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…