IIT Kanpur: Freedom is your nature — will you choose it?

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

Questioner (Q): If awareness is our true nature, then why don’t we have a natural inclination towards it? Why do we get so easily overpowered by our bodily tendencies?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Awareness might be your nature, but you live by your habits, not by your nature. This system that we call as the person, the human being, exists as a habit. Therefore, it is a system, right? A system means a habit. A system means something that can proceed without any consciousness. A machine is a system. A machine, even a very sophisticated machine, needs no consciousness to function.

So, when we talk of man, these two things have to be remembered at once, parallelly: One, our nature is awareness, joy, freedom; but our habit, our structural habit, our long-standing habit, our evolutionary habit is dimness, which is insentience, bondage, and sorrow, which is suffering.

Now, it depends on you. What is it that you want to choose?

The ‘I’, the little self has a choice: it could either proceed towards its nature or its old habits. And if it chooses nature, which is freedom and pure consciousness and joy, then there are pros and cons; there is a reward to be had, and there is a…