Acharya Prashant addresses a questioner's query about a statement by Nisargadatta Maharaj, "You are not suffering, you are suffering your experiencing." He affirms that the experiencer and the experiencing are the same. There exists an experiencer who is asking the question, and this same experiencer has expectations from the happenings and events of life. This experiencer is the suffering itself. Without the experiencer, there are just events. The experiencer, the experiencing, the sufferer, and the suffering are all one and the same. The experiencer is the experiencing, and the experiencer is also the sufferer. To guide the seeker on how to proceed, Acharya Prashant uses the analogy of an old coal-fed locomotive. The locomotive is moving in a particular direction, but the man deployed to feed coal into the furnace has his back to the direction of travel. The seeker's job is precisely this: to keep feeding the fire. This fire is the fire of self-annihilation, self-dissolution, and purification. The seeker should keep their back towards the direction of travel, meaning they should forget about the destination or the track. The direction will be taken care of by the fire itself, impersonally. The task of the ego is to just keep constantly purifying itself. One should leave the questions of proceeding, decision, and direction to purity itself. Our task, as the ego, is to constantly purify ourselves. When this is done, the right decisions descend upon you like an epiphany or a moment of spontaneous realization. This revelation does not happen without what seems like repetition, which is actually a process of uncovering. The decisions just happen through you. For the right decision to come spontaneously, one must have fed enough coal into the fire, constantly and daily. The job is to give oneself completely to this task. The rest is taken care of. If you fully understand this, you will find yourself one with the source from where the words come. This may require listening to one line ten times to get closer to the point where the words are coming from.
