Why do people find personality important? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Acharya Prashant

3 min
58 reads
Why do people find personality important? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Question: Sir, I can see that personality is a mask, but then why is the world giving personality so much of importance? Why does everybody seem to give personality so much of importance?

Speaker: The reason is simple. When you need to talk to me, you need to have some sense of who I am. As you stand up and talk to me, you must have some idea of who you are speaking to.

There are two ways of trying to understand who I am.

If you are intelligent, you would have heard what I said, looked at it carefully and seen that you can talk to me, that I am worth talking to. Right? That is one way of determining who I am. You want to see who I am. So, the first way is that you look at me clearly, and from that clear seeing comes your understanding of who I am. For this to happen, you must be attentive. Right?

But if he is not attentive, he will find out a substitute method of knowing who I am. What will be that substitute method? You would say, ‘look at his clothes, what kind of clothes is he wearing? Is he using flowery language? Is he fluent in one particular language. Look at his background, where does he come from? What kind of jobs has he done? Where has he studied? Look at his religion. Which religion does he belong to? Which country? Which caste? If you cannot look at me directly, if you cannot look at my essence, then you would use other means to look at me. Correct? What are these other means called as?

Listeners(everyone): Personality.

Speaker: Personality . One needs personality because one is inattentive. Are you getting this? The other person cannot see your essence. The world is blind. It cannot see your essence. All it can see is- what kind of shirt are you wearing? What’s the brand of your shoes? How wealthy is your father?- this is all that the world can see. The world is unable to look at your essence, and hence all that the world sees is your personality. The intelligent man will not look at the personality. He will look directly at your essence. He has the eyes to look at your essence. He will not be impressed by your knowledge. You cannot fool him. You cannot deceive him by your appearance. He has the eyes to penetrate deep into your essence and look directly at that. It is the blind man who looks at the personality. Are you getting it?

Only the blind man looks at the personality. The one with eyes looks at the essence. He will just know what you are. He will not bother about the way you walk, the way you talk, the brand you wear, and the voice you have. He will not bother about this trivia. Yes. Getting it? Alright.

Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant
Comments
LIVE Sessions
Experience Transformation Everyday from the Convenience of your Home
Live Bhagavad Gita Sessions with Acharya Prashant
Categories