Question: I am a student of life. I know my potential, my passion, my strengths, weaknesses. I am eager to improve myself, pursue my dreams. But I feel whenever I try to do that, I lack motivation or a burning desire.
Shri Prashant: We all feel this way. The entire humanity is entitled to its illusions. Everybody has the license to keep hallucinating. You ask anybody, here, or on the road, everybody will say, “Yes, I know my potential, it is just that I am unable to realize the potential. Yes, I know I can be at the top of the world, just that I lack the passion and the drive.”
First of all, drop this silly illusion that you know anything. We do not know a thing. To say that you know your passion is to say that you know yourself; that’s a very high claim, that is the zenith of spirituality to say “I know who I am”. To say that “I know who I am” is to say that I am Home, done, finished.
And if you are done and finished then from where is this question coming?
First of all, very innocently and simply surrender to this realization that you don’t know and nobody knows and then see what happens. Don’t wait for something to happen. Just see what happens. Maybe there will be no need to wait for anything, maybe there will be no need to have a burning desire, maybe there will be no discomfort left with not having this or that.
We dream up images about ourselves that “This is who I am, this is what I can be” and they don’t correspond with the fact of the mind. They cannot. Then they feel disappointed.
L 1: Exactly.
SP: You know that! Look at the assurance in your voice “exactly”. If you know that do so obviously, from where is the confusion coming? Ignorance is not about not knowing, ignorance is about ‘knowing’. Stop thinking that you know.
