This Is Our Love, and Our Worship || AP Neem Candies
Acharya Prashant: If you conduct a general survey and ask people, “What is it that you worship? And can you list down five items, five things, objects, people, places; anything that you worship?” nobody would list the ego. Or would people do that? No, nobody. And nobody would say, “I don’t have five things to worship.”
And ‘worship’ here we are not talking necessarily in a religious sense. Worship is devotion. What is it that you are devoted to or committed to? What is it that you hold as high and worth attaining? So people would be able to put down the five things that they worship, but very rarely would you find the word ‘ego’ in this list of five things.
Why do we worship so many other things if centrally we all worship nothing but the ego?
All these things that we appear to be worshipping are the things that strengthen the ego. So maybe we do not worship the ego directly, but we worship it indirectly by worshipping the servants of the ego. And that’s an even deeper worship, is it not?
“I worship the ego so much that I am prepared to worship all those things that serve the ego.” In other words, “I worship the ego so much that I am prepared to worship the servants of the ego.”
For example, your ego is bolstered by money, so you may start worshipping money.
For example, your ego is bolstered by some kind of knowledge or by being at a particular place or by proving a point to the other or by being in a particular way, cultivating a personality of a particular type. And you will start doing all those things just for the sake of the ego. All that is nothing but ego worship.
So, generally, whenever you would ask, “Sir, what is it that I worship?” I really don’t have to think about the answer.
To be born is to be born an ego worshipper. To be born is to be born with a tendency to preserve the little self. The little self is born, and it wants to remain alive knowing fully well that being born, it is going to die. All its life, all its time, all that it occupies itself with is self-preservation; self-preservation because it is always haunted by the spectacle of its imminent demise. It knows fully well that the end is approaching—and fast.
And the end is approaching not merely in the form of physical death. The end keeps approaching in a thousand ways. Your concepts, your beliefs, your thoughts, your plans, your projections, your memories and your relationships—all are proven false by the facts of life again and again, over and over again, on a daily basis. That’s death.
And when death surrounds us from outside and threatens us from inside, then obviously our central effort is towards self-preservation. That’s what we are doing all the while. Therefore, we worship nothing but the ego.
You have to figure out the ways in which you worship the ego. You have to figure out the appendages of the ego that you worship. You have to figure out the concrete ways that apply to your particular case. Those ways might differ.
One might worship the ego as his beloved wife.
One might worship ego as his bank account.
One might worship the ego as his political power.
One might worship the ego as his bohemian ways.
One may worship the ego as the idiosyncrasies of his personality.
All those things can change, the names and form, the particularities, but the central fact remains the same.
Full article link: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/do-you-know-who-you-worship-on-bhagavad-gita-1_5d2bbef
