Acharya Prashant explains that if you live on the circumference of life, things will always appear fragmented to you. This is not because things are actually fragmented, but because what you experience is determined by your location. He illustrates this with an experiment he used to conduct with large audiences. He would ask them to summarize his talk, and upon exchanging their notes, they would discover that their neighbor's understanding was completely different from their own. This commotion proves that what you think you heard is not at all what even your neighbor thinks you said. We are very confident in our own experiences, believing something is true because we know it or a fact because we saw it. However, this is not true. What you perceive could only be true at the center of the wheel, but we exist somewhere along the radius, on the long, delicate nerve connecting the center to the periphery. This is the difference between a low and a high consciousness. A low consciousness lives in its own personal world, which is a sign of insanity. A higher consciousness is marked by a disbelief and indifference towards its own perceptions. A paradox exists: when you are not prepared to trust your perceptions and experiences, they become trustworthy. Conversely, the more you trust them, the more untrustworthy they become. Being skeptical of your perceptions is essentially being skeptical of yourself. All the negative aspects of life come to you through the vehicle of your personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences. To stop these mischief-makers, you must stop the vehicle they travel in. This means barricading your personal impulses of consciousness. The path to purity is to always remember your own impurity, to know that we are born unclean and dishonest. One must develop a linguistic allergy to subjective phrases like "I felt," "I thought," or "This is the way I am," treating them as danger signals, much like hearing "fire" or "snake." When you reject the subjective, that which is believable comes to you on its own. When you are no more, that's when you truly are. Then, there is nothing left to reject.
