How to drop the burden of past? || Acharya Prashant (2018)
Question: Acharya Ji, Pranaam!
I watch video of yours, and I feel that I am getting addicted to your videos. Your videos and your talks have lit a fire in me to search for the Truth. But I carry on with the things which I am doing from the past thirty-seven years.
Now I have started feeling that it was better had I never heard anything about the Truth. There is a fight going on within me between my thirty-seven years old journey, and this search for Truth.
Please guide me.
Acharya Prashant Ji: Prashant (the questioner) , you keep something with yourself only if that thing is of use to you. Right? That which is of no use to you is called as ‘waste’. Simple!
What is it that defines ‘usefulness’ to you? What is it that characterises ‘usefulness’? Something is of use to a man, only if it gives him Peace, only if it gives him some Clarity.
See what the entire world is rushing after. People do several kinds of things. Somebody is a sportsman, somebody enters politics, somebody wants to earn money, somebody runs after sensual pleasures.
Ultimately, what is it that all want through their miscellaneous movements? Peace. We all want to reach a point where we feel contended.
Have your thirty-seven years given you contentment? If they have, then hold them to your chest. And if they haven’t, then you are like the emotional monkey holding it’s dead baby to it’s chest.
Before you become attached to something, or identified to something, won’t it be prudent to ask, “What is this thing giving me? What has this thing given me so far, thus far?”
But that’s the thing with ‘habit’, it prevents you from asking questions. It has a flow, a momentum of it’s own. In that momentum you just keep flowing. You just don’t even feel the need to enquire.
Are you here to preserve your thirty-seven years, or are you here to lead a Joyful life? What have these thirty-seven years given you? They have given you this body, they have given you memories, they have given you conditioning. They have given you certain knowledge, they have given you your current state of mind.
Are you okay with your current state of mind? If you are, then worship your thirty-seven years. And if you are not, then why are you clinging to something needless?
I am not asking you to be devoted, I am asking you to sharply do what you have been anyway doing.
You have been calculative, right? And you have always wanted to further your self-interest. Now calculate, and calculate holistically, calculate rightly. Do your old paths serve you? Do your old habits, and ways, and tendencies help you? If they do not, then what’s the point in hauling them? Act in your own self-interest. There is no need to follow dictum.
Man suffers alone, so obviously his primary responsibility is to alleviate his personal suffering.
It’s just that when you enter into your personal suffering and go deep enough, you realise that your personal suffering is inseparable from the general good.
You cannot get rid of your personal suffering, without bringing goodness to everybody. But the beginning nevertheless has to be with your personal suffering.
If continuing as you are reduces your personal suffering, then continue as you are. Otherwise, seek something beyond yourself. That ‘something beyond yourself’, is called ‘the Truth’.
But remember you can search for the Truth only when you firstly see that a lot has been false about you. Otherwise, what is the point in calling the Truth as ‘Truth’. You don’t want to acknowledge falseness, then falseness itself is Truth.
Why are you calling ‘something beyond’ as ‘Truth’ if you don’t want to acknowledge that your worldly life, your daily life has been full of falseness? Then call your worldly life itself as ‘Truth’.
You cannot have two Truths. You cannot say, “The life that I am leading is Truth, and simultaneously I also want to search for the Truth beyond.” You cannot have two parallel Truths.
If you want to say that you are a Truth-seeker, firstly acknowledge the false. And there is no compulsion. You really, honestly, fearlessly, motivelessly have to come to see how false things have been. A spontaneous ‘No’ must arise within you, and when that spontaneous ‘No’ arises, then you say, “I am a Truth-seeker.” Now you know that you are surrounded by the false. So you are eligible to say that you want to break-free of the false.
It pains, it offends, it suffocates.
I have said this so many times. On this occasion too I am repeating this.
The domain of Spirituality is too full of people who want to search the Truth, without firstly admitting that all about them is false.
