Your mind has been lying to you || Acharya Prashant, On Vedanta (2021)

Acharya Prashant (AP): The mind has been continuously lying to you. What has it been telling? It's been telling you that there exists no reality outside of itself; that it's not possible to 'be' without being the mind. That's what the mind has been telling you in its own selfish interest. 'If I am not there, you are not there.' The mind tells you, 'If I am not there, you will not exist.'

But when the mind is brought to a standstill, something has been proven, rather something has been disproven. What is it? The lie that the mind has been peddling since centuries has been called out. The mind has said, 'If I am not there, you cannot be there at all.' But here, the mind was stopped for a while, and in that moment you did not merely exist, you existed more authentically than ever.

Now, you cannot resume your usual relationship with the mind. Now, you will be able to look at the mind with distrust. You'll be skeptical of everything that the mind says because if one thing—one central thing—that the mind has said can be false, then it's possible that everything that the mind has been telling you is probably false. The central thing mind has been saying is: 'You are me, I am you; the two of us are inalienable. If you drop me, you drop dead.'

The mind reads out a law to you. Now, a thousand occurrences that confirm the law are not sufficient to conclusively establish the law, and that is the thing with any law ever read out. But a single instance in which that law stands violated is enough to disprove that law. And they are disproving to you in an empirical way, not in a vicarious way.

In your own experience, you find it very clearly that something extraordinary happened. What is something extraordinary? Your usual ways just stopped. The mind had always been telling you that if you want to understand words, then you have to keep thinking on them.