How to remain free from the hurt and sickness of others?

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

Question (Q): Dear Acharya Ji, you have said that what is healthy is forgotten, what is sick is remembered. If something is bothering me and making me restless, is it always that I am sick? Can there also be a way where I am healthy but the sickness of the other person is bothering me? Can you please give clarification on this?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Sickness is always the ‘other.’ Sickness is anyway never yours. I am not merely saying that sickness belongs to the others, I am saying, sickness is the ‘other,’ and parallelly the other is the sickness. So, it doesn’t make matters any better for you.

Even it is proven that the sickness that is bothering you, comes from the other. Even if you are identified with sickness still it is the other.

Your nature is not sickness. Your essence is not sickness.

So, obviously wherever whenever there is sickness, it is foreign, it is something else, it is somebody else.

You are asking what do I do if somebody else’s sickness is bothering me? If somebody else’s sickness is bothering you then you have contracted that sickness.

All sickness always comes from somewhere and starts bothering you then that sickness starts bothering you, it is the only proof that you are sick now. A virus comes from somewhere but it has not started bothering you. What is this situation called? The situation is called ‘disease.’ You are infected now.

The first step in dealing with the sickness of the world is to not fall sick.

Your own system must remain free of infection, influence, impact. No sickness understand it, deal with it, play with it. Do whatever you want to but remain careful that it should not start encroaching upon your mind. All the rubbish, all the nonsense of the world is worth studying, not worth contracting. And that is why when you study something, it is important to study from a distance. That distance is the essence of witnessing. And witnessing is the essence of realization.

That which you are connected with, identified with becomes very difficult to know. You cannot study blindness by getting infected with blindness.

First of all, maintain your own aloofness and purity and then proceed to play, study, fight, it’s all yours.

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