What incompleteness? You are already complete! || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2014)

Question: What is inner completeness of a person?

Speaker: Monica is asking, ‘What is inner completeness?’ Monica does ‘the complete one’ ask this question? Who is asking this question? We ask this question. We ask this question because we sense that we are incomplete. So this question is coming from our incompleteness. Do we understand what is this incompleteness? You are asking that what is it to be complete. I am asking, ‘Can an incomplete mind understand completeness?’ But there is surely one thing that is available to us to understand. What is that? This life, this mind. All the imperfections, all the incompleteness can clearly be seen, and when you look at them, when you look at incompleteness, of course you cannot understand them by being incomplete. Something else happens then. When you understand the imperfections, you move little beyond the imperfections. When you pay attention to the incompleteness, you move a little beyond that incompleteness. You ask me, ‘what is it to be complete?’ Whatever answer I will give will fall upon an incomplete mind. Would it not? You will hear it with an incomplete mind and the complete cannot be understood by an incomplete mind. So, the answer will not be useful. We would do better to just look at what we call as incompleteness, because if you are asking what is it to be complete, surely you are sensing some incompleteness somewhere. Right? That is why I asked you that does the complete ask this question. No the complete does not ask this question. The healthy man doesn’t ask, ‘what is health?’ It is the sick man who seeks health. And what is the way of seeking health? To enquire into the sickness. Right? When you enquire into the sickness, when you see what sickness is all about, then you can move beyond the sickness. So enquire into incompleteness.

Now there is this life that we live, our daily life. What all do you see incomplete in this? Everything. Is there anything complete in this life? But do we ever look at it? Do we ever understand this? Does this realization ever strike us? Because if this realization strikes you, then life will change. That whatever I have is incomplete and the horror is that it will always be incomplete right till my death. That’s the horror, it is not complete today and there is not even any hope of completion. I may entertain myself with false hopes, the entire world entertains itself with false hopes, but the fact is there is no completion. Nothing ever comes to a point where it is total, comprehensive, holistic. There is always so much remaining.