When you can see your entire universe in the parted lips of the beloved,it is Atman||AcharyaPrashant

Acharya Prashant: As you know, this we are calling as a ‘Myth Demolition Tour’. This is the third day of the tour. On the first day, we took up the ‘Genesis of myths’. We went into how the Truth gets obfuscated and falseness appears to have come into being, and then yesterday we took up the ‘Myth of the smile’. Today, in the same series, we’ll take up the ‘Myth of the Self’, rather the myth of the ‘Aatman’.

Call it ‘Self’, call it ‘Aatman’, the immediate and obvious reference is towards the ‘I’, the ‘me’. That is the closest indicator, and unfortunately also the worst deceiver. Whether we say the Self, the Aatman, the spirit, the soul, the intention is to point towards something which is within us. The intention is to point at some deep spot inside us.

The word ‘Aatman’ means ‘I’. The myth has permutated so deep in the psyche of mankind that we even use expressions like: ‘The soul has left the body’. The obvious assumption is that the soul is contained in the body, that the soul resides somewhere in the body. And not only the soul resides somewhere in the body, there have been attempts to even indicate where exactly it resides! This myth needs to be debunked.

When you say ‘Self’, ‘me’, ‘Aatman’, there is a very little relationship actually between that which you want to arrive at and that which you are pointing at. This has very little to do with Aatman.

The Aatman, the Self, is the only Truth that there is.