Who makes your choices? || Acharya Prashant, at Kedarnath (2019)

Acharya Prashant

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Who makes your choices? || Acharya Prashant, at Kedarnath (2019)

Questioner (Q): Acharya ji, in the last session you mentioned that one should always try to choose "that" instead of choosing money or any worldly things. But who is the one that makes this choice? Is that again the same ‘I’, same ego that makes this choice? Can it ever make a choice against itself? What is that part of us that makes this choice? Because even when we were trekking, there were many instances where my body tendencies and things were telling me not to go forward, but somehow, we chose to go beyond that. What is that part that is making these choices?

Acharya Prashant (AP): It is not a part. Choices made by the parts are always partial. It is your very core that makes the right choice.

So, who makes that choice? The one who believes that he has the power to choose, the one who sees a lot of choices, options, alternatives; the one who says, "I might do this; I might as well do that”—He's the one.

Who is he?—The one you live, eat, breathe as, the one you exist as, the one you keep referring to as the "I". This "I" is a creature of thoughts, evaluation, criteria, effort, action, achievement, profit and loss. This "I" is the only one who is addressed in any spiritual discourse.

Whenever a teacher has addressed a student, it is actually this "I" being addressed—addressed, counseled, tempted, awakened. As long as you see choices, it is imperative upon you to make the choice that will progressively unburden you of the need to keep making choices.

It is straightforward: suffering comes to the sufferer.

Suffering comes to the sufferer. Out of suffering, choices are made. Suffering too is a choice.

Therefore, the choice has to be made in the direction of an unknowable, choiceless compulsion.

Once that happens, you know that your choice is no longer yours. You know that it was not really a choice; it was an inevitability; it was a deep inner compulsion. And having known that, you cease to suffer.

Suffering requires a choosing "I". There has to be someone to choose to suffer. Once the "I" has given up its right to choose in favor of that unfathomable, inevitable, insurmountable compulsion, then the "I" also becomes free from the need to suffer. To suffer, you must be present, right? If you are not there at all, how do you really suffer?

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant
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