Spiritual Experience vs Spiritual Realisation || Acharya Prashant (2022)

Questioner (Q): First of all, Acharya Ji, you are very focused on scriptures, especially the authentic scriptures—Upanishads, more specifically. So, what do you consider more important, spiritual knowledge or spiritual experience?

Acharya Prashant (AP): See, there is nothing called as spiritual experience. Experience by itself is a thing in duality and has to be understood. What is experience, first of all? There exists the ego tendency inside and it keeps projecting a world all around itself, and that's what it calls as experience—to take cognizance of the world that it's seeing, touching, feeling, thinking.

So, experience consists of these two entities: the experiencer that we call as the self or the ego, and the world that is experienced. So, there is the self, there is the world and there is the interaction between the two. That is the process of the experience. Now, the thing is that the one who experiences is himself quite fictitious. The more you examine the experiencer, the more you realize that the experiencer is itself a product of time and situations and the entire process of condition.

So, this experiencer itself is a product of the process of conditioning. For example, we have this India vs South Africa cricket match going on these days. So, let’s say, I'm an Indian and you are a South African and we have this big TV screen showing the match. Let's say, India is winning the match. The same happening is experienced very differently, almost in opposite ways, by the two of us. I’ll feel elated by what is happening on the screen and you might feel annoyed or even depressed. So, then what is the worth of the experience? Experience depends on your time, place, conditioning, what you have been made to go through.