What is disappearance of the self? || (2019)
Questioner: Acharya Ji, what is the meaning of disappearance of the self?
Acharya Prashant: Your interest in your interests has to disappear. Your interests can remain. Can this brain survive without interests? Your lungs are greatly interested in Oxygen, and they reject Nitrogen. Can lungs survive without interests?
Let the interested one remain interested. ‘You’ have no business to be interested.
The intellect is curious by design, the intellect will remain interested. Have you not seen kids, three-year-olds asking questions that grown-ups cannot answer? They will remain interested.
Let the intellect, the design of the brain remain interested. ‘You’ need not remain interested. Let this physical system, including the brain apparatus, remain curious, interested, inquisitive, whatever. Even attached. ‘You’ stay wherever you must.
Spirituality does not entail that the lungs must give up oxygen. Renunciation is not for the lungs, Sir. Do not stretch it to absurd limits. That will give you another excuse to stay away from spirituality.
You will say, “Baba Ji was asking me to renounce oxygen. If I have to have no relation with the world, why must I even breathe?” Because breathing is the continuous relationship with the world and seeing is the continuous relationship with the world, so if Spirituality means renunciation even at the physical level, or at the psychological level, then you have to cease existing as an embodied entity.
Spirituality is not committing suicide, or is it? Then we do not need Satsang, we need mass suicide halls. Over! It has happened, you know. There have been cults in Japan and other places where incidents of mass suicides have been reported. They thought that it is ‘Liberation’. So, 300-400 hundred people would get together, and would just breathe in some nice gas. And all are liberated.
That is not Spirituality, obviously!
Do not deprive the stomach of food, and do not deprive the mind of thoughts and feelings. Just as it is stupid to deprive the body of food, it is equally stupid to deprive the mind of thoughts and feelings. Thought is not the enemy; feelings are not the culprit. Your misplaced presence is the culprit. The needless presence of ‘I’ in the thoughts is the culprit.
Be fully secure about the ‘I’, and then think as much as you want to, feel in whichever dimension you want to. You can laugh, you can sing, you can cry. You can even hate, or fall in love.
All that is okay. All that is part of the rainbow.
Spirituality is not about banishing certain things from your life. Spirituality is just about seeing that life is beautiful, and does not get any better with the intervention of the little self, the ‘I’.
It is one thing to think, it is totally another thing to think with the objective of self-preservation. Can you see the difference between these two thoughts? There is just thought, as is needed to solve a mathematical problem. And then there is the thought that feeds on fear. Are these two the same?
Thought is not the problem. Your insecurities about yourself, your utter loneliness – that is the problem. And that is an assumed, imagined problem. A problem that does not exist but is taking to be.
Now, how smart is that – to be fretting over an imagined problem?
