When you meet beauty, pay attention || Acharya Prashant, on Vedanta (2021)

Acharya Prashant (AP): When you come upon something beautiful, try to understand it. That’s what is meant by watching. The worldly bird, the engaged bird would have surely glanced at her neighbour many times, that’s not really called looking. To look is to understand; do you really understand, or do you just keep looking?

We said that if you are looking and not understanding, then something in you is just looking to avoid and it’s very possible, be warned, that you might just be looking at something or someone for years for decades and yet be a total stranger to the reality of that person. Just as several people keep reading holy books all their life and yet really understand nothing because nothing shows up in their life.

Similarly, you could be looking at the person of the saviour bird for months, years and decades and yet gain not an inch of real closeness, because you just kept looking and never understood anything. You never approached the secret; you never had any love for the bird’s core. You kept looking at all the external actions, the words and all the fluff. There is no bird without fluff. You kept looking at all the fluff.

“Aah! Golden hued, big, small,” you kept noticing twitter, you never knew the centre, and I am repeating the warning, it is not merely possible, it is very, very probable. You will be very, very close and unimaginably far, further than you can ever imagine as most people in the world are. You stand in front of a statue of Krishna, how close are you to the essence of Krishna? Are you getting it?

Something in us does not want to acknowledge the Truth, because the Truth is so poignant that falseness will melt, if not in heat, then in tears. When you really look at the Truth, there is not merely illumination, there is a deep pathos.