Acharya Prashant explains that the distinction between 'one's own' and 'strangers' is fundamentally flawed and rooted in body-identification. He questions why a person feels pain only when a few specific individuals are hurt, while remaining indifferent to the vast violence and suffering caused to others by their daily consumption of resources like electricity and fuel. This selective empathy exists because the individual is only concerned with those to whom they have a physical or biological connection. He asserts that what people often call compassion or love is actually a poisonous mixture of body-consciousness and self-interest. He further elaborates that people are cautious about hurting those who have the power to hurt them back or those upon whom they are dependent. Using an anecdote about a student who claimed to deeply respect his father's career advice out of love, Acharya Prashant reveals that such 'devotion' often vanishes once the parent becomes old, weak, or financially dependent. He argues that the initial obedience was not love but a compulsion born of dependency. True liberation, he concludes, belongs to those who can break away from these patterns of body-based relationships and self-serving interests.
