What does the mind actually want? || (2018)

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, what does the mind actually want?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Man’s mind with its great search for freedom and an equally great determination to never be free - so you are trying all kinds of spiritual tricks with the ostensible objective of meeting peace or freedom or bliss or Truth. And you are parallelly ensuring that the methods are designed to fail as if one wants to deceive nobody but himself. As if one is determined to keep telling himself that he is sincere, and one is equally determined to never attain his sincere goal.

One does know what to say of man. Is he a seeker, or is he a stubborn cheat? By the looks of it, there are seekers everywhere. Somebody is seeking through money, somebody is seeking through pleasures of various kinds, somebody is seeking through prestige, somebody through knowledge, and somebody through divine chanting or yogic asanas and there are others who are seeking through politics, through wars, and through various means and methods.

At the same time, the moment you pay attention to it, it is obvious that none of it is ever going to help. It is not as if there is a deficiency in the method. It is almost as if the method is designed not to succeed. As if we are working hard, just to convince ourselves that we indeed want freedom. But where freedom is direct and simple, we deny it. That is what is happening in Rishikesh as well.

If you see shops that are selling a variety of things, material and non-material; this-worldly and probably other-worldly as they claim, it is because there are people who want those things. If Rishikesh won’t exist in this form, it would exist in some other form because there is a demand. Where there is a demand, supply is automatically created. Because we want somebody to entertain us with spiritual gossip. Because we want somebody to convince us that without changing the core of being, liberation is still possible.

So there exist shops that are selling cheap liberation. There exist teachers who are giving us easy Truth. Whom do we fault? The teacher or the student? Are the teacher and the student really different? Aren’t they, the two sides of the same coin? Had there been a student demanding nothing but pure Truth, nothing but total freedom; a pure and total teacher too would have descended. The pure and the total teacher is nothing but a flesh and blood manifestation of the great demand of the student’s heart to fly free.

If that demand really exists inside the student or the seeker, then the teacher necessarily appears on the outside. But when the student himself is determined to ask for something spurious, something mediocre, even fake; then equally you get a teacher on the outside who is all there to provide exactly what the student wants. Stuff that is mediocre, superficial, spurious.

So when we ask the question, "What is Rishikesh?" The question turns around to us and the question, questions us, "Who are you?" Because Rishikesh is nothing but the expression of who we are. If we are different, Rishikesh would change. Were we any different, we wouldn’t have seen this Rishikesh. Is it possible to really look at man’s surroundings in isolation? Or the society in isolation? Doesn’t man create his own society and in turn gets created by it? If you say that a place is filthy, is it the fault of the place? Or is it about the mind that pervades that place?

Whatever this place is, it represents who we are. If we follow the crowds in the great cities, in our jobs, in the cinema halls, in the shopping malls; we follow the crowds here as well (Referring to a city called Rishikesh). If a herd mentality exists everywhere else in our domain, the same herd mentality exists here as well. It is just that in another city you are following the crowd that is going to the newest Friday release, and in Rishikesh, you are following the crowd that is going to the most popular teacher. In either case, most of us do not know what we are getting into. We are just following the flock.

You see, look at a probable day of a common man. In the daytime, he is all busy catering to his vocation. He goes to his office, he earns money, and then when he is tired in the evening, he wants to relax a little because his day has been tense. Otherwise, why would there be a need to relax? So he would go to a pub, or to a temple. You can go to a pub or you can go to a temple to relax. That is what is happening. How does it matter which place you are choosing to feel relaxed? Ultimately you are relaxing yourself just so that the next morning you can again enter your tense and stressful schedule. Right?

So it is great. Come over to Rishikesh for a week or a month and then go back again to the same life. It is the equivalent of a pub in a metro. Helps you to have some sound sleep.

Rishikesh would have really blossomed and materialized as a spiritual place if it could really change and dissolve a person. That too happens. But that happens for one in a thousand visitors. That is just too few. One in a thousand visitors never returns from here. When I say here, I do not mean the geography, I mean the peace. Others who come here, they just go back to do what they were doing. Just as you watch a movie. To calm your tense nerves for a while. And after you have calmed down...

We don’t come here to dissolve. We come here determined to stay the way we are. We come here to get decorated. We come here to be a little more attractive. Maybe more fit, maybe more knowledgeable, maybe more skilled in a certain art or yoga. But who comes here to die? Who comes here never to return? Nobody.

Q: Somebody or so...

AP: One in a thousand, maybe. As I said. But that one in a thousand is really precious. Really precious. I wish we had many more of them. Every year I come here and how many of such people do I meet? One, two; maximum five. Even of the five, I can’t be absolutely sure. The crowds that I meet, who are they? Mostly people. Nobody can be blamed. You are to be blamed only when you are hurting someone else and benefitting yourself. How to blame someone whose intellect is causing the greatest damage to nobody else but himself?

You can sympathize, you can commiserate; you can be full of compassion.

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