To follow one's conditioning is comfort and deadness || Acharya Prashant, on Khalil Gibran (2015)

Acharya Prashant

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To follow one's conditioning is comfort and deadness || Acharya Prashant, on Khalil Gibran (2015)

Comfort! Comfort the treacherous, the deadly! Comfort that cheats our senses and makes us slaves to the passing hour!

~ Khalil Gibran – “Lazarus and His Beloved”

Speaker: So, what does Khalil Gibran has to say?

*Comfort! Comfort the treacherous, the deadly!Comfort that cheats our senses and makes us*slaves to the passing hour!

What is ‘comfort’? That which you are conditioned to.

There is no other definition of comfort. And that is why comfort means different things to different people, at different points in time. Nothing else defines your comfort. The conditioning of the mind is what defines comfort. The conditioning of the mind, is what defines ‘comfort’.

You are conditioned to take a particular kind of food. You say, “Now I am comfortable with this.” You are conditioned to think in a particular way and avoid thinking in other ways, and then you become uncomfortable with those thoughts, and comfortable with other thoughts. You are conditioned to wear a particular kind of dress, and when some other kind of garment comes to you, you feel uncomfortable in wearing it.

What is comfort, except that which time and ritual have given to you? And you spend so much energy after seeking comfort, and you give it so much importance, as if comfort has any objective value. You say, “I want a comfortable life,” it only means that you want a dead life. Such an oxymoron, ‘A dead life’.

Because comfort means conditioning, conditioning means dead patterns. “I want to live on my patterns,” and that will keep you very comfortable. Comfort says, “Just repeat. Just repeat! For the sake of diversity, mix and repeat. But just repeat.”

You see, you go to a discotheque. Now, there is no newness or freshness in what is happening there. If you look at the dance floor, really, what is happening on the dance floor, is what has been happening to mankind since the beginning of time. The same dance of pleasure, comfort, lust and ignorance. And then there is that DJ. What is he doing? To facilitate the same old dance, albeit with new steps, he is giving you a new mix of old songs. That is his very job – to mix-up the music. Is there anything new in this mix? Anything new?

Some of the songs are the same songs to which your parents danced, probably on the night when you were conceived. And now you are dancing. And it is all very comfortable, very comfortable. That is what comfort is – repetition, pattern, conditioning. It is an inability to break out in the open. It is an inability to breathe in fresh air. That is what comfort is.

“I can’t break out of my cocoon. I can’t break out my four walls.” That is what comfort is.

It is poison. It kills life.

Read more articles on this topic:

Article 1:Why can’t I leave my comfort zone?

Article 2:To take the body seriously is to allow the world to control you

Article 3: Is there anything beyond conditioning?

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