What is reflected awareness? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Speaker: The question is, ‘what is reflected awareness?

There are two ways to know yourself. I will first take up the way we commonly know ourselves. What is that way?

So, here is Preeti and someone comes up to her and says, ‘Preeti, you are brilliant’. Right? And this sentence changes into her mind as, ‘I am brilliant’. Are you getting it?

An external entity comes to her and says, ‘Preeti, you are brilliant’. What does Preeti make of this statement? That I am brilliant. Now, has Preeti known for herself that she is brilliant? No. An external entity said something to her and she has just internalized it. The result will be that she would never be sure of herself, because it is not her own knowing, it is coming from outside. She will also live in fear, because if she accepts that I am brilliant which is coming from outside, then she will also have to accept that I am stupid which will also coming from outside. Are you getting it? The gates have been opened. You have given somebody else the power to determine what you are.

. You are knowing yourself in a second hand way, in an indirect way, this is also what is called the ‘ego’. Not knowing yourself directly; not having your own eyes to look at yourself instead, depending upon the opinion of others, identifying yourself with what others have given to you. So, somebody else hands over a religion to me, nobody chooses his or her religion himself and then we identify with it. I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim or something else. Somebody else gives us all our identities