The Best will not come to you as a result of your want || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Question: Sir, I would like to ask something from a topic which was touched yesterday but that has been revolving around in my mind even today. We were talking about self-improvement, and all the time, I try always, to see, what’s wrong in me and bring about some change.

When you said that actually self-improvement is nothing, it really shocked me, and became really difficult for me to believe because until I know the difference between ‘What I should do?’ and ‘What I am doing?’, then, how can I change?

Acharya Prashant: You see, self-improvement, the agenda for improvement, is decided by the ‘self’. The self totally disregards the greater agenda and imposes its own little agenda. And that it calls as self-improvement. Obviously in its own eyes, what it wants to do, where it wants to reach, what it wants to become, the questions that it wants to ask and get answered are very important, but only in its own eyes.

Right now, what is the wider agenda that has been set? What are we here to discuss right now?

Listeners: The Essential.

AP: We are here to discuss about the Essential and how we miss out on the Essential. That is the wider agenda. But the self, the ego, is following some other agenda, some other personal agenda. It has a total disregard, even contempt, for what? – Anything other than what it can be.