Confidence is your enemy. Catch the inner thief red-handed. Look at its functioning. See how it manipulates and distorts. See how it has preset conclusions and then fabricates arguments in favor of the conclusions.
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Questioner: Namaste Acharya Ji. So my question was: when we make important life decisions, how do we distinguish between natural thinking and conditioned thinking? There are some things like you get some genuine wisdom, and there are things which are conditioned to us. So how to distinguish between them?
Acharya Prashant: Inquiry is the only route. Otherwise, there is no way you can ever detect whether your thoughts, internal processes, feelings, and importantly, conclusions and decisions are your own, really original or whether they are products of an implanted process, you will never come to know. What has been implanted within, that which you are calling conditioning, is an implanted thing. And once it has entered your insides, it will always appear innate.
In the normal run of things, human beings lack the capacity to differentiate between what is original and what is borrowed. That which is borrowed very quickly, very unnoticeably, starts appearing one’s own, homemade, native. So one puts the force of all his confidence behind his thoughts and feelings and decisions. One says, “These are my own, and I’m confident. This is what I am thinking, right? This is what I am feeling. That’s what I have thought out for my future” — ‘I.’
