Watching the movie, keep popping popcorn || Acharya Prashant, on Vedanta (2021)

Acharya Prashant (AP): Great things are happening on the screen, don't get so excited, it's just the screen. Irrespective of what happens on the screen, it's not real. That's how you have to look at things. Great silence on the screen. Is it silence? No, it is the silence of the screen. Great blasts on the screen, sounds that pierce the ears—they'll be gone. They belong to the screen. Don't get so excited! Your own ‘self’ is the screen—to be enjoyed, not indulged in. If big, bad boys appear on the screen, plotting to kill the cute, good boy, don't try to jump into the screen, but that's what we do. “The baddies need to be punished, the cute diva needs to be salvaged. I am the redeemer.” If somebody does that in a cinema hall, you'll say, “What a fool!” Each of us keeps doing that every single moment.

The world is just a great cinema hall with millions of screens, as many screens as there are people and as many screens as there are moments in time—millions of millions of millions of screens.

Then some nice chap is running his solitary show somewhere in some corner. It's a qualitatively different movie he is showing. One special movie that tells you that all that you are seeing is movies. The common thing between the messages that these millions of movies are giving you is that ‘We are real!’ All the movies have different plots, different characters, and different scripts, everything varies, but one thing stands in common: all these movies tell you, “We are real! That which you are seeing is happening, and come on join the happening!”

Irrespective of the storyline, this is what each of the stories is telling you: “come on, jump into us!” There's one solitary special movie that's running, obviously to an empty hall—some one or two are there, watching the show and well, they can have the best seat in the hall. That's the privilege of going to that particular movie. What's that movie telling you? —"All that you are seeing in each of the halls is just a movie. It's not real.” It's a special movie that tells you that.