Are you your Brain?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: I can understand when you say, “I am not the body.” But the identification with the mind, the thoughts, it feels like — ‘I am the brain.’

How to be dis-identified from the brain?

Acharya Prashant: The brain wants to just continue, you want to come to an end. How can you be the brain? Does the brain ever want to come to an end?

Questioner: No.

Acharya Prashant: The brain’s continuous desire is to stay continuous. That’s the nature of desire — it just wants to continue. And you want to come to an end, right? You want to come to a sleep, you want to come to a full stop, how can you be the brain?

Questioner: All I know is my brain.

Acharya Prashant: Is that so?

Questioner: How can I know anything other than my brain?

Acharya Prashant: Don’t you ever yearn for Freedom? Have you never known Love? Are these things of the brain? And if they are not, why do say that all you know is the brain?

Is Freedom a thing of the brain? All that the brain can have is the thought, ideas, concepts. Is Freedom a thought, idea, concept? Is Love a subject of the brain? All that the brain can have, I repeat, is thoughts, ideas, concepts. Is Love a thought, idea, concept? If you are saying this, then you must be living an un-free and loveless life.

How is it that you say that you have never known anything apart from the brain? You surely have. Even as I speak to you right now, the brain is busy comprehending and analysing what I am saying. But can the brain understand?

And have you never known Understanding? And if you have ever known Understanding, how do you say that you are nothing but the brain? Even this moment is sufficient to prove that you are not the brain.

Are you getting me?

Questioner: Yes.

Acharya Prashant: And if you are getting me, is it the brain that is getting me?

Questioner: Yes.

Acharya Prashant: Even that you do not know, because you are speaking as the brain.