IIT Bombay: How to be liberated while alive?

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

Questioner (Q): What is the difference between death and liberation? How can we be liberated while alive?

Acharya Prashant (AP): These are two very different things in the sense that they happen to different entities.

You are driving your car and there is a point that you must reach. But you are, as usual, drunk. So, you bang the car, and the car is no more in a shape, in a position to move any further. This is death — the death of the car. You are just left frustrated. You haven’t died, but it is just that without the car you belong nowhere. You cannot move. Somehow your configuration is such that your two legs can be used only to press the accelerator and the clutch and the brake; those legs cannot be used to walk. Somehow that is the way you are constituted. So, if the car is gone, you are gone. Your journey is gone. That is death — the death of the car, and death of the possibility, the potential that you could have reached your destination.

What is liberation? Liberation is when you reach your destination using the car. And having reached your destination using the car, you find the car does not hold the same meaning as it used to. The car was tremendously important as a tool, as a vehicle carrying you…