Acharya Prashant: So, we find two processes always and concurrently at work in the domain of the Ego. One, the Ego says, "It feels insecure." So, it is constantly seeking vistas of security, that's the first thing. And secondly, all the securities that the Ego arranges for itself are necessarily false; not by chance but by design, such is the nature of the Ego. On the one hand, it says, "I want security", and deliberately arranges only false security for itself.
Why false security? Because true security would be the end of the Ego. It tells itself, “Oh, I do not like the situation I am in, unsafe, insecure, I don’t like it. I want to be carefree, I want to be fearless.” On the other hand, it will purposefully avoid doing that which will give it true fearlessness. The position of the Ego is unenviable.
With insecurity, it is uncomfortable. Without insecurity, it is dead. That's what you get as the Ego, either discomfort or death. Choose! So obviously, you choose discomfort over death, right? What does that mean? That you consciously - to the extent the word consciously can be applied to the Ego - that you consciously arrange false comfort for yourself. You dare not tell yourself that you are arranging discomfort for yourself, that would make you appear a lunatic in your own eyes. So, what do you do? You convince yourself that you are arranging comfort and security and safety for yourself and you go out and fetch false versions of each of these, or false substitutes of each of these.
That's what we are doing as mankind, telling ourselves that we want to do good to ourselves. We can’t openly say, "We don’t want our welfare, we don’t want good to happen to us." So, we say, "We want good to happen to us", and then we arrange false goodness for ourselves. False goodness, which in the complete analysis is worse than actively harming oneself. How do we arrange false security? As we said, by hedging our bets. We say, "Let's have this to secure ourselves, let's have that to secure ourselves, let's have plan A B C D, let's have forty kinds of backups. If this thing won't turn out nice, then let me have something else ready." Getting it?
