Acharya Prashant explains that whatever is becoming meaningful for you—internal urges, impulses, emotions, thoughts, desires, and lusts—you should consider yourself separate from them and them separate from you. Do not say, 'My mind is doing this'; say, 'The mind is doing this.' It is the mind's job. Do not say, 'My desire is arising'; it is not your desire. You are not the master of desire, so how can you say it is your desire? If desire becomes yours, you will become as small as the desire. Create a distance. Just as you maintain distance from others to avoid COVID, maintain distance from yourself to avoid the ego. The infection that comes from being too close to oneself, from being attached to oneself, is far more fatal than any infection from a germ or virus. When you get a viral infection, you can say that the virus is an external thing that has affected you, and you take medicine to kill that external thing. But when you get an infection of the ego, you do not say that some external thing has come and attached itself to you; you say, 'This is me.' However, what you call 'me' is not you. You never say, 'I am COVID.' You always say that COVID is something else that has wrongly attached to me and needs to be removed. But when various influences from the world attach to you, you don't say that an external thing has attached to you. When influences affect you, you become affected. The influence on you becomes your identity. You will think, walk, and plan according to that influence. In such a situation, there is no possibility of you distinguishing between who you are and who the other is. The other, the alien, becomes 'me.' When the alien has become 'me,' it is necessary for you to become alien to this fake 'me.' When all the snakes of the world start living in your house, it is better for you to become a stranger to your own house. Ego is such a thing. It seems to you that it is 'me,' but it is not 'me'; it is occupied by all the strangers. It is occupied by your body, your education, what you have heard in the media, the teachings from your family, the things you have picked up from here and there, and what you have absorbed from the environment. All these are the snakes of the world that have entered your house. If you live with them, you will get nothing but suffering and death. Since all these have become 'me,' you should say, 'I am not this me.' All that which is not 'me' has become 'me,' so you should say, 'If this is me, then I am not me.' You should distance yourself. This is called being a stranger, hence the term 'Paramatma' (the supreme self). Stay away. Whatever you think you know about yourself, distance yourself from that one person you call 'me.' Your thoughts are not yours. Nothing of yours is yours. As and how much you know yourself, you are not that at all. The questioner asks that in becoming a stranger to the 'me,' the 'me' itself can play the game of becoming a stranger to the 'me.' How to be cautious of this? Acharya Prashant replies that whatever is associated with 'me,' whether it is associated with leaving the 'me' or before leaving the 'me,' whatever is associated, keep becoming a stranger to it. This process has to be carried on for a lifetime. This is the punishment for having a body. You have to run a race against your own shadow for your entire life. You cannot win this race. The purpose of running is not that one day you will defeat your shadow in the race; that is not going to happen. Your existence is tied to the ego just as the body is tied to its shadow. You cannot imagine a day when you will exist, but the ego will not. That would be like saying the body will exist, but the shadow will not. That is not going to happen. Then why am I saying to keep running to defeat the shadow in the race? It is so that you get spent, you get finished, you wear out, you perish while running. This is a certainty. The 'me' will not leave one thing without catching hold of another. So you are not going to get any rest, thinking, 'Now my work is done.' This is why I get a little annoyed with concepts like enlightenment because the feeling there is that 'we have left our shadow behind.' Either you say you are no more, or you say you are still carrying the shadow with you. It cannot be that you exist, but the shadow does not. Every living person has to be alert until their last breath, engaged in the campaign of annihilating the self. And understand this much more, this act of annihilating the self will never be final. It is possible that you perish and are reborn, you come back. The ego has gone from within, but the ground on which the ego is born, that is still there, right? You may have uprooted the plant of ego from its roots, but the ground on which that plant is born, that ground is the body. As long as the body is there, there is a full possibility that the ego can come back. It is possible that you have completely uprooted it, but it can return. That is why this spiritual practice is for a lifetime. Never sit in rest, very assuredly, thinking, 'Now our work is finished, we have reached the final destination of spirituality.' No. Liberation is not a final state; liberation is a continuous process. Since it is a process, it can be interrupted at any time. Any flow can be broken. Processes are like flows. Liberation is not in the result of the effort for liberation; liberation is in the effort for liberation itself. What is liberation from? From lowly actions. You have been freed from other lowly actions, now you are doing the supreme action. What is the supreme action? The process of liberation. This itself is liberation. To do the highest possible action amidst the bondages, this is what Shri Krishna's entire teaching is. This is liberation. You are an embodied being. An embodied being will find liberation only amidst bondages. Liberation is not that one day you will break all bonds. Liberation is that the bonds are in their place, but look at us, look at our valor, our dignity, our prowess. There was not a single moment in life when we accepted bondage; we were in constant struggle. This is liberation. We did not accept the bonds, so who can bind us? The mind is defeated if it accepts defeat, and it wins if it accepts victory. I did not accept the bonds. It's not that the bonds were not there. The proof that the bonds are there is the body itself. This is the bond. As long as you are not cremated, turned to ash, the bond is there. But we are free amidst these bonds. The bonds have not been cut, but our life has been continuously dedicated to doing the highest and the best we can amidst these bonds. This is liberation.