Acharya Prashant explains that if you are holding something but are not identified with it, you know you can drop it at any moment. However, if you mistakenly forget that it's possible to drop it, it becomes a part of your identity and personality, leading to trouble. Once you identify with it, you will keep holding it because it has become a part of your being. You then start making efforts to get rid of the negative consequences associated with it, but these efforts are fundamentally misplaced. By proceeding with these misplaced efforts, you are only assuring yourself that your initial assumption about yourself had substance. For instance, if you are trying hard to cleanse yourself, and someone tells you that you are already clean, you would feel like an idiot. Therefore, it becomes necessary to convince yourself that there is something terribly filthy about you to justify your efforts. This creates a stupid and dangerous loop. He compares this to compulsive bath-takers who convince themselves they are dirty to justify their habit of bathing. This is how most wrong battles are fought. Because the mind has made it a necessity to fight, it justifies the need for a war. The mind is like a weapons factory that needs wars to continue its output. Most of our wars are "production-led" because the mind is habituated to fighting and picks up some war. The entire life is built around wrong assumptions, which are cunning and there to hide something else. For example, one might be in the business of weapons because they are too lazy to learn something else, but they will assert that war is necessary rather than admit their laziness. We are great losers in life not because we meet with regular defeats, but because we are fighting the wrong battles. Most of our effort, conflict, and strife are simply unnecessary. Defeat is not at the end of the war; for a needless war, defeat lies in its very beginning. Man has two options: either see who you are and what you have and delight in it, or do not see, wallow in self-pity and incompleteness, and therefore keep picking unnecessary battles, which is a downward spiral.
