Who are the various gods? || Acharya Prashant, on Vedanta (2020)

Acharya Prashant (AP): “Who is in power within me?” I am asking myself, “Please, bestow well-being on myself.” What am I telling myself? Kindly be good to yourself. Too much to ask for? We keep wanting others to be good to us but very rarely want ourselves to be good to us. The Upanishads are filling in that small little gap — before you want others to help you, come on, be responsible and help yourself. Therefore, Brashapati is neither a planet nor a faraway god. Who is Brashapati ? Your own potential for wisdom is Brashapati . Isn’t Brashapati the God of learning? Now, who would learn for you? Is some deity going to come and learn on your behalf? Tell me, please. So, when you really want to learn, when you are devoted to learning, you are Brashapati . Or you can be one of the demons who fight Brashapati . Brashapati is a great teacher.

The teacher does exist within you. Isn't it what the scriptures repeatedly say and we fail to comprehend? What do they mean when they say, “Teacher exists within you?” Can you be taught without your consent? Tell me. That’s Brashapati within you. The faculty to say ‘yes’ to learning, the ability to exercise the option to learn. To learn from a book, from life, from a person, from yourself, your own life experiences, from anything and everything — that’s Brashapati .

And then there is Tarksha , who is called Arashtanemi and who doesn’t allow bad things to happen to you. Now, who can prevent bad things from happening to you when all the badness is inside? Obviously, Tarksha cannot prevent a truck from mowing you down. That can happen if you are not careful or the truck driver is special. Here the Gods are all being referred to in the internal and subtle sense.

There are things and events and people outside who can harm you in an outer way. They do have the power, for example, to fetter you, they can chain your hands. What’s being said here is that nobody can chain your spirit, your inner-self without your consent. Nobody can bring inner harm to you without your consent. Externally, they can do a lot of things and externally you do not require somebody to be vicious to you, to bring harm to you. Externally, you know well that even coincidences can harm you; you can take the road to Gangotri and meet a landslide. Nobody planned it for you, nobody was conspiring to kill you, you just died. And even if there is no such landslide, time will kill you. You will get old and simply die.

So your external self, which is the bodily thing, is always at the mercy of the Universe to a great extent. One new virus strain and we all might find ourselves helpless. We are at the mercy of situations, and coincidences, we do not know. Somebody may now decide to eat a horse, you know, one progresses. Yesterday, they ate a bat, tomorrow they might eat something even fancier. How do we know? But internally, you are your own Lord and all the Gods reside within. Pray to them and awaken them. So, now never fall to the kind of nonsense that says, “You know, Indra or Shani is not pleased with you and therefore bad things are happening.” So, how do you please Shani ? “On that particular day, you bring oil in an iron vessel and offer this kind of money and then Shani will be pleased’. There is nothing but Money for Shani kind of fraud.

Where are all the Gods? No Shani , no Shukra , no nonsense. You may as well say, “I pray to my own potential fearlessness” and you can give that fearlessness a new name of your choice and that name becomes the God of your choice. That’s the kind of process that has gone into these verses. You take a God and let that God represent fearlessness. First of all, you decide that fearlessness is something worthy of worship. That value system has to be there. I decide that it's great to be fearless and then I want to give fearlessness a face. And I worship that face, I call that face the face of the deity. Do you see how the Gods came up? Are you seeing the entire process?

Similarly, I find that strength is very important, my value system says, “No to weakness and yes to strength.” So, what do I do? I give strength a face, as poets do as artists do, as painters do. If you go to a painter and say, “Paint depression for me,” would he refuse? He will paint it. So, how has he managed to paint depression on the wall? Because that can be done, you can give a face to something very subtle. That’s the function of an artist. So, these poets are at work here, in fact, you know the Upanishads several times call the Rishis as Kavis , poets not without reason.

They are bringing towards that which is very abstract and that’s what a poet does. They are giving a face to that which is very conceptual. That’s what a painter does. And then when you give it a face, you obviously give it a name and that becomes the name of a God. So, those Gods don’t really exist, they are names of something virtuous within.

Q: What could I get from ‘Shaman’ and ‘Daman’? What could I get is maybe the suppression of emotions over our unnecessary actions. But what do we mean by ‘Shaman’?

AP: ‘Dam’ and ‘Sham’ are classic words. ‘Sham’ simply means that you are not encouraging the inner tendencies to take hold of you or consume you further once they have arisen. What do you call the fireman in Hindi?

Q: AgniShamak (अग्निशामक)

AP: Now you see what they do? Do you see what is ‘Shaman’? Once the thing has caught fire, you do not support the fire, you do not feed its fuel, you rather douse the fire. The fire could be of fear, love, lust, anger, jealousy, possessiveness, attachment, or anything. ‘Shaman’ comes into the picture only if ‘Daman’ is not succeeded. First of all, you do not want it to be initiated at all. You don’t want the fire to happen. But if the inner thing does catch fire, then you want to put out the fire. That’s ‘Shaman’. But often the fire and the inner temperature become quite pleasurable. There is a heat within and we like it. Don’t we in today’s metaphor like things hot? Now if the fire is there and you started liking its hotness, why will you put it out?

First of all, you have to see that hot things will reduce you to ashes. We don’t see that in the moment of passion, do we? When that hot thing is there in front of you, do you see ashes? A few hundred meters from here you have the crematorium, some of you might have already walked past it by the Ganga. It’s spectacular at night, the lit pyres. You must be able to see your own body there and you must be able to see all hot things there. Why can’t you outsmart time?

Time will show you those things. But time will take ten to twenty years. Why can’t you outrun time, outpace time? What time would show you twenty years later, see it today and you will be saved. No? Or do you want to keep yourself fooling for twenty years only to come to ashes then? Before that external fire consumes us, most of us are already internally charred, destroyed by the inner fire. ‘Shaman’ is about putting out the inner fire. And the scriptures tell us that if you have put out the inner fire then you are immortal, irrespective of what happens to your body. Your body will indeed burn but you will be immortal. But you are already dead if there is a fire within. ‘Shaman’ is about dealing with that inner fire properly. It is adjacent to dispassion.

Q: Acharya Ji, what does the internal fire mean? Is it the desires and the human tendencies?

AP: What does fire want? I have a fire, what is it trying for?

Q: To burn.

AP: Who? When you put something into it, what happens to the fire?

Q: It gets life.

AP: It wants even more. What’s the fire trying out for?

Q: Food.

AP: Food. And when you put food into it, what happens to the fire? Does it get satisfied with all of its demands?

Q: No.

AP: Its demand only increases being fed food. The more you feed it, the hungrier it gets. It uses everything that you give it to further itself. One of the quotes and posters read “What you collect for your security makes you all the more insecure.” It’s like this, what do you collect it for? — To feel secure. But what does it make you?

Q: More insecure.

AP: More insecure. That’s the nature of fire. You give something to it with the hope that it would be satisfied and placated but instead of getting placated or appeased its demand only magnify like that of a blackmailer. The blackmailer arm twists you for something, the moment you concede to his demands, does he go away happy and contended? What does he do? Next time he wants even more. That’s the nature of the inner animal, the ego. Never try to come to a negotiated settlement with it, never try to meet it halfway. It won’t work. This is a battle in absolute terms. This is a battle in binaries — you will either win or lose, there can be nothing midway.

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