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Breaking Through Pride: Finding True Clarity in the Present || Acharya Prashant (2023)
173.4K views
1 year ago
Total Change
Duality
Moving On
Spiritual Entrepreneurship
The Past
Sameness
Security
The Unknown
Description

Acharya Prashant explains that the way forward from being attached to certain aspects of oneself while disdaining others is to move to the next quantum level, the next orbit. He describes one's life and experiences as a "mixed bag," a characteristic of duality, containing both things to be proud of and things to be ashamed of. The mind's tendency is to want to keep the good parts from this bag, but in doing so, one inevitably gets the entire bag, including the undesirable elements. The solution is to have the courage to keep the entire bag aside and begin something afresh. He clarifies that if the journey of life has given you anything truly valuable, it is not in the external bag of accomplishments but has been internalized within your heart. This internal gain is what you carry forward. With this understanding, the entire bag of the past can be set aside, and you can proceed to the next "quanta" or orbit. The bottom line is that it is futile to expect to have one thing without the other; you cannot be partially attached. The entire bargain, the whole mixed bag, must be let go of. This process of moving on should be a constant, everyday practice. Every morning, one should wake up and keep the old self aside, deciding to move on. This is what he calls "spiritual entrepreneurship": starting a new life every morning and exiting it every night. The hell of life is repetitiveness and sameness, which is born of the desire for security. To move on is to be bored of oneself and to embrace the new and the unknown. This requires a resistance to sameness, which is stagnation and, in a sense, death. The real change is not about trivial external changes like hairstyle or clothes, but about the courage to move towards the higher and unknown, even with the fear and insecurity it brings, as this is what keeps one truly alive and young.