If you don’t know who you are, then who is asking?

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

Questioner (Q): Sir, how to remember that remembrance — that which you are?

Acharya Prashant (AP): You don’t need to remember. Because when you remember, you are also prone to forgetting.

Do you remember your driving license number? We don’t even remember the phone number of the first sim card we had. How many of you remember that? But we say we want to remember the Truth. If you remember the Truth, you will also forget it. So, don’t try to remember, don’t even remember. Conveniently, rid yourself of the responsibility to remember anything.

Why do you want to remember that which you anyway are?

Why do you want to think about that which is outside the province of the thought?

Why do you want all that?

Q: Because we want to know that.

AP: You cannot know that; you can only surrender to that.

Knowing is violence, knowing is arrogance. You want to know the Truth as one knows a zebra in a zoo! You have confined a zebra in a zoo and you are saying, “That is Zebra”.

(Laughs)

That is our attitude towards the Truth. We think that Truth is some exotic thing brought down from the Himalayas. “It is there in that cage, pay the price, enter it, have a look at it, now you know it”. The price could be anything — yoga, tantra, mantra, japa, tapa. Pay the price and have a look at that zebra! Fluorescent stripes.

You never know the Truth;
you dissolve in the Truth.

You are gone. Now, who will know?

When you are so disappeared that there is nobody left to even know, then it is there. Unfortunately, when it is there, then you will not be there to know. The one who surrenders to this situation is the one who has known. And the one who continues with this desire ‘to know the Truth’, is someone who will never know.

The Upanishads say, “Those who say they know, they don’t know. And those who do not know, they are the ones who really know.”