you keep running after all kinds of things, yet the promise of fulfillment is never kept, and you are deceived. Therefore, to have any self-worth, you must have clarity about the self. All wisdom literature is about clearing away your false notions of the self.
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Questioner: Hello sir, I am Harshit Pandey. I am a second-year B.Tech student at IIT Kanpur. Sir, first of all, it is a great pleasure to talk to you. My question is mainly about self-worth. I want to know: is self-worth a genuine concept or just an egoistic or narcissistic way of assigning value to insignificant human beings? And if it is real, then how can one measure it and how is it defined?
I also came across one of your quotes from the book: “If your self-worth depends upon anything external, then life will play with it like a puppet.” I want to know, then, what are the factors self-worth is assigned to? Is it assigned to efforts? But then animals like a donkey also put in efforts, are they worthy?
The second question is: can a person's worth exist independent of others' perception?
Acharya Prashant: What you are asking is probably one of the most important questions ever faced by a person. If it is not the most important question, it belongs to the family of the most important ones. Why? Because it deals with the self. When you say, “What is self-worth? Is self-worth important? Why does self-worth have to depend on others?” and other related things that you will probably come up with as we discuss. All of these terms and all of these questions are very obviously centered on the self. Right?
