Acharya Prashant begins by narrating the story of a cuckoo that lays its eggs in a crow's nest. The crow, not being watchful or vigilant enough and lacking discretion, does not inquire whether the eggs are its own. It then keeps looking after, protecting, and nursing those eggs as its own, only to be disappointed later on. In the moment she is caring for those objects, she is very sure that they have arisen from her own self. This story is used as an analogy for the human condition. Just as the crow becomes attached to the cuckoo's eggs, we become attached to our thoughts, believing they are our own. We remain attached to our thoughts precisely because we think that our thoughts, our mind, its disturbances, its hopes, its highs and lows, its attachments, its likes and dislikes, are our own. The speaker poses the question of whether we truly know if what we consider our own is our own at all. He clarifies that he is not talking about property, but something subtler: the mind, our inclinations, attitudes, opinions, and ideologies. To illustrate, he mentions a case where a woman is ready to divorce her husband because he won't support a particular politician. The woman has a particular ideology and believes it has arisen from her own self, making it very dear and intimate to her, even more so than her husband. She sacrifices the relationship for the ideology because she considers it closer to her. The object of the thought is not material; what is material is the belief that "these thoughts are mine." We invest a great deal in our thoughts and ideologies, sometimes disrupting or even starting families based on them. For a vast majority of human beings, religion is nothing but an ideology, a collection of myths, codes of conduct, and stories, rather than a relentless dive into the Truth. We give ourselves up to these prevalent religions, such as greed, career, and progress, without questioning their origin. The central question is whether we are sure that our thoughts are truly our own. We invest so much in everything that is born out of thought. The speaker asks what we would have done if we had not been told what to do, urging an inquiry into the real source of our thoughts and beliefs.