If you had no false teachers, you would require no teacher today

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

Questioner: Sir, I have come here for the first time and I want to know you better and that is why I want to ask, why do you teach?

Acharya Prashant: Why do you listen?

Listener: Sir, actually I come here to be in the company of like-minded people.

AP: No, you do not come here for like-minded people.

What you are looking for is extremely difficult to confess.

L: Confess what?

AP: You have to tell.

L: But I am asking you that why are you teaching?

AP: I have responded.

If you can understand what is it that you want, then you’ll come to know why anything else happens in this universe. Without knowing who you are and what you are looking for, how will you know anything else?

Who am I? I am right now a person in ‘your eyes’ and unless you know what your eyes are, how will you know me?

Am I an objective entity?

Do I exist without you?

The person to whom you are asking this question is a person in ‘your eyes’. So you must first know what these eyes are all about. I have a particular machine. It takes the information and converts it into a code. Everything that enters the machine finally emerges as some incomprehensible code. Now, the code reads ‘CXXV -*D’

I want to know what that code means? Should I ask the code, who are you?

What should I first understand?

I should understand how the machine turns everything into a code. From where is the code coming?

L: Machine.

AP: The Machine. So what needs to be understood — the code or the machine?

L: The Machine.

AP: You are the machine that is encoding me. So you need to understand yourself first.

L: I think you are going too deep for that.

AP: No, this is never too deep.