Acharya Prashant addresses the question of whether experience is the ultimate truth, a notion often propagated by many gurus. He begins by stating that it's not just gurus, but every individual who holds the belief that their own experience is truth. He identifies this very notion as the primary ignorance and fundamental misunderstanding of life. To believe that experience is truth, or that whatever one experiences must be true simply because it was experienced, is the foundational error. The speaker distinguishes between verification and experience, clarifying that they are two very different things. He asserts that one must verify or examine the experience itself, rather than using experience as a tool for verification. To illustrate the unreliability of experience, he provides an example: a person coming from a 45°C environment into a 30°C room will experience it as very cold. However, after half an hour, the same person in the same 30°C room will start to feel warm. The external reality, the temperature of the room, remains unchanged, but the experience has completely shifted. This demonstrates that experience is not dependent on the external object but on the experiencer, whose physical and mental state changes. He further argues that experience is a shallow and false phenomenon. It is dependent on the experiencer, who is a product of past conditioning. The experience of the world is a function of the experiencer (the ego). He suggests looking up optical illusions to see how easily our experiences can be proven false, even when we know they are illusions. He also mentions that experiences can be induced chemically, such as the feeling of fear or happiness through injections, or the varied experiences of a drunk person, proving that experiences are not a reliable measure of truth. The speaker concludes that truth is beyond experience (Anubhavatit). The path towards truth involves negating one's experiences, which means negating the experiencer—the ego. The popular spiritual quest for different kinds of experiences is likened to consumerism, a futile attempt to appease the restless ego, which is the root problem.