How does thought divide?

Acharya Prashant
4 min readMar 18, 2020

It is not so much about thought, it is about the point where thought arises from. There is that center of existence which relies very heavily on itself. And what does it mean by itself, the body, the world, all that it sees, thinks, touches, eats, glance, consumes, all that which I broadly refer to as material. There is that center of existence. If one operates from that center, then one takes material very very seriously. If you are someone who looks towards material with hopeful eyes, aiming for an internal completion, then the material would be very very important for you. After all, who are you?

You are someone who feels incomplete and you are looking towards the material for the sake of completion.

Material and thought in some sense are one. Material arouses thought in you and thought can do things with material. If you have a lump of wet clay in front of you, you can think of a hundred possibilities, can’t you? So, thought acts upon material. Material and thought go together and the intermediary is intellect. And that’s how man is a little different from animals. Man has an advanced intellect. An animal can do only a few things with the material. An animal looks at a tree, what does the tree mean to the animal? Maybe some food, maybe some shade or maybe a nest. That’s all. That is a limited relationship of the animal with the material. Man has a more complicated, call it a more advanced relationship. Man’s intellect and therefore imagination is far greater. Man can think and make a thousand things from the tree. So, when you are seeking completion in the material, thought is unending because there are so many things you can do there. That’s the kind of thought which you need to be alert about. This thought is telling you that you and the tree are separate and the tree can be used for your fulfilment. This thought is supporting the fallacy that you are a little being, separate from the tree and therefore, you can possibly use the tree to feel satisfied and complete. And I said this thought is going to be never-ending. Why, because the fulfilment is never really going to arrive. So, after a thousand possibilities, you will search for two thousand, then three thousand and you will so on and so forth continue.

The problem then is not the thought, the problem is the point from where you started. You started from a point where

Acharya Prashant