Acharya Prashant explains that the issue with being fooled is that it causes you harm. Otherwise, there would be no problem in being fooled. Therefore, to determine if you are being fooled, you must first know what constitutes your loss and what constitutes your benefit. If you have this clarity, you can understand if someone is making a fool of you. Anyone who causes you internal harm is, in effect, fooling you. The speaker defines this internal harm or loss as the state of becoming restless. It is when you move away from the ground reality and start living in imaginations, fantasies, and beliefs. Harm occurs when, despite knowing what is right, you choose the wrong path due to greed or some other reason. For example, when you start to feel very small inside, you should know that you have incurred a loss. Similarly, if someone convinces you that you are small and can never become great, and that you must find happiness within that smallness, accepting this belief is a loss. The fundamental reason one can be fooled is the lack of self-knowledge. Because we do not know who we truly are, we do not know what is genuinely good for us. Acharya Prashant defines being fooled as being convinced that you are something you are not. He identifies Maya as the great deceiver that makes us believe in things that are not real. We are fooled because we believe in things that do not actually exist. To ascertain whether you have truly understood something, such as a scripture or a philosophy, you must check if this new knowledge has destroyed a pre-existing false belief. The sign of true knowledge is that it removes ignorance and darkness. If new information is merely added as another layer on top of old beliefs without removing anything, then no real understanding has taken place.
