Tools and techniques for awareness || Acharya Prashant, at IIT Delhi (2020)

Questioner (Q): Can you please introduce us to some tools or practices which can help us in maintaining and focusing our awareness on the path of that endless work you hinted about the inner work?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Actually, all my life, I have never really used any specific definite tool but since you have asked for it... the one that I can recommend especially to a young person is the question —what is going on and to whom?

Things always happen to you when you are awake, alive and conscious, right? There is always something happening. You are constantly in the middle of experiences, are you not?

Always keep asking what really is happening? And who is experiencing it? —that's all. And this has to be a 24 hours practice. There is not something that you can practice only when you are down or defeated. In fact, far greater importance is to our ease of asking these questions when you are happy and high. What’s happening? What's happening? What's happening out there? What's happening in here?

I am in the middle of a market; what really is a market? Can I define a market? What is a market? And bring the whole definition down to first principles. So fine; ‘A market is a place where a seller meets a buyer’. Who is the seller and why does he want to sell?

What is he selling ? Who is the buyer? Why and what does he buy? What is this interaction like? Don’t believe the pre-existing definitions you carry in your head. Always reduce everything to first principles. What really is going on?