What happens to ego tendencies after Realization? || (2017)
Questioner: Are you saying that the mind can somehow be mastered; the remaining tendencies would still acquire some working?
Acharya Prashant: The tendencies remain.
The tendency of the eye to see remains. The tendency of the tongue to speak remains. The tendency of the body to eat, live, read, remains. But all those tendencies are sanctified by the touch of Truth.
When the lover is not there, then the house is a prison. When the lover comes, the house still remains, the walls still remain, but the same walls that were the walls of the prison, now are decorations, now are active canvases to be painted. The walls will remain, but their meanings will totally change.
You’d still move but now you would no more move about in desperation. Now you would move about dancing. You would still be attracted, but now the objects to which you are attracted would change. You still would touch, but now the quality of your touch would change.
Even the tendency to acquire, to achieve might be there but even the acquisition and achievement would now have a certain distinct aroma.
You may still weep. The tendency to feel bad, to experience sorrow might still be there but now even your tears would have a certain purity. You would not be crying for self-centered reasons. That great latent tendency, sexual attraction, that too will still be there, but now your touch will not be the touch of the butcher. It will really be the touch of the poet and the seer.
It is not as if tendencies evaporate when you come close to the Truth. They don’t evaporate, they just get purified; they still remain. Kindly, don’t try to kill the tendencies. If you kill the tendencies, you kill yourself. The tendencies have their rightful place in existence. Let them be there.
If you want to cry, cry in love, not in hatred. If you want to run amok, run amok, in joy, not in desperation. Spirituality, since long, has been about a suppression of tendencies, that does no good.
Our tendencies need a healing touch. They do not need a butcher’s knife. And these are two very different things. The surgeon’s knife and the butcher’s knife. The ‘I’ tendency, all the latent tendencies, vrittis , they are suffering. They need someone who can take care of them. They are like a weeping baby. Because a kid is weeping, do you strangulate it? When the kid is weeping, you hold it to your chest, don’t you?
All your tendencies, even the most vile and vicious ones, even the most disrespectable ones are just the weeping child. That which you call as abominable about yourself, that which you call as vile and aberrant, is nothing but the ‘I’ tendency seeking completion, seeking fulfillment.
Fulfill it, don’t try to kill it.
