That which you do to solve your problem becomes the problem || Acharya Prashant (2016)
Question: I suffer a lot because I do not know my child has an incident, I suffer, I cry. What can I do then?
AP: Whatever you do, if you do, knowing that you are going to do it, are you doing it or is the thought doing it?
Listener 1: It is the thought.
AP: And we have just discovered that you need not have thought before the doing. You really do not need to have thought before the action. Thoughtless action is possible and it is not as bad as the popular culture makes it out to be. We use thoughtlessness almost as an abuse.
We say, ‘What a thoughtless man!’ Don’t we? When someone acted in a stupid way then, we say what a thoughtless action. First of all, that is not a thoughtless action, secondly, if it indeed happens to be thoughtless actions, it is something of the highest quality.
That which we want to do in order to solve our problems, only feeds our problems. My request is, for a moment stop resisting your problems.
Let them come, let them go. As you are sitting here, a few cars have passed by, a few bicyclist passed by, do you really say let them come, let them go? Do you say that? It happens and you have nothing to do with that, you have nothing to do with it. Or would you sitting here shout out to every cyclist, ‘You may go, you may come.’ It’s his thing to come and go. Your thing is something else. do you see this?
Do you see this?
He will come and go even without your interference. By engaging yourself with him, you are only unnecessarily draining yourself out. You do what you must do, let him do what he must do. What yours is yours and what mine is mine. And you need not say even this much because even to say this much you must first take cognizance of the other. Even if you say to the bicyclist, ‘I am not going to stop you!’, still, it means that the cyclist has made an impact on your consciousness, otherwise, why would you say anything to him, otherwise why would even the slightest thought arise.
And taking the bicycle picture forward:
Thoughts are so much like a bicycle; unless they move, they fall down.
Yes. They can’t stand still just like a bicycle, they must move. And no bicycle moves with its own energy. You are the one who keeps paddling it, only then it seems to move, only then it have a certain momentum. Otherwise, you stop the bicycle falls. Are you interested in stopping? Have you had enough of it?
Are you not tired of all this movement, all this coming, going, of this incessant clutter, chatter, all this total disorder and chaos? Are we not just through with it and fed up? Do we still have hope that can give something to us?
L1: No!
AP: Obviously, yes. Otherwise, why would we still be nourishing it? Otherwise, why would we still ask for methods and ways? We still believe that it may yield result someday.
Now tell me, why are we flogging the dead horse?
Why do we expect it suddenly get up and start running?
It won’t.
