I will not help you decorate your prison

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

Question: When I speak to somebody, always there’s this ego between me and the person. How to get rid of this ego?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Who is asking this?

Listener (L): The ego. (hesitatingly)

AP: So, the ego is the one who is so eager to get rid of itself. Praise the ego. Worship the ego. Only the ego wants peace. Ego is that within you which wants peace.

Ego is the lover of the Heart. It wants to go there.

Ego is tremendously desirous to settle into peace.

Every desire of the ego is the desire of peace.

Don’t you see what the ego is asking? “How can I get peace?”

Don’t take the ego as the problem. The ego itself is the solution. It’s asking for peace. Now let it have peace. Don’t block it.

L: How to remain in this Truth when you go out?

AP: Don’t go out. Why do you find it compulsory to go out? Why is that so significant for you? Do you see that you come only to leave? Do you see that you want to keep coming and leaving? And this is mind. Now that you have come, stay.

If you have come here to listen to a Guru, then you will have to leave. Figure out, what is the quality of that coming in which one never leaves. In that coming, surely you are not coming to a preacher.

L: I am coming to myself.

AP: The question is, why must you ask this question? Don’t you see that this question contains the root of all suffering? You have come here only to go back to your daily life. And my role as a teacher is not to lubricate your daily life. But you will like it if I give you something that makes your daily life more pleasant. “My wife gives me hell. Now I meditate when she starts breaking loose.” Why must you go back to her? Why? “My office sucks. But now, in lunchtime, I do pranayama.” Why must you go back to that office? Why? Have you come here so that your stay in that hell-hole becomes more protected? And you want me to do that, to enable you to stay further in that hell-hole? “I have come back revitalized, rejuvenated, to my prison. My Guru has…