Why should I understand the mind? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Questioner: What is the need to differentiate between the Self and the mind?
Shri Prashant: I’ll make it a little easier for you, I will rephrase this question into:
What is the need at all to understand the Real Self?
Because only when you go into this process does the distinction come, that the mind may not be the real self. Ultimately his question is, ‘Why must I know myself? What is the need to go within? What is the need of self inquiry? ‘
Life is going on pleasantly, nicely. There seem no hiccups. I have a set routine. I have my normal spectrum of pains and pleasures, and I am cruising along. So what is the need to find all this out- the self, and the mechanics of the mind? Why must I understand them at all? Or in other words, why this type of course is being floated at all? Because that is the very objective of this course?’
Why must we understand all this? Because only in the process of understanding this that we come across this distinction- that there is the mind and that mind may not be ‘me’.
Alright! Let us see.
How many of us young, free, men and women are interested in leading a life of slavery?
Hardly anybody. Right?
Who is the slave? Whom do we call as slave? A slave is someone who has no free-will of his own. His actions happen due to influence of others. This is what a slave is. Simple, that’s a slave.
Now, let us understand what is the way in which we function.
What is the way in which our mind functions?
This brain, the human brain that we have, is the product of millions of years of evolution. It is nothing but the journey it has traveled, the journey that it has undertaken. It is nothing but a collection of all the experiences which have happened to it during the course of its journey. It knows nothing but all that, it has gathered in the journey, during the past. It is in that sense nothing but a database of experiences, and also a program that has been told how to deal with that database. It is very mechanical in nature. You don’t have to ask it to do certain things. It keeps doing all those things. It does not ask for your sanctions or for your free-will. It operates on its own, basic functions of the body, our basic reactions and not only that; the basic way in which we perceive the world, even that is pre-programmed, we don’t have a say in that.
You perceive space to be a three-dimensional thing not because it is in three dimensions. It is because the brain is configured to perceive a three-dimensional reality. You live your life in time not because there is an independent, objective truth called ‘time’ but because your brain is configured to read time, just as the compiler of a computer system is configured to read a particular language. That is how the body operates. The brain is the part of the body. That is how the brain makes the sense of the world. The brain has been pre-programmed and the body too has been pre-programmed which is called as physical conditioning.
In physical conditioning, surely as an intelligent students you would see, there is no free-will involved. The brain already knows what to do. Are you getting it?
There is another conditioning which is called as the social conditioning . Physical conditioning is the hardware that you are carrying, social conditioning is the additional and multiple layers of software that have been layered upon it. The social conditioning includes all your beliefs which you have gathered since birth, your culture, tradition, language and lot of other things. The entire accumulation of thoughts; that is social conditioning.
Wherever there is conditioning, there will be no free-will and the absence of free-will is nothing but slavery.
A very unfortunate event can take place with every human being and does take place with most of us which is, that we do not realize how deeply conditioned we are. We start identifying with our conditioning. Freedom from slavery is not at all difficult, provided you intelligently look at the process of the mind and realize that, ‘Oh! my God, I am not acting on free-will and intelligence. I am just being told and programmed to act in this way.’
And the moment you realize this, in that moment you are free from it. We don’t realize it. To not to realize it is to waste life altogether, because there is no great fun in living a slave’s life. Are you getting it?
This mind is two things: the conditioned part which you can give a general name as ‘the brain’ and ‘the intelligence’. The brain is thoroughly conditioned but you are not merely the brain, there is something more to you.
And when you discover that, the quality of your life entirely changes. Your day-to-day living, the kind of decisions that you are making, that totally changes. There is now brilliance about it, there is an energy about it. You are not stupid anymore then. You are not merely a machine anymore then. Are you getting it?
Hence, it is important to understand how this machine functions, and how we are little more than that machine. That being little more is what makes the life valuable.
Otherwise you go on leading a conditioned life. The script has been written by the external forces for you, such as parents, society, education, and you go on believing that you are taking those decisions without having the sense to understand that, none of that is yours really, then you are merely a puppet, who is just enacting a pre-scripted role, whose life is entirely predictable.
There is no fun in that, there is no energy in that, there is no vitality, and there is no youthfulness in that. Right? We deserve better than that. We deserve more than that. Hence, it is important to understand the difference.
Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.
