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The price you pay for helping others

Acharya Prashant

3 min
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The price you pay for helping others

Questioner: Dear Sir,

You once told me that teaching was the ability to see shit. I dare say it is more. It is not just the ability to see shit but to swim in it and come out clean on the other side and taking a few people out along with you – a concept of course but seems useful to me at this point in time.

You know sir, a year earlier, I had read Osho talk about Jiddu Krishnamurti and it said “He talked for so long and very few heard him. But I will take off from where he left, I will speak to your hearts.” And I was annoyed, but now I know Osho is right. Osho used pettiness to reach pettiness. How else will one talk to the diseased who speak another language? He indeed reached the hearts of the people, but to do so, he had to jump into the pool of shit – the urban sewers of civilization – we call cities and large corporations. Osho is the model of a Teacher and I appreciate what he has done far more now than I ever have before.

But one must be strong and also be able to derive joy – as you have said – “Joy is the ability of seeing rubbish”. I do not have that quality. I get angry, annoyed, and enraged at bigots, religious folk, corporations and capitalists, and all other “isms” and “schisms” that exist around me. Surely there is something beyond anger and frustration!

I was in the hills for a few days in Sikkim enjoying the bounties of nature and then when one comes back even to one’s own hometown, one can see the pollution inwardly and outwardly.

I am downloading and watching your video now that you have uploaded.

Thanks.

Acharya Prashant: Yes. The price you pay for helping is that your own clothes will inevitably be drenched in shit.

The deeper you stay in it, the more is your compassion, commitment to help, the more soiled you begin to appear. You cannot fight all-pervasive ego and yet have a sparkling clean dainty demeanor. That’s a danger. Big danger. Someone said – the danger in fighting demons is to avoid becoming one yourself. I feel it is bound to happen- the crassness that you fight does have some effect on you. You do start to look and act like a demon. All you can do is to preserve your extreme core. Only that can remain untouched. Everything else will be spoiled, corrupted. In this fight, at one point, one is bound to look as evil and as ignorant as the forces he is fighting. There will remain just a subtle difference – a single, deep point of awareness- pristine- that no shit can ever reach.

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant.
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