Acharya Prashant explains that in an ordinary life, taking a pause for reflection will ruin you. This is why many people prefer to have very occupied and busy lives, because if they have spare time, they will necessarily do something self-destructive. Reflection is not something you do by taking out time exclusively devoted to it. If you have to take time out to reflect, it merely means that the life you are leading has problems, and the time you take out will be misutilized. Therefore, reflection or stock-taking has to be spontaneous and concurrent with life itself. Your life has to be such that it forces you to be spontaneously reflective. Only when your life is bad will you not be spontaneously reflective, and then you will want exclusive time for reflection. The moment you want exclusive time for reflection, you have already proven to yourself that you are leading a bad life. If life is good or great, who will have the time to break away from it, even to reflect? One must lead a life that forces spontaneous reflection, choosing work and relationships that do not allow one to stay unconscious. If you stay unconscious, you should receive a jolt immediately. The mark of a right life is continuous, in-the-moment reflection. One should be so attentively occupied with the right life, so in deep love with perfection, that anything short of it immediately shakes you up. This sensitivity comes from love for what is precious. If you are afraid of losing something you love, you will act sincerely to protect it, not waste time thinking about it. Thinking, in this context, is a cunning way to avoid action and destroy what you claim to care for. The time and energy that should go into concrete work are squandered in endless thought. If you were truly afraid, you would have worked, not brooded. Thought at best can be a precursor to understanding, but it involves a time gap. Life, however, demands a real-time response. Spontaneous understanding is a different thing altogether; it is knowing without time, without method, without the possibility of error. This is real mysticism. This state of spontaneous knowing, however, can look dangerously similar to the automatic operation of a conditioned mind, so one must be careful. Therefore, thought has value for the conditioned mind as it allows a temporary space to break away from conditioning and observe it, but one must also see its limitations.
